10+ Best Link Building Tools For SEO Link Building

Nov 23, 2022 by Simon Hilton

Visualize Value has built backlinks on some of the most sought-after media outlets online.

Here we used link building tools to land a dedicated feature on Entreprenuer.com.

Entreprenuer.com Backlink For Visualize Value

And again, we used this same link building strategy when Business Insider covered Visualize Value - securing a backlink from a 'super high' authority website with a domain authority of 91.

Insider Backlink For Visualize Value

And these are not isolated instances.

Thousands of referring domains have linked to Visualize Value over the past few years, some naturally, and many thanks to our successful link building strategy.

The best link building tools hep you generate more backlinks by focusing your attention on the blogs, publications, and podcasts that can move the needle for your business.

This means monitoring your existing backlink profile, auditing your competition, running backlink gap analysis, and ultimately finding tools to run email outreach at scale.

The result.

Improved domain authority and search rankings.

Best Link Building Tools

We've tested all of the best link building tools for backlink analysis and outreach campaigns.

Here at Visualize Value we use Majestic, alongside Semrush and AHREFs to spot link building opportunities.

We're also continuing to test Buzzstream and Just Reach Out for email outreach.

Majestic
Semrush
SE Ranking
AHREFs
Linkody
Buzzstream
Just Reach Out
Pitchbox
Buzzsumo
Ninja Outreach

Focused Look At The Best Link Building Tools For SEO

Majestic

Majestic is one of the best link building tools online.

Majestic has two link indexes, their historical link index, and their fresh link index.

The fresh link index reports on all links found in the last 120 days, this index is made up of over 470 billion crawled URLs and 1.3 trillion unique found URLs. The Majestic historical index ranges back to 2006 and includes over 3.6 trillion crawled URLs.

SEO experts use Majesic to assess any websites backlink profile, in order to uncover link opportunities, and assess the impact of competitor link building campaigns on their overall domain performance.

When accessing the Majestic SEO dashboard, you can see a Trust Flow score, as well as a Citation Flow score. Trust Flow signifies the quality of inbound links, while Citation Flow represents the quantity of inbound links.

Two important and differentiated metrics.

Many of the best SEO tools provide domain authority scoring, but few break out the differences in quality and quantity within your backlink profile.

Majestic then allows you to drill down and assess the entire list of referring domains pointing to your website, as well as new and lost backlinks, anchor text reports, as well as the pages that are driving the most backlinks - which is great for shaping content campaigns.

Majestic also has a unique backlink context report which provides intel on the context of each referring link. Allowing you to drilldown and find links that sit within text, directories, images, and other digital sources.

Advanced Majestic tools allow you to run competitive benchmarking analysis, pull backlink data via API, and analyze visual link graphs to assess how link equity is running through your website.

Pricing starts at $49.99 per month which includes 1 million analysis units per month, the PRO plan is priced at $99.99 per month, and allows for 20 million monthly units.

Features we like

Trust Flow scoring - analyze the quality of any websites backlink profile
Link context - filter by link context to assess backlink source
Competitive benchmarking - compare your backlink profile to your nearest competitors

Majestic pricing

Majestic has 3 paid pricing plans, which allow you to analyze backlinks in your industry at scale

Lite - $49.99 per month, 1 million analysis units
Pro - $99.99 per month, 1 million analysis units
API - $399.99 per month, 1 million analysis units

Semrush

Semrush is an all-in-one SEO tool used by over 10 million marketers around the world

It is used for keyword research, rank tracking, competitive benchmarking, content marketing, and critically, backlink monitoring and link building.

Semrush provides you with a complete breakdown of your websites backlink profile, including referring domains, total backlinks, unique keywords per backlink and your total number of outbound domains.

Here's a snapshot of the Visualize Value backlink analysis report in Semrush.

Semrush also gives you the ability to start benchmarking by adding up to 3 competitor domains, so that you can compare your backlink profile vs your competition in simple to digest visuals.

Here we compare the backlink profile for Visualize Value vs Value.app, another website we run and operate.

On top of this, Semrush allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your link building campaigns over time by analyzing the growth in your referring domains, backlinks, and new vs lost backlink splits.

Check out this dashboard.

Like Majestic, Semrush shows you a breakdown of your backlinks by website authority score, and shows you whether the backlinks pointing to your website are text links, or driven by images, forums or i-frames.

