Best Link-Building Tools to Get Quality Links & Automate Your Outreach

Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks to your content. Backlinks are a ranking signal to Google, indicating that the linked pages offer great content, so the more backlinks a page has, the higher its authority is in the eyes of Google. Apart from that, it works like a snowball: the more high-quality backlinks you get, the more traffic comes to your pages.

The truth about link-building is that the process has changed a lot over the past decade. And so have link-building tools. The good old link schemes, link exchanges, and trading links on Web 2.0 might bring your pages to nowhere with Google’s Penguin algorithm sanctions. Modern day link-building is not about earning links per se, but rather about bringing value to users and establishing business relations.

Why you might need link-building software to get new backlinks

No matter how good your content is, you must be proactive and promote it. Most sites once started from nowhere. Besides, there is always harsh competition on top of the SERPs, so you need to have a consistent link-building strategy to build up your site's authority.

Gnerally, the whole link-building process unfolds in these four steps:

Doing all these steps manually will require years to attain tangible results. That's why site owners dump decent sums of money on link-building tools and services. If you decided not to outsource link-building and do it all yourselves, start with asking how you find evidence that link-building does work and your have the positibe results form it.

So, we've collected this list of the best link-building tools, available in both free and paid versions, to help you out of the question. You will find tools that help you find new backlinks, measure the effect, and, most importantly, scale and automate your backlink outreach process.

Best link-building tools: comparison table

For convenience, here is the comparison table of all tools covered in the article, marked with all steps they cover in the link-building workflow.

To be more precise over the data in the chart:

Link-building outreach tools

LinkAssistant

Pricing: free - $16.6/mo, 7-day free trial

Good for: SEO link-building, email research, link tracking

LinkAssistant is link-building software designed specifically for link-builder outreach. Currently, it combines a bunch of link prospecting tools, keyword research, a backlink analysis tool; an in-built email client (with a possibility to integrate external email clients), and a backlink tracker to verify that all built links are live.

The tool includes all popular methods for link-building campaigns. You can find your prospects by various search options, such as finding guest post sites, forums, blogs, review platforms, business directories relevant to your niche, comment threads, etc.

With a powerful backlink analysis tool, LinkAssistant lets you conduct link building by backlink check methods, such as discovering backlink gaps, competitors’ intersecting backlinks, or a site’s fresh backlinks over a defined time term. This way LinkAssistant ensures that your link building becomes better targeted. Likewise, you can find top-ranking pages by your selected keywords or find similar websites operating in your niche.

You can set quality thresholds for Domain InLink Rank (its unique metric), Alexa Rank, etc to filter out rubbish from the results yet before your research starts. Also, you can define the location where you want to find the link prospects which is especially helpful for local SEO link-building.

Being an outreach tool, LinkAssistant by default scrapes contact information from the pages you are researching. You may as well add your prospects manually from another backlink checker, select the rows, and hit Update contact info. The email scraper software will collect emails from the pages. There are a bunch of technical tools for safe search, human emulation delays, resolving CAPTCHA, and proxy rotation for bulk scraping.

LinkAssistant contains an outreach tool that allows sending bulk emails to prospects right from the in-built email assistant.

LinkAssistant contains several ready-made templates that you can customize according to your needs and scale your link-building outreach while staying personal. The email outreach tool contains several labels to flag the status of the emails (from Send request to Site links back).

There’s a reporting tool in enterprise versions to show how many backlinks have been built over a month, their statuses, the domain authority, etc. This step requires LinkAssistant. You can download it now for free. Download LinkAssistant

The tool uses color labels next to a link, allows setting up a link exchange pair, verifies anchors, dofollow or nofollow tags, etc. 

In all, it’s been conceived as a special tool for link-builders. There is an option to receive link-builder reports to emails and send PDF white-labeled reports to SEO clients.

Linkody

Pricing: €13.90/mo - €138.90/mo

Good for: backlink checking, link tracking

Linkody is among the top specialized link building tools that let you check backlinks pointing to your domain, compare link profiles of the competitors, and pick the right link building strategy.

The tool provides top SEO metrics from external backlink checkers like Moz, Majestic, etc. Linkody keeps track and reports on all link-building efforts.

