Link building is the backbone of a successful SEO strategy, boosting your website’s authority on search engines.
But let’s face it, it’s not always a walk in the park. Fortunately, a wide array of SEO link-building software exists to lighten the load for your team.
The “best” tool truly depends on your specific goals and where you are with your link-building efforts.
Here are 13 tools we’ve found effective at our agency, organized by the stage of the link-building process they’re most useful for.
13 Best Link Building Tools
Ahrefs: Best for a backlink audit
Undoubtedly, Ahrefs is one of the most essential tools to use in your link-building strategy.
It’s the SEO software equivalent of a Swiss army knife. Don’t take our word for it: 55.5% of link builders use Ahrefs.
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool designed to help you improve your website’s search rankings and overall visibility. It offers a wide range of features, but here are the key ones:
➡️ Site explorer: This is the beating heart of Ahrefs, offering a deep dive into any website’s backlink profile, organic keywords, top-performing pages, and estimated traffic.
➡️ Keywords explorer: Uncover keyword ideas and analyze their search volume, competition, and potential traffic value.
➡️ Content explorer: Find high-performing content in your niche, analyze its social shares and backlinks, and identify potential link opportunities.
➡️ Rank tracker: Monitor your keyword rankings over time and compare your performance to competitors.
➡️ Site audit: Crawl your website to identify technical SEO issues such as broken links, slow page speed, and duplicate content.
Standout feature
While Ahrefs is renowned as an all-in-one SEO tool, it truly shines regarding in-depth link analysis. Its backlink audit feature provides unparalleled detail and insight into your website’s link profile.
With Ahrefs, you can assess the following backlink metrics:
- Uncover your most valuable linkable assets: Easily identify which pages on your site attract the most backlinks, revealing your strongest content and potential opportunities for further link acquisition.
- Monitor backlink changes: Track the ebb and flow of your backlinks over time, spotting trends, identifying new opportunities, and addressing potential issues before they escalate.
- Discover hidden link prospects: Compare your backlink profile with your competitors to find websites linking to them but not yours—a goldmine of untapped link potential.
- Evaluate link quality: Ahrefs provides metrics like domain rating (DR) to help you gauge the authority of referring domains, ensuring your links come from reputable sources.
- Identify toxic links: Spots potentially harmful links based on their anchor text and flags questionable sources. This allows you to disavow toxic links and protect your site’s reputation.
Ahrefs pricing
| Plan | Monthly Price | Features |
| Starter | $29 | Limited features, ideal for someone starting out |
| Lite | $129 | Limited features, ideal for small businesses. |
| Standard | $249 | More comprehensive features that are suitable for growing companies. |
| Advanced | $449 | Advanced tools for established businesses. |
| Enterprise | $1,249 | Extensive features for large enterprises. |
ℹ️ For more info, see their pricing page.
BuzzSumo: Best for finding link-building opportunities
BuzzSumo is an online platform that analyzes content performance, discovers trends, and identifies influencers.
It provides valuable insights into the kinds of content that resonate with audiences, shows which social channels drive engagement, and identifies the key influencers in your niche.
So, as a link-building tool, it has two main uses:
1️⃣ Content discovery
- Search for top-performing content across the web based on keywords, topics, domains, or even specific authors. You can then use this information to generate content ideas based on these trending topics.
- Analyze engagement metrics (shares, likes, comments) to understand the most popular content types and topics.
2️⃣ Finding influencers
- Find key influencers in your niche based on their reach, authority, and engagement.
- Analyze influencer profiles, including their top-performing content, audience demographics, and social media engagement.
- Reach out to influencers for collaborations, partnerships, or content promotion.
Standout feature
One of BuzzSumo’s best features is the ability to set up alerts to track trending topics and conversations in real time, allowing you to stay ahead of the curve.
BuzzSumo pricing
| Plan | Monthly Cost (Billed Annually) | Number of Users | Searches | Alerts | Key Features |
| Content Creation | $199 | 1 | Unlimited | 2 | Content Analyzer, Trending Feeds, Question Analyzer |
| PR & Comms | $299 | 5 | Unlimited | 5 | Media Database & Outreach, Coverage Reports, Slack Integration |
| Suite | $499 | 10 | Unlimited | 10 | YouTube Analyzer, Advanced Chrome Extension, Article Uploads |
| Enterprise | $999 | 30 | Unlimited | 50 | RSS Feed, Granular Location Search, Early Access To New Features |
ℹ️ For more info, see their pricing page.
Check My Links: Best for finding broken links
Check My Links is a Chrome browser extension that quickly scans a webpage and checks all its links. It then identifies and highlights which links are working and which ones are broken (leading to errors like a 404 “page not found”).
Why is this link-building tool useful?
This broken link-building tool not only improves your website’s user experience and SEO by identifying broken links, but also opens doors to relevant link-building opportunities.