If you want to drilldown into any of these metrics, Semrush has a complete breakdown of each unique backlink and referring domain, showing you domain authority score, number of external and internal links, as well as when the link was first and last seen by Semrush.

In addition to Semrush's backlink checker and monitoring reports, they also have dedicated backlink auditing tools, as well as a link building building tool that generates link building ideas.

Semrush's link building tool works by allowing you to include specific competitors that you are looking to outrank, as well as keywords that you are looking to build backlinks from.

Once the report runs, you get a detailed list of link prospects you can use in your link building campaign.

Semrush pricing starts at $119.95 per month which is perfect for solo entrepreneurs and startups. There are also Guru and Business plans available for larger businesses.

Features we like

Link building tools - generate a list of link prospects based on your competitors backlinks
Backlink audit - audit any websites backlinks in minutes
Backlink benchmarking - analyze your backlink profile vs competitors in easy to read reports

Semrush pricing

Semrush offers 3 different pricing plans for businesses of all sizes. Their backlink reports are available on all 3 paid plans.

Pro - $119.95 per/mo, optimize 5 projects, crawl 100,000 pages per/mo
Guru - $229.95 per/mo, optimize 15 projects, crawl 300,000 pages per/mo
Business - $449.95 per/mo, optimize 40 projects, crawl 1,000,000 pages per/mo

SE Ranking

SE Ranking is one of Semrush's largest competitors, helping over 600,000 brands run keyword research, website audits, competitor analysis, and rank tracking.

SE Ranking has a full range of backlink monitoring and link building tools available that can be used to track backlinks, audit competitor backlinks, and spot new backlink opportunities

Using SE Ranking's link building tools, you can check any websites backlink profile, analyzing anchor text, dofollow/nofollow splits, domain trust, page trust, text/image splits, and more.

It's also possible to run backlink gap analysis, and select links in your backlink profile that you would like to track over time, to ensure that they do not disappear without you being alerted

Once you have generated link building ideas using SE Ranking's tools, you can also set owners within the SE Ranking platform to own outreach for specific backlinks.

SE Ranking allows you to track your progress in acquiring links over time, and when you acquire links that you don't want, SE Ranking also allows you to disavow bad backlinks by generating disavow files for Google in minutes.

Pricing starts at just $23.40 per month, with Pro and Business plans available for larger businesses.

Features we like

Backlink gap analysis tool - spot link building opportunities based on gaps in your existing backlink profile
Competitor benchmarking - directly compare your backlink profile to your competition
Link assignment - assign backlink outreach to specific colleagues within SE Ranking

SE Ranking pricing

SE Ranking offers 3 paid plans, all of which allow you to carry out link building analysis.

Essential - $23.40 per/mo, optimize 10 projects, crawl 40,000 pages per/mo
Pro - $53.40 per/mo, unlimited projects, crawl 250,000 pages per/mo
Business - $113.40 per/mo, unlimited projects, crawl 700,000 pages per/mo

AHREFs

AHREFs is another leading all-in-one SEO tool used by millions of SEO experts globally.

AHREFs is used for website auditing, analyzing site performance, keyword research, rank tracking, and backlink monitoring

Once you're signed in to AHREFs it's easy to pull reports on any websites backlink profile, where you can order backlinks by domain authority, page authority, domain traffic, referring domains, linked domains, anchor text, and first/last seen.

Here is a snapshot of the Visualize Value backlink report in AHREFs.

AHREFs also allows you to access reports on broken backlinks, referring domains, and anchor text, as well as referring IPs. This ensures that if referring domains do stop linking to you, you can reach out to see whether you can reinstate the link.

If you are willing to pay for AHREFs more advanced plans, you can also access Link Intersect.

Link Intersect runs gap analysis on your website vs your competition, showing you the top backlinks that are passing domain authority for your competitors and not you.

This tool allows you to spot endless amounts of link building opportunities, and download target domains into reports that you can use in your link building strategies.

Pricing starts at $99 per month for access to AHREFs backlink analysis reports. If you want to access Link Intersect and other advanced backlink reports, then you need to upgrade to the AHREFs Standard plan.

Features we like

Backlink analysis - get a detailed breakdown of your backlink profile and analyze the competition
Broken backlinks - pull reports to spot broken links so that you can get these reinstated
Link Intersect - run backlink gap analysis and spot link building opportunities

AHREFs pricing

AHREFs offers 4 paid plans suitable for link prospecting and backlink management.