The dashboards show new and lost backlinks, statuses of built links, top anchors, broken or unfollowed backlinks, and tons more information. A link visualizer shows where the link is located on a page. There is the disavow file generator tool for hiding spammy links from Google. You can receive reports and alerts to emails, and there is an option of white-label PDF reports for link-builder agencies.

Linkio

Pricing: $19.99/mo - $149/mo, 7-day free trial

Good for: link-building outreach

Linkio is a cold outreach tool combining rank tracking and off-page SEO.

Linkio takes your major keywords, pulls the backlinks for your ranking page, and analyzes them to form the foundation of your research. Then the tool grabs the top 10 on Google’s SERP for the keyword, all their backlink data, and comes up with a custom link-building gameplan.

For link-building campaigns, Linkio contains the bulk email finder tool, and tons of email templates for cold outreach that can be easily personalized. A nice feature for link-builders is an anchor text suggestion tool and an anchor text planner.

Besides, for cold outreach, there is the schedule and human sending mode for higher deliverability of emails. The software turns off reminders once the addressee replies back. On top of that, Linkio is said to be team-friendly, allowing an unlimited number of users and multiple email accounts for inbox rotation.

SEMrush

Pricing: $119.95/mo - $449.95/mo, free signup, 7-day free trial

Good for: SEO link-building, digital marketing and PR

SEMrush is one of industry leaders positioning itself as an all-in-one SEO toolkit for SEO agencies and professionals. The tool allows keeping track of all your link-building activities from beginning to end in a convenient workflow.

The tool focuses on prospect search with the Backlink Gap Tool to analyze links of your competitors and bid on highly-promising link-building opportunities. The SEO site analysis lets you identify weak or strong prospects, likewise you may want to find unique or shared backlink sources of your competitors.

Besides purely SEO link-building, SEMrush runs the Brand Monitoring Tool and the Lead Generation Tool which help companies run marketing campaigns and expand brand coverage.

The SEMrush Link Building Tool is great to manage link outreach campaigns. It has Authority Score, its unique SEO metric to estimate domains and pages that you’re prospecting. The tool lets you add or remove link prospects, find contact emails, and track email correspondence. Link-builders have a convenient option to sort out prospects immediately by the type of link-building strategies and build emails from several default templates, such as requesting a product review, a guest post, a linked mention, recovering lost backlinks, etc.

There are several parameters for tracking built links: the backlinks are verified if they are in place and have the needed tag attribute. The progress stats can be exported in a CSV file or sent as a report to an email.

The SEMrush link-building tool is really great to quickly build fresh backlinks and keep track of your outreach success.

Pitchbox

Pricing: upon request

Good for: SEO link building, digital marketing, and PR

Pitchbox is one more powerful outreach tool praised by many SEOs for its well-meditated pipeline that boosts productivity.

The tool provides ready-made search modes for various link prospecting campaigns, like doing blogger outreach, finding competitor backlinks, requesting link removal, etc. The tool powers a bunch of SEO metrics from other backlink sources, like Moz, Majestic, Ahrefs, etc.

A link-builder formulates the search, sieves through the results rights in the internal browser view, adds the prospect to the mailing list, and then hits the addressee with a personalized email template. The tool automatically declutters the inbox from irrelevant mail. There is a possibility to set up automated follow-ups to those contacts who have not replied yet. Before replying, you can view an influencer’s profile and even react with social signals right from the tool.

The Aging Report shows the success of the email campaign, the reports are shown in comprehensible graphs and diagrams.

Thanks to the automation and reporting features, the tool is perfect for SEO agencies, doing link-building, PR, and content promotion. Integrates with a bunch of SEO tools and Google Data Studio, Zapier, Slack, etc.

SEO backlink checkers

SEO SpyGlass

Pricing: free - $16.6/mo, 7-day free trial

Good for: link prospecting, off-page SEO

SEO SpyGlass is desktop software from SEO PowerSuite aimed for checking a website’s link profile. It lets you overview your competitors, discover backlink opportunities, inspect HTTP requests and do broken link building, inspect anchor texts, check link penalty risks, and compile disavow files.