When the tool finds broken links on other websites, you can proactively reach out to the site owners, alert them to the issue, and offer relevant content as a replacement.
This link-building outreach benefits everyone involved: the site owner maintains a positive user experience, you gain a valuable backlink, and users find the information they want.
Google Alerts: Best for spotting unlinked brand mentions
Google Alerts is a free tool from Google that helps you monitor the web for mentions of your brand, products, or industry.
It sends you email notifications whenever new content relevant to your chosen keywords or phrases appears online.
This makes Google Alerts an invaluable link-building asset, especially as it is capable of tracking unlinked brand mentions.
Imagine discovering a blog post or news article mentioning your company but not linking to your website. With Google Alerts, you’re immediately notified of this opportunity.
You can then proactively reach out to the site owner or author, thanking them for the mention and politely requesting that they add a link to your site. This simple outreach often results in a valuable backlink.
How to set up a Google Alert
Go to Google Alerts and enter your search term. Type the keyword or phrase you want to monitor in the search bar.
This could be your brand name, a competitor, an industry term, or anything else you’re interested in.
Next, click on “Show options” to customize your alert. Here, you can choose:
- How often you want to receive alerts (as it happens, daily, or weekly).
- What types of sources you want to monitor (news, blogs, websites, etc.).
- Language and regional preferences.
- How many results you want to see (all or only the best results).
- Which email address you want the alerts delivered to.
Lastly, create an alert: Once you’ve entered your search term and adjusted any desired options, click “Create Alert.”
That’s it! You’ll receive email notifications whenever Google finds new content that matches your search term. You can create multiple alerts for different topics and manage them from the Google Alerts page.
Best PR tool: Connectively (formerly HARO)
Connectively, formerly known as Help a Reporter Out (HARO), is a platform that connects journalists, bloggers, and content creators with sources and experts for their stories and articles.
It’s a mutually beneficial platform where:
- Journalists can submit queries or requests for information, quotes, or opinions on specific topics.
- Sources/experts can respond to relevant queries with pitches, showcasing their expertise and offering valuable insights.
Getting quoted in relevant articles can earn you powerful backlinks from reputable publications, making it another essential PR and link-building tool.
Standout feature
HARO caters to various industries and topics, from technology and health to finance and lifestyle. This broad reach means almost any professional can find relevant queries to respond to.
Connectively pricing
| Plan | Monthly Price | Features |
| Lite | Free | One profile, ten pitches a month |
| Core | $19 | One profile, 25 pitches a month, two email alerts |
| Pro | $49 | Three profiles, 50 pitches a month, six email alerts, view complete public profiles |
| Premier | $149 | Ten profiles, 150 pitches a month, 20 email alerts, view complete public profiles |
ℹ️ For more info, see their pricing page.
Best writing assistant: Grammarly
Grammarly, an AI-powered writing assistant, streamlines content creation and elevates your writing quality.
The paid version of Grammarly goes beyond checking basic grammar and spelling, offering a suite of features to enhance your style, tone, and clarity:
- Grammar and spelling correction: Eliminates errors that can undermine your credibility.
- Style and tone suggestions: Tailor your writing to your intended audience and purpose.
- Clarity improvements: Ensures your message is easily understood.
- Vocabulary enhancement: Expand your word choices for more impactful writing.
- Plagiarism and AI detection: (Premium feature) Maintains originality and avoids potential issues.
These tools are invaluable assets for any link-building campaign. Grammarly streamlines the process of creating error-free content that naturally attracts backlinks while ensuring your link-building outreach emails are polished and professional.
Standout feature
A standout feature, especially for businesses, is Grammarly’s custom style guides. These help teams maintain a consistent brand voice, strengthening your professional image in outreach efforts.
Grammarly pricing
Grammarly offers a variety of subscription options to suit different needs and budgets. Let’s explore them in more detail:
| Plan | Price | Features |
| Free | $0/month | Basic writing suggestions, tone detection, 100 AI prompts/month |
| Premium | $12/month (billed annually) | Advanced suggestions, tone adjustments, sentence rewrites, plagiarism detection, 1,000 AI prompts/month |
| Business | $15/member/month (billed annually) | All Premium features, centralized billing, style guide, brand tones, analytics, 2,000 AI prompts/member/month |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | All Business features, enhanced security, dedicated support, unlimited AI prompts |
ℹ️ For more info, see their pricing page.
fBest for finding contacts: Hunter
Surfer SEO is an on-page SEO tool designed to help you optimize your website content and improve your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).
It does this by analyzing the top-ranking pages for your target keywords and generating a detailed content optimization report with specific recommendations on ways to improve your content. This includes suggestions for:
- Ideal word count
- Keywords to include and their optimal frequency
- Heading structure
- Image optimization
- Internal and external linking strategies
Surfer is an underrated link-building tool because by following Surfer SEO’s recommendations, you can create content that improves your chances of ranking higher in search engines.