Lite - $99 per/mo, optimize 5 projects, 100,000 crawl credit
Standard - $199 per/mo, optimize 20 projects, 500,00 crawl credit
Advanced - $399 per/mo, optimize 50 projects, 1,500,00 crawl credit
Enterprise - $999 per/mo, optimize 100 projects, 5,000,00 crawl credit

Linkody

Linkody is a link building tool that allows you to track your link building campaigns and receive quick insights on your progress.

It's an affordable SEO tool, with pricing starting at just $14.90 per month, and it used by SEO experts at big brands like eToro, Sendinblue, and Getresponse.

Linkody allows you to get a complete view of your backlink profile in one place, showing you your distributions of DA, spam score, top anchor text, trust and citation flow (powered by Majestic), and other important metrics.

You can also run competitor benchmarking, find broken links, and use the Linkody disavow tool to export a disavow file ready to submit to Google

There are 5 pricing tiers for businesses and agencies of all sizes. The intro pricing starts at $14.90 per month, allowing you to track 2 domains and monitor 500 links

If you are looking for a chapter dedicated link building tools than Majestic, Linkody is your best option.

Features we like

Backlink tracking - track backlinks and get alerted to shifts in backlink profile over time
Fix broken links - if a backlink stops pointing at your site get intelligence on how to fix it
Disavow tool - it takes minutes to create a disavow file ready to submit to Google

Linkody pricing

Linkody offers 5 paid plans, starting at just $14.90 per month. If you're looking to analyze at greater scale, we'd recommend the Advanced or Pro plans.

Webmaster - $14.90 per/mo, 2 domains, 500 links
Advanced - $24.90 per/mo, 5 domains, 2,000 links
Pro - $49.90 per/mo, 20 domains, 5,000 links
Agency - $104.90 per/mo, 50 domains, 20,000 links
Agency XL - $147.90 per/mo, 100 domains, 40,000 links

Buzzstream

Buzzstream is one of the best link building tools for email outreach.

Used by thousands of content and SEO teams at brands like Indeed, Canva, and Airbnb, Buzzstream allows you to find backlink opportunities, write emails that can be distributed at scale, manage all of your email outreach in one place, and get analytics on performance so that you can optimize over time.

It starts by using Buzzstream filters to weed out the top influencers in your niche, and to build an opportunity list of publications that you want to target.

If you already know who you want to outreach to, you can also bulk upload your own contact list.

Once you're ready to pull the trigger and start sending outreach emails, you can schedule email cadences to run on autopilot, and to automate email follow ups and chasers so that contacts get touched enough times to provoke a response.

Buzzstream then has all of the tools you need to monitor your progress, track your success, and to initiate additional steps in your link building campaign if required.

We are currently testing Buzzstream to see how we can use Visualize Value to drive more backlinks like this one at Convertkit.

So far Buzzstream has helped us identify more link building opportunities, and become more efficient by utilizing a single outreach tool.

Features we like

Publication search - search top influencers, and filter sites by domain authority to find contacts
Smart inbox - manage all of your email outreach from one place and run email cadences
Reporting tools - get an overview of performance over time, and monitor what is working

Buzzstream pricing

Buzzstream has an affordable introductory plan that allows you to reach out to 1,000 contacts per month. For bigger businesses, we'd recommend the Growth Plan.

Starter - $24 per/mo, 1 user, 1,000 contacts
Growth - $124 per/mo, 3 users, 25,000 contacts
Professional - $299 per/mo, 6 users, 100,000 contacts
Custom - $999 per/mo, 15 users, 300,000 contacts

Just Reach Out

Just Reach Out is another excellent link building tool for brands looking to get featured in the media.

In fact, Just Reach Out has been named one of the best digital PR tools for promoting startups on the internet, and is used by brands like Pipedrive and Hubspot to generate backlinks and find PR opportunities.

Just Reach Out's link building tool breaks down into 6 main areas, press opportunities, podcast outreach, broken link building and outreach, journalist pitching, guest post outreach, and unlinked brand mentions.

In the Podcast and guest post outreach modules you can search by keyword and use dozens of filters to search for relevant publications and podcasts that are featuring content related to your niche.

