What Are the Best Link Building Tools?

Quality link building is an essential element of ranking well on search engines. But it’s also extremely time-consuming without the right tools. The best link-building tools show you ideal domains, target URLs and contact information for speeding up the link-building process. 

You get details about the domain’s authority so you can make educated decisions about where to put your time in generating quality backlinks to your website. Here is an explanation of the benefits of link-building tools, the best features to look for and the top tools on the market to help you accomplish your goals. 

What Are the Benefits of Using a Link Building Tool?

Link building tools help provide better insights into website owners you should reach out to for strong linking opportunities. You’ll get valuable insights from these tools that will serve as a huge time saver.

Contact Information Without Lengthy Searching

One of the most time-consuming aspects of link-building is finding contact information to reach out to the website owner. The best SEO link-building tool pulls in email addresses so that you can go from evaluating the opportunity, to reaching out to a relevant party for more information. 

Domain Authority Insights 

With more than 1.1 billion websites on the internet, linking opportunities are enormous. But you don’t want links from just any website. Instead, you want highly regarded and trustworthy domains to link to your website. Linking tools that show you how respected these websites are will help you prioritize your efforts and get the most out of time spent building links.

List of Relevant Target Domains

Finding relevant domains for each of your web pages to request backlinks takes copious amounts of searching and investigation. Good link-building tools show you relevant target domains based on each of your website’s URLs. This speeds up the process to make things efficient for you.

What Factors Make a Good Link Building Tool?

All link-building tools are not equal. You’ll want to evaluate the options available based on these key factors.

Keyword Research for Search Engines

If you’re investing in an SEO tool, it should also give you the ability to look up relevant keywords related to your industry. You can’t only focus on building links and not doing some on-page SEO strategy. Integrate your efforts with an all-in-one SEO tool.

Global Traffic Estimation

Before reaching out to a website owner to inquire about backlinks, it’s helpful to know their global traffic estimation. Link-building tools can show you these statistics for competitors and for websites you’re considering working with for backlinks. Additionally, seeing a breakdown of organic website traffic versus direct traffic is also insightful in these situations. 

Keyword Click Distributions Statistics

Learn more about a website’s ranking distribution. This bar graph shows how many keywords the website ranks for in the top positions. Websites with many first-page keyword rankings offer helpful insights as to where to build links and how to improve your website’s rankings for those keywords.

Reporting

See in real-time when you earn or lose a backlink. That way, you can ensure partners keep their promises to link to your website and you can monitor the impacts that those links have on your rankings. Link-building tools with in-depth reports will also give you insights into how much referral traffic you get from a backlink.

Filtering

When reviewing your competitors’ backlinks, having the ability to filter by indexed and do-follow links is helpful. That way you can target the most beneficial backlink opportunities first in your outreach efforts.

The Best Link Building Tools

Ready to start building valuable links to your website to boost your SEO and traffic? Here’s a look at the top tools on the market to make that process easier.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the industry-leading SEO tools available. Not only is it great for link-building, but it also excels at site audits and keyword research tools. Uncover broken links or backlinks that now deliver a 404 error. 

Pros:

• Competitor link analysis showing new opportunities
• Easy backlink filtering to target the best prospects
• Comprehensive SEO tool

Cons:

• Reporting is somewhat limited compared to its competitors
• The user interface is not the most attractive or easiest to use

Best for: An all-in-one SEO tool with backlinking tools

Pricing: Plans start at $99 a month, but exclude some link-building tools. To get full access to all link-building tools, upgrade to the Standard subscription for $179 a month. 

Rating: 4.5 stars

Linkody

Get a clear view of your top pages for backlinks to look for opportunities to expand the backlinks to your website with Linkody. Because this tool is focused solely on backlinking, it’s much easier to learn for beginners. But that being said, it’s also limiting in its capabilities to improve overall website rankings with efforts outside of link building. 

Pros:

• Connects with other tools like Ahrefs to enhance features
• Instant alerts when backlinks change
• Visual link locator

Cons:

• Solely a link-building tool

Best for: Inexpensive link-building tool

Pricing: Prices start at $14.90 per month for one user to manage up to two domains.

Rating: 3 stars

Linkio

Linkio is a tool designed to make building backlinks as fast and easy as possible. Enter your target keywords for your website and the tool will pull websites ranking on the first page for those keywords. Then, it will supply a listing of those websites’ backlinks so you can get started. You don’t even have to specify who your competitors are, Linkio will find them.

Pros:

• Backlink outreach automation
• Advanced link filtering to speed up backlink requests
• Anchor text suggestions to make backlinks even more powerful

Cons:

• Solely a link-building tool
• No integrations with more robust SEO tools

Best for: Bloggers needing to build backlinks fast

Pricing: Get started for $19.99 a month to manage up to three websites and get 10,000 backlinks analyzed. You can track up to 150 keywords at this account level.

Rating: 4 stars

Postaga

SEO is about more than just building quality backlinks. Postaga helps you earn more product reviews, blog comments and social media shares while providing insights on backlink opportunities. You’ll need to have some baseline SEO information about your site to get started, such as keyword research and competitor information.

Pros:

• Steal backlinks from your competitors by suggesting better content to link to
• Find guest podcast and blog opportunities for building valuable backlinks
• Improve and get more product reviews

Cons:

• Focused on link-building and PR tools
• You’ll need some baseline SEO information, such as keyword research, before getting started in Postaga

Best for: PR and backlink outreach

Pricing: Test out Postaga with a 14-day free trial. After that, accounts start at $99 a month. 

Rating: 4 stars

SEMRush

No SEO tool listing would be complete without SEMRush. This all-in-one SEO tool also includes powerful backlink tools, such as a backlink gap analyzer. Get competitor insights and top-ranking websites related to your target keywords. Plus, get all the tools necessary for on-page SEO strategy and site auditing tools.

Pros:

• Outstanding all-in-one SEO tool
• User-friendly interface
• In-depth reporting

Cons:

• Can be overwhelming at first with so many tools
• No outreach automation tools to speed up the process

Best for: SEO agencies and in-house marketing teams

Pricing: Test out the tool for 7 days for free. After that, subscriptions start at $119.95 per month.

Rating: 4.5 stars

Drop My Link

Drop My Link is a free tool that helps you identify link-building opportunities through blog comments. While you can’t focus only on dropping your links on blog comments, it’s a good place to start if you have a new website you’re hoping to get on the map quickly. 

Pros:

• View listing of relevant blogs that have comments sections
• Post relevant blog comments seamlessly from the tool
• Get started building links for free

Cons:

• Mild risk of being seen as a spammy website

Best For: Free link-building tool for building links through blog comments

Pricing: Free with no limits. 

Rating: 3 stars

ScrapeBox

ScrapeBox helps you use the power of search engines to pull a list of websites and forums that accept comments related to your topic or keywords. This can help you pull together a fast list of places to comment with links to your website.

Pros:

• Fast blog commenting
• Search relevant keywords by search engine
• Easily export a list of blogs to post comments on

Cons:

• Not a very user-friendly interface
• Challenging to use for first-time link builders

Best for: Advanced searches to find relevant forums and blog commenting opportunities

Pricing: You’ll purchase a plugin one time for use. There are 7 different plugin options that each serve their own purposes. One plugin starts at $20, or get the full bundle for $152. Some plugins are not compatible with Mac so be sure to read carefully before downloading.

Rating: 3 stars

Where to Go From Here

Building quality backlinks is an essential element of any SEO strategy. Different types of website owners, such as bloggers vs. SEO agencies, will have different backlinking needs. Review the listing of tool options above and test out some free trials to see what works best for your needs.