That said, it’s important to note that Surfer SEO is just one tool in your SEO arsenal—it’s not a magic bullet.
Standout features
For paid subscribers, two features truly set this tool apart:
✅ AI content detector: This feature helps you identify whether a piece of text was written by a human or generated by an AI tool. As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, this is increasingly important, especially for maintaining authenticity and transparency in your work.
✅ Content humanizer: If you use AI to generate text (e.g., for drafts or outlines), this feature can “humanize” the output, making it sound more natural and less robotic. It helps avoid the telltale signs of AI-generated content, making it more engaging and easier to read.
SurferSEO pricing
| Plan | Monthly Price | Features |
| Essential | $89 | For small business owners and freelancers |
| Scale | $129 | For mid-sized agencies & marketing teams |
| Scale AI | $219 | For agencies and teams looking to scale up with AI |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | Tailored features for larger teams |
ℹ️ For more info, see their pricing page.
Best for finding contacts: Hunter
Once you have created high-quality content or found a broken backlink, you’ll need to contact website owners.
Manually looking for contact information can be time-consuming and inefficient, especially with a large list of targets.
Hunter.io streamlines the process by scraping the web to gather contact details for website owners and professionals.
All you need to do is upload your list of target sites, and Hunter.io does the heavy lifting.
While it may not find every email address, its high success rate and use of multiple sources ensure you get a comprehensive list of potential contacts.
Once you have a verified list of contacts, export it in CSV format for seamless integration with your other link-building tools.
Standout feature
One of Hunter.io’s standout features is its email verifier. This crucial step confirms the accuracy of the email addresses it finds, ensuring that you can easily find the right person’s contact information, which reduces bounce rates.
This link-building tool even highlights the sources it uses, allowing you to verify the information independently if needed.
Hunter.io pricing
| Plan | Monthly Price | Features |
| Free | $0 | 25 searches, 50 verifications |
| Starter | $49 | 500 searches, 1,000 verifications, three connected email accounts |
| Growth | $149 | 5,000 searches, 10,000 verifications, ten connected email accounts |
| Business | $499 | 50,000 searches, 100,000 verifications, 20 connected email accounts |
ℹ️ For more info, see their pricing page.
Best for outreach: Mailshake
Outreach is often the most time-consuming aspect of link building and juggling multiple campaigns can quickly become overwhelming.
That’s where Mailshake can help streamline your efforts when communicating with link prospects.
This link-building software simplifies outreach by allowing you to send mass personalized emails and automate follow-up sequences based on recipient interactions. This translates to less manual work, freeing you to focus on backlink building.
Standout feature
One of Mailshake’s standout features is its library of pre-made templates optimized for various link-building strategies, including:
- Broken link building: Easily identify and offer replacements for broken links on other websites.
- Guest posting: Pitch your expertise and secure valuable guest post opportunities on relevant blogs.
- Link requests: Directly request links from websites where your content adds value.
- PR pitches: Get your brand or product featured in the press with targeted outreach.
- Content promotion: Spread the word about your latest content and attract backlinks naturally.
Mailshake pricing
| Plan | Monthly Price (Per User) | Features |
| Starter | $29 | Automated email sequences, 1,500 email sends/month, 50 data finder credits, A/B testing |
| Email Outreach | $59 | All starter features plus 2 email addresses, email personalization, advanced scheduling |
| Sales Engagement | $99 | All email outreach features plus 5 email addresses, power phone dialer, LinkedIn automation |
ℹ️ For more info, see their pricing page.
Best backlink monitoring software: Monitor Backlinks
Once you have put in all the hard work to build links, it’s important to monitor them. One of the best link-building tools for this is SEOptimer’s Backlink Monitoring feature.
This link-building software offers a range of advanced features to assess the effectiveness of your strategies and identify areas for improvement.
With Monitor Backlinks, you can:
- Stay on top of all the links to your website, ensuring your hard-earned backlinks remain active.
- Spy on your competitors and identify potential backlink opportunities.
- Create disavow files to submit to Google, disassociating your site from spammy links.
- Generate detailed backlink reports to evaluate the effectiveness of your link-building efforts and track progress over time.
- Receive alerts when a backlink disappears, enabling you to take action if necessary, especially for paid links.
Standout feature
A standout feature of Monitor Backlinks is its keyword rank tracking, which allows you to correlate your backlink profile with your ranking performance.
This unique insight helps you understand the extent to which your link-building strategy directly contributes to organic traffic.
This link-building tool is not only for monitoring your backlinks. It also offers a range of other features, including:
- Keyword research
- Keyword tracking
- Backlink research
- SEO audit
- Bulk reporting and more!