Just Reach Out then provides you with templates and email functionality to pitch for features, and monitor progress against those objectives.

The press opportunities area is also great and feeds you with a constant list of press opportunities from over 15 different sources.

Just Reach Out also allows you to search for unlinked brand mentions online, and broken links in your niche that could be opportunities for you to pick up a new backlinks.

Pricing starts at $79 per month, and provides startups with access to 250 email sends per month, as well as most of Just Reach Out's platform functionality, there are also Advanced and Ultimate outreach plans available.

Features we like

Press opportunities - receive opportunities to pitch for coverage from 15 different sources
Podcast and publication pitching - find and pitch the top influencers in your niche
Unlinked brand mentions - find brand mentions and turn them into backlinks

Just Reach Out pricing

Just Reach Out provides 3 paid plans for SEO experts and PR teams.

Starter Outreach - $79 per/mo, 1 team member, 5 campaigns, 250 emails
Advanced Outreach - $149 per/mo, 500 team members, 25 campaigns, 250 emails
Ultimate Outreach - $299 per/mo, 1,000 team members, 100 campaigns, 250 emails

Pitchbox

Pitchbox is a brilliant link building tool and leading content marketing platform.

Used by thousands of brands and agencies, Pitchbox provides you with a full suite of outreach tools to search for influencers and publications in your niche that you can target to win new backlinks.

Start by simply creating campaigns, finding relevant bloggers, and using powerful filtering to select the opportunities that are most relevant for your business.

Once you're ready, create emails using Pitchbox templates to target those bloggers and influencers, and create email cadences to automatically follow up with them if they don't respond.

Once you're up and running, use Pitchbox's full suite of reporting tools to monitor your link building opportunities and see which hot leads you need to follow up with and prioritize.

Pitchbox integrates with Moz, Semrush, AHREFs, Majestic, and other leading SEO tools so that you can pull target lists directly into Pitchbox.

There is also a full suite of reporting tools for agencies and in-house teams that are looking to circulate progress updates.

This includes white label reports, management reports, team performance breakdowns, pipeline history reports and more.

Pitchbox also has other useful functionality like link tracking, and alerts for broken links or lost backlinks with high authority.

Features we like

Email cadences - design powerful email cadences to drive responses
Reporting - access tonnes of useful reports to track progress and update clients
Integrations - Pitchbox integrates with other major SEO tools like Semrush, and AHREFs

Pitchbox pricing

Pitchbox do not share their pricing on their website. Reach out to the Pitchbox sales team for more information.

Custom - book a demo

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a content marketing platform that helps you find leading influencers in your niche.

Trusted by thousands of brands and agencies, including Hubspot and Ogilvy, Buzzsumo reveals exactly what content is performing best in terms of driving attention for you and your competitors.

Buzzsumo helps with content discovery, featuring a keyword tool, topic finder, and question query bank that help uncover all of the top trending keywords and topics in your niche.

There is also an influencer discovery tool that allows you to see the top influencers in your space, filtering by those who publish and share the most content, and those who get the most interaction and engagement on their posts.

Buzzsumo tracks engagement across a variety of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google Alerts, and Reddit.

Buzzsumo can also be used for content monitoring and features a handy backlink analysis tool that allows you to analyze your competitor's site in order to see which content has driven the most backlinks and social engagement.

All of these tools can help shape the type of content you create so that you can enhance your link building campaigns.

Buzzsumo offers a free tool that allows you to make 10 content searches per month, for Buzzsumo's paid offering, pricing starts at $99 per month.

Features we like

Link prospecting - search for the best performing content in your niche
Link opportunities - sort your competitors backlink profile by social engagement
Link building outreach - shape your link building process by finding influencers that matter

Buzzsumo pricing

Buzzsumo offers a free plan, as well as 3 paid plans for businesses looking for link opportunities on the best digital content sources.

Free - 10 free searchers per month
Pro - $99 per month, for startups and freelancers
Plus - $179 per month, for small agencies and growing businesses
Large - $299 per month, for large agencies and businesses

Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach is an influencer outreach platform that helps you search for the best Instagram and Youtube influencers to promote your brand.

While Ninja Outreach can be used for any type of outreach campaign, including digital PR or product promotion, it's also used for link prospecting.

Simply add the keywords, hashtags, and locations that you want to search, and Ninja Outreach will show you a complete list of the influencers and publications that operate in your niