22 Best Link Building Tools

Link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. is one of the biggest components of a strong SEO strategy. It is also not straightforward. In the past, the quantity of linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. was all that mattered. It means that link farms, content farms, private blog networks, and other spam practices were widespread. These boosted a website’s ranking, but at the cost of the quality and search engine results. Rather than let this practice continue, search engines evolved. Over the 18 years that Google’s search algorithm has existed, it has become incredibly sophisticated at sourcing and rooting out spam and irrelevant results from its SERPs.

For many digital marketers, this means that link building is out of bounds. After all, the practice of buying links is outlawed by Google’s guidelines. When you link build, you put your company at risk for penalisation.

Or, so goes the myth.

In reality, you can build a white-hat link building campaign, but you need to put a significant amount of effort and research into it before you start. The goal with a white-hat link building campaign is to find quality publishers to post guest content from you. By putting in the effort to create great content specifically for these publishers, you can boost your ranking on the SERPs and increase your brand awareness and visibility organically. Think of link building like the guest posting aspect of influencer marketing. Done right, it can offer you many different benefits over time.  

What are Link Building Tools?

In order to create a great link building campaign, you are going first to need to find and choose the right set of link building tools for you. Link building tools can help you in a variety of different categories, from link analysis to link prospecting, and beyond. If you do not use link building tools, you cannot guarantee that your efforts will pay off. The internet is a big place, and automating as much of the process as possible can help give you more time and space to put effort into where it matters – the quality of the content.

The Main Categories of Link Building Tools

There are a few main categories that link building tools can be separated in. Some tools are capable of performing well in more than one category as well, so choose wisely based on your needs and budget to pick the right tools for you:

Link Analysis

There are many reasons why you need to understand links. On-site, link analysis can help you determine if you have any broken links and to let you know if you are missing links and so on. Off-site, link analysis is important for a few reasons. For one, it can help you find links to your site, so that you can find and suss out poor quality sites and remove those links from your backlink profile. When you are looking to build links, it can be useful for judging the quality of a site. Knowing where their outbound links go, how they are structuring these links, and most importantly if they have any black-hat SEO tactics on their page like hiding outbound links underneath nofollowing links.

1. Ahrefs – A preferred choice amongst professionals, Afrefs has a notoriously larger database than their competitors. It means more link analysis and even link prospecting can be done.
2. MajesticSEO – You can separate links by topic, allowing you to shift through multiple characteristics easily.
3. SEO Tools for Excel – These tools allow you to directly put metrics from Google Analytics and MajesticSEO into excel sheets. Doing so allows for better analysis and reporting.
4. Scrapebox – Allows you to evaluate a large sum of websites, but avoid its automatic link placement tools. Automatic link placement is always a huge “no-no” in SEO!
5. Broken Link Builder – Broken links are ranked poorly by Google, so using this tool can help you both test your own site and any publishers you are interested in partnering with.
6. Link Miner – This is a browser extension as opposed to a fully operational tool. With it, you can see the broken links and all the links that point to that broken link 
7. URL Profile – A very fast tool that will allow you to analyse a website, its links, and its content for quality.

Disavowal Tools

When you have backlinks you absolutely do not want; you need to contact the webmaster of the site itself. If the site is active, the webmaster might take it down for you without too much hassle. If not, then you will need to disavow the link on Google. To make that process easier, here is a roundup of the best disavowal tools out there:   

1. Link Research Tools – This has a link detox option to scan your backlinks and help you clean up your backlink profile
2. Rmoov – This helps you to source and find the contact information of webmasters. It also offers auto-generated emails to mass-request link deletion.
3. CognitiveSEO – This offers backlink analysis and audit tools to help put together a list of links for removal or disavowal.

Link Prospecting

Link prospecting refers to finding the sites that you want to be linked from. Ideally, they should have high domain authority, page ranking, and trust flow. They should also be within your niche and have a relatively high level of engagement. Use these tools to find the right publishers, and then use the link analysis tools to check the quality of the site further:  

1. GroupHigh – This tool will allow you to analyse blogs and website with social metrics and SEO metrics at its focus. It’s good for SEO and engagement analysis.
2. Ontolo – By selecting keywords, you can organise your prospective and create a list of options.
3. Link Prospector – This tool allows you to identify websites by publication type, to help you narrow down by niche.
4. Fresh Web Explorer – A tool to keep track of brand mentions.
5. Google Alerts – A tool to keep track of brand mentions.
6. Mention – A tool to keep track of brand mentions. Use either of these three to partner with websites that already have written about you naturally, but might not have linked to your site.
7. BuzzSumo – Useful for both blogger outreach and influencer outreach.

Sourcing Contact Information

In order to guest post on a blog, you will first need to contact the webmaster. Rather than try to find all this information yourself manually, streamline the process. These tools can make it easier to source the necessary contact information.

1. Muck Rack – An ingenious tool that helps you find journalists for more quality backlinks on major publications.
2. Agency Analytics – Helps you find and contact influencers in your niche.

Outreach Management

It is unwise not to keep track of which sites you have posted to. Flooding one publisher with content containing your backlink is spam and Google will take notice. You need to build up a healthy repertoire of sources so that you can boost your page ranking and benefit from an increase in organic reach. By using these outreach management tools, you can keep track of your publishers and how often you have posted on their sites.

     1.Link Assistant – Good for both prospecting and outreach management. Find and store information as well as create a custom email for each site you partner with.

Tracking and Reporting

Data is difficult to understand unless you organise it into patterns. That is why tracking and reporting are so critical. Reports are specifically necessary if you are an SEO agency or a large enterprise that has to report your findings to a boardroom or marketing team. By using these tools, you can make tracking and reporting the necessary data a breeze:

1. Google Sheets – A widely-accessible tool to keep track of your data for easier reporting and tracking.

Local SEOLocal SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank on the 1st page of Google for a search term and geographic location that is relevant to your business. Tools

Local SEO efforts generally pay off much faster than global efforts. The more local citationsA citation is a mention of your company, product, or service in an online publication. Citations increase the ranking of your site on search engines a site has on quality directories, the better. Combine these local citations with a smart keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. strategy and link building campaign, and you or your client can be seen within their community. To make this step even easier, try using this last link building tool to boost local SEO:  

1. BrightLocal – a tool to simply the process of finding and monitoring local citations. Good for citation building.

Conclusion

The general consensus from SEO experts around the world is that the best all-in-one tool for link building is Ahrefs. Though expensive, it has the largest database allowing users to get the most results as opposed to any other brand. Of course, depending on your overall goals with your link building campaign, you will likely need to combine Ahrefs with a few other tools. If any of this sounds too complicated or out of your depth, don’t worry. That’s what we here at Click Intelligence are for. Simply contact us today, and we’ll let you know how we can help you build your backlink profile and boost your search engine ranking and online visibility.