SEOptimer pricing
| Plan | Monthly Price | Link-building Features |
| DIY SEO | $19 | One user with no access to backlink research or backlink monitoring features. |
| White Label | $29 | Three users with access to backlink research and backlink monitoring for three websites. |
| White Label & Embedding | $59 | Six users with access to backlink research and backlink monitoring for ten websites. |
ℹ️ For more info and an expanded feature breakdown, see their pricing page.
Best for disavowing backlinks: Google disavow links tool
The Google disavow links tool is a free feature within Google Search Console that allows website owners to tell Google to ignore specific backlinks when assessing their website’s search rankings.
This link-building tool allows you to disassociate your site from low-quality links that could negatively impact your SEO.
When to use the disavow tool
Image courtesy of Hubspot
⚠️ Manual action: If Google issues a manual action against you due to unnatural links, using the disavow tool forms part of the process to recover from the penalty.
⚠️ Link spam: If you have many low-quality or spammy links pointing to your site that you can’t control or remove, the disavow tool can help mitigate their potential negative impact.
Here’s how it works:
- Create a disavow file: You create a plain text file (.txt) listing the URLs or domains you want Google to ignore.
- Upload to Search Console: You upload this file through the disavow links tool in your Google Search Console account.
- Google processes the request: Google takes your request into account, but it doesn’t guarantee that all disavowed links will be ignored entirely.
| 💡Important note: Google representatives have indicated that the disavow link tool within Google Search Console may eventually be removed.
John Mueller, a senior search analyst at Google, stated on X (formerly Twitter), that “At some point, I’m sure we’ll remove it.” Currently, the tool remains available and functional. We recommend staying informed about any official announcements from Google regarding the disavow tool. |
Best link-building service: Authority Builders
Above we’ve discussed a range of premium link-building tools, and we would like to introduce another option for you to explore: Authority Builders’ link-building services.
Yes, we know, it’s not software BUT it could be another valuable asset in your link-building toolbox, particularly if you are tired of juggling multiple SEO tools and struggling to build high-quality backlinks.
Authority Builders takes the hassle out of link building, allowing you to sit back and relax while our experts secure authoritative links that boost your website’s visibility and rankings.
What we offer:
- Link audits
- Link building
- Broken link building
- Digital PR
- Link insertions
- Guest posting
- Content creation
Why choose us?
“Authority Builders Co. is a perfect solution for anyone needing to scale up their outreach. These are quality guest posts on real sites that I’m actually proud to show my clients.”
- Ryan Stewart, Webris
🏆 Unlock the power of high-quality backlinks. Authority Builders focus on securing backlinks from real websites with genuine traffic. This means your site gains SEO benefits and attracts valuable visitors who are truly interested in what you offer.
🏆 Tailored strategies for maximum impact. We understand that your business is unique. That’s why our link-building strategies are customized to your specific goals and industry, ensuring optimal results that align with your vision.
🏆 Leverage our expertise. Our team of SEO experts understands the nuances of link building. They’ll ensure your backlinks are high-quality, relevant, and comply with search engine guidelines, safeguarding your site’s reputation.
🏆 Find your perfect match in any niche. We’ve been building relationships with webmasters since 2016. Our network of websites spans a diverse range of niches, ensuring you’ll find the perfect link-building opportunities, no matter your industry.
🏆 Comprehensive reporting. Get detailed insights into your link-building campaigns, including progress tracking and the impact of backlinks on your SEO efforts.
🏆 Enjoy a seamless user experience. Our platform is user-friendly, making it easy to manage your link-building campaigns. You can quickly find suitable websites, place orders, and monitor results.
Pricing
Here is the pricing for our most popular packages:
| Package | Cost | Custom Strategy Design | Example Deliverable |
| Intermediate | $1,000/mo. | Anchor text analysis, link velocity analysis, authority diagnosis | Six high-traffic, DR 20-65, niche-relevant guest posts |
| Pro | $2,000/mo. | Anchor text analysis, link velocity analysis, authority diagnosis | 12 high-traffic, DR 20-65, niche-relevant guest posts |
| Custom | $3,000+/mo. | Anchor text analysis, link velocity analysis, authority diagnosis | 18+ high-traffic, DR 20-65, niche-relevant guest posts |
ℹ️ We also offer premium blogger outreach services starting at $3,000/mo. Click here for more details.
Final Thoughts: Link Building Tools
The world of link-building doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
With the right tools in your arsenal, you can streamline your efforts, discover valuable opportunities, and build a backlink profile that propels your website to new heights.
Choose the tools that best suit your needs and budget, and start reaping the rewards of a stronger online presence.
Need some help?
At Authority Builders, we don’t just build backlinks; we build your online authority.
Our focus on quality and relevance ensures your website ranks higher in search results, which helps you establish a strong reputation in your industry.
Book a call today and see how we can help you improve your search engine rankings and grow your online presence.