The tool contains its unique metrics InLink Rank and Domain InLink Rank based on the number of backlinks referring to the page and the domain.

There is a penalty risk tool that shows spammy backlinks that you may want to take down or disavow, the special disavow file generator is available for free.

The Historical Data tool lets you inspect new and lost backlinks. A very handy module is Bulk Analysis for checking domain authority and InLink Rank of prospects at scale.

This step requires SEO SpyGlass. You can download it now for free. Download SEO SpyGlass

Alternatively, there is an online backlink checker from SEO PowerSuite. To analyze the link profile of any page, just enter the URL, and the tool will quickly show all the referring domains. The company also offers their Backlink API, claimed to be one of the most extensive in the market with around 3 trillion newest backlinks.

Ahrefs

Pricing: $99/mo - $999/mo, discount at yearly billing, 7-day trial

Good for: SEO, link prospecting, link monitoring

One more tool for outreach with link prospecting functions is Ahrefs. It lets SEOs analyze competitors' link profiles with the Site Explorer. By using filters, you can find the resource pages by the type of backlinks you need, for example, high-quality links or broken backlinks. There is a featured Broken Link Checker tool, by the way.

To spot relevant sites referring to multiple competitors but not yours, there is the Ahrefs’ Link Intersect tool.

Ahref’s Batch Analysis tool lets you check domains in bulk, allowing up to 200 pages to be analyzed at a time.

The tool has its own metrics for calculating domain authority called Domain Rating (DR) with the range from zero to 100. You can filter pages by DR, organic traffic, number of linking domains; word count length in the article, publication date, languages, social media popularity.

There is also an Alert feature similar to Google Alerts where you can get an email delivered for your keywords, or even backlinks built to some page.

Moz

Pricing: $99/mo - $599/mo, discount at yearly billing, 1-month free trial

Good for: backlink analysis, link prospecting, link tracking

Moz SEO tools also offer domain analysis tools and metrics that can be helpful for link prospecting.

Moz has developed its own metric Domain Authority to measure a website’s strength and its ability to rank in the search results. An analogical metric for a web page is the Page Authority; both SEO metrics are available in the free plan of the tool.

The tool creators also offer free SEO tools that can be used in link-building. For example, the Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool, MozBar, a browser extension, and the MozScape API that can be integrated into other SEO tools.

The Free Domain Analysis Tool lets you quickly analyze a domain's ranking pages, top linking domains, give a historic outline to new and lost backlinks, and see the spam score. In addition to that, the tool sets out major search competitors and top keywords for which the website ranks. Such domain analysis can be helpful to see your organic competition at large as well as to reverse-engineer your competitors’ link-building strategies.

Majestic

Pricing: free signup, $49.99/mo - $399.99/mo

Good for: backlink monitoring, link prospecting

Majestic SEO is a powerful link checker tool with its own SEO metrics that are popular with link-builders. Majestic offers the Site Explorer Tool for competitive intelligence from its extensive database of crawled web pages. There are two indexes: Fresh Index (built over the last four months) and Historic Index of web pages (that appeared over five years).

Majestic lets you find your best-performing competitors, check their top backlinks, compare top-level metrics for sites and individual web pages, spot more link-building opportunities by discovering link intersection between several competitor websites.

The tool has unique metrics like Citation Flow (CF, the number of backlinks) and Trust Flow (TF, the quality of links), both metrics are available after free signup.

Majestic offers a great visual Link Graph tool to easily see tight networks and tiers building around a website.

SEOquake

Pricing: free

Good for: on-page SEO, backlink checks, link prospecting

Sometimes you don’t need a whole set of link building tools, but rather a minor tool to do a small SEO task, like checking links on an individual page. That’s where Chrome extensions for link-builders can be real timesavers.

SEOquake is a plugin checking a bunch of useful SEO metrics right in your browser. It immediately checks site metrics, such as Alexa Rank, whois, Google index, traffic, and more. It shows keywords on the page and their density, and all that can be exported in a CSV list. For in-depth on-page diagnosis, it opens a separate tab. It will require access to a free SEMrush account to check backlinks.

Email lookup services and cold outreach

Snovio 

Pricing: free - $578/mo

Good for: email lookup, cold outreach, and leads generation

Snovio is an outreach platform that lets you create drip campaigns and scale outreach manyfold. The tool combines cold outreach tools and a customer management system, helping sales managers find relevant prospects and convert them into leads.

After signing up, you will need to add two extensions for finding emails (anywhere on the web except LinkedIn) and the prospect finder tool. The core functionality is setting up an email drip campaign with automated follow-ups. It integrates with Pipedrive and Zapier for sales management, and with Calendly for scheduling events with prospects.

Snovio’s remarkable feature is an email verifier with over 90 verified emails in the database. The tool lets you upload an email list and verify them, or use the email verification API as well.

Hunter.io

Pricing: free – 279$ per month.
 
Good for: finding and verifying emails, sending email campaigns
 
Hunter is an email lookup and outreach service that lets you dig through the web and instantly discover email addresses, save contacts as leads, and run personalized email campaigns. The tool provides Domain Finder, Email Finder, Email Verify, and Mail Tracker. On the flipside, the tool lacks influencer research, though, and the Author Finder is going to be discontinued.
 
Hunter operates in accordance with GDPR, and integrates with popular CRMs like Salesforce and Pipedrive. It enables automation (with Zapier) which is a cool feature for automated outreach in B2B campaigns.

RocketReach

Pricing: free - $199/mo individual plans, enterprise plan upon request

Good for: contact search

RocketReach is a nice platform to find email contacts at scale. You can try their email lookup services done on a website, via a Chrome extension, or with the help of API. RocketReach enables bulk email search, contact verification, advanced search filters. In enterprise versions, it allows integrations with Zapier and Salesforce, share contacts and history with your team, and report on team productivity. 

FindThatLead

Pricing: free - $399/mo

Good for: contact search, cold email outreach

FindThatLead is another contact research tool providing quick and accurate data. Operates as an online platform and as an extension as well. In addition to email lookup services, it offers automated prospecting tools for better targeted advertising campaigns. It finds leads from local businesses, and searches contact info from social media channels, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Besides, there is a bulk email sender tool for cold outreach. FindThatLead integrates with Zapier.

Mailshake

Pricing: $59/mo - $99/mo, 30-day money-back guarantee

Good for: email outreach campaigns

Mailshake is email outreach and sales engagement software with intuitive dashboards and user-friendly interface. To set up a campaign, you either add your prospects’ email addresses manually or import them from a spreadsheet. Importing allows classifying contacts automatically while mapping your columns to merge fields. 

The tool sends bulk email requests built from default popular templates, such as link building, guest posting, PR pitches, content promotion, and other networking opportunities. Templates are easily managed and customized, there is A/B testing as well. The tool lets link-builders scale their email outreach while staying personal, track replies, measure the campaign efficiency, spot leads, and many more.

Mailshake integrates with tons of other instruments from sales’ tech stack, including SalesForce, Hubspot, GoogleSheets, Facebook, LinkedIn, Outlook, and the like.

Influencer research for content marketing and PR

Awario

Pricing: $29/mo - $299/mo, discount if billed yearly, free trial available

Good for: influencer research, digital marketing & PR

The popular link-building method is to find linkless mentions and reclaim your links. You can do this by using social listening tools like Awario. It is a web-based application that collects mentions across the web, forums, news, and social media. You can apply the Boolean filter to collect unlinked mentions: in the extended search settings enter your target keyword plus the search operators AND NOT + link to find linkless mentions.

After that, you will be able to reach out to the authors of the mentions by email or on social media. It will be easy to convince them to insert a backlink because they have already written something about you.

The tool provides an info card about the influencer, with contact information (if available on the web page), influence rank, top SEO keyword.

The prospect management tool lets you mark prospects as important, delete them from your list, label or ban.

The sentiment analysis module lets you manage your PR and marketing campaign success, segment and analyze your audience. The beta tool Leads detects mentions with purchase intent that can be easily turned into hot leads. The Reports module lets you compile your stats in convenient dashboards, download them and send them to your team members or clients.

Buzzsumo

Pricing: Free - $299/mo, discount at yearly billing, 30-days free trial

Good for: influencer research, digital PR, and outreach

Buzzsumo is a great tool for finding top journalists and pitching them for your great stores. I like it for its great visual layout of content research results. It shows what top headlines are currently ranking and have the most engagement on social media.

You can view influencers and their top stories, as well as see who links to their articles with Buzzsumo’s backlink analysis tools. This is helpful for your content marketing strategy in general because you’ll be able to see trends in the news, what content has larger potential to rank, and improve your content so as to add more E-A-T (Expertise - Authority - Trustworthiness) to your content. The backlink research tool can help you implement the skyscraper technique, find top-ranking pages and their linking sources. Besides, you can set up alerts and monitor your competitors’ domain, their backlinks and social content performance.

Buzzsumo also offers a Chrome plugin and an API to integrate into other SEO and reporting tools.

HARO

Pricing: free - $149/mo

Good for: pitching for media coverage

HARO is a platform where journalists and sources meet to discover a common ground for a topic coverage. The platform can hardly be used in a traditional sense of link-building, however, it may help you pitch high-quality mentions in the press. HARO (abbreviation of Help A Reporter Out) works as simple as that: you get daily alerts about your keyword topic, and you can post an answer and get a quote in the upcoming article in case the journalist finds your answer useful.

Unlike another Cision’s platform PRNewsWire, that serves rather to press-release distribution and content syndication, HARO is more about connecting two sides of story-making: you receive the feed relevant to your topic, monitor source requests, and contact the reporter with your pitch.

Muck Rack

Pricing: provided upon request

Good for: PR & influencer research

Muck Rack is another PR platform connecting sources to journalists that operates slightly differently from the above. While HARO is more like a newsletter with alerts, Muck Rack lets you review reporters and their articles. Sources can follow updates in journalists’ statuses to know what they’re up to. Users get access to the media database where they dynamically sort lists of journalists and publishers, get their contacts, check out social media profiles, and send pitches to them. And users can compile coverage reports and infographics to report on the impact of the campaign, see shares and retweets of the article link.

Just Reach Out

Pricing: $99/mo - $399/mo, discount with yearly billing, 14-day free trial

Good for: influencer research, pitching journalists, broken link building

JustReachOut is a useful tool to launch PR campaigns and pitch journalists, podcasters, or bloggers. It helps companies to get featured in the press by doing their own PR outreach. The platform does not let you access the database of journalists and media, but rather creates a workflow for researching the right contacts, and provides guidance for pitching them the right way.

Link-builders will like a special in-built report for broken link building. The tool crawls Google starting page 1 for your selected keyword, checks all the content, and finds broken links in every result. You’ll be able to review your broken link report and send the request to replace the broken link with a link to your content.

Other must-have functionalities include email scheduling, pitch analytics, and team management.

Buzzstream

Pricing: $24/mo to $999/mo, 14-day free trial

Good for: influencer outreach

BuzzStream is the industry-leading outreach tool for link-building and digital PR. The platform helps marketers find influencers in relevant niches, reach out to web publishers, and track all communications history. Thus, Buzzstream conveniently combines outreach and CRM functionalities. Buzzstream makes it easy to pitch a story, especially offering linkable assets, such as infographics, research and whitepapers.

A bunch of SEO and social media metrics simplifies prospect research and evaluation. The tool contains several templates for data import from other link checkers and CRMs, including Majestic, Citation Labs, or SalesForce. The prospect list can be easily split into segments, filtered, and updated. Navigation through the boards is pretty intuitive.

Besides, the platform offers the Buzzstream Buzzmarker, an extension for Chrome to add prospects along the way you browse the web. The plugin will work with your Buzzstream account only.

Buzzstream lets outreachers maintain all relations history: track email opens and clicks, send reminders and follow‐ups automatically, keep record of replies, tweets, and reactions. An undoubted timesaver is the possibility to sync email accounts and share communications history with your team. The reporting feature provides insights into email success, best-performing subject lines, and other stats crucial for email marketing.

Respona

Pricing: $145/mo - $299/mo, 30-day money-back guarantee

Good for: influencer outreach

Respona claims to be the most contemporary and comprehensive tool for PR and blogger outreach. In fact, it offers all the routine steps in setting up an outreach process: finding leads and estimating prospects with a bunch of SEO metrics (domain authority, stats from Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, etc., engagement on social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit), email contact lookup services, automated email setup with toggling off the follow-up sending after receiving the reply, and reports into your outreach efforts’ success.

The tool stands out by its live search into ranking content such as news, podcasts, trending content. The tool helps companies streamline link-building strategies by pitching great stories and authors. It offers automated integration with HARO to identify relevant journalists and bloggers. Besides Respona’s AI responsible for clearing data, users access a vast database of over 400 million contacts (email addresses, Linkedin profiles, etc).

There is an AI-powered email personalization assistant to help you customize templates. And a pitch quality analyzer that will remove all spam and improve the tone of voice. All in all, the tool creators guarantee a seamless link-building workflow with no hassle.

Ninja Outreach

Pricing: $299/mo - $499/mo, 14-day free trial

Good for: influencer research, link-building, PR

NinjaOutreach combines influencer and link-building software. It finds leads and popular blogger profiles from Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

It lets you create templates with custom fields and send bulk personalized messages to your contacts. The templates are crafted specifically for white-hat link-building, such as making inquiries for guest posts, interview, and podcasts opportunities, offering infographics, etc. The analytics tool shows the templates with the highest open rates, most replies and CTRs. It notifies once a prospect replies, and tracks further lead interaction.

There are built-in CRM features for team management, such as leaving notes, labels, and tags, and of course, lead import or export.

Terkel

Pricing: free plan available; $99/month - $199 per month for three accounts (and $30 per additional account thereafter).

Good for: SEO link building, PR, link tracking

Terkel is a professional Question & Answer marketplace that connects experts to publishers like Forbes, Fast Company, GoDaddy, Zapier, SHRM, and more.

Essentially, Terkel releases questions that are posted on the platform by their publishing partners. When you sign up as a source, you have the opportunity to contribute a quote with the chance of getting published in a blog. Terkel collects these quotes, turns the best ones into a full-length blog, and passes them to their publishing partners.

Terkel tracks your placements and gives you feedback on where your quote is in the article creation process (i.e. selected or not selected for publication). It goes by a freemium model, where you can choose various plans depending on your needs. You can sign-up for Terkel for free and get 5 opportunities per month to pitch your quotes.

To get started with Terkel, sources should first fill out their profile. The headshot, company name, and job title that you upload will be the information that appears in any blogs you are published in. Once you complete your profile and submit your interests, relevant questions will populate your dashboard.

With the premium access, you’ll have access to the information about the link status in the citing article (dofollow, nofollow, unlinked, etc.), the Domain Rating of the publisher, 2-day early visibility of questions, editorial support from Terkel’s team, and unlimited opportunities to respond to questions.

Recent announcements from Terkel say that their average publication success rate is around 30%. Ultimately, Terkel’s simple interface and Q&A format make it easy to build high-quality links at low cost.

Link Building Agencies

If you are short of time, there is always an option to outsource link building to agencies. It is essential to put all efforts in establishing natural backlinks with authoritative websites that Google values. Therefore, it’s important to consider reputable link building agencies that stick to white-hat tactics.

As there are abundance of link agencies, you will always want to be sure that the agency is offering services of good quality. For example, you may want to cross-check if the link builders you work with do not build links on PBNs. Otherwise, the money spent are simply wasted, and in the worst scenario, it may even spoil a website's authority.

 Let us mention some white-hat link-building agencies that ensure best practices.

LinkDoctor

An agency of link building specialists, LinkDoctor offers link building services that follow Google’s guidelines. The agency adopts a human centered approach and helps to earn organic and high-quality backlinks easily and ethically. The team foster friendly connections through SEO link building, blogger outreach, guest posting, and fixing broken links, etc.

The beauty about link building agencies is the fact that they adopt a holistic strategy that integrates content production, backlinks, and SEO services to achieve the desired business outcomes. Considering all the search engine optimization aspects, LinkDoctor will help in strengthening a website ensuring the high caliber of a company’s links.

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These are only a few of the dozens of tools for SEO link-building in the market. Do you happen to use some of these? Do you have some favorite link prospecting and outreach tools that you think are great? You are welcome to share your experience in the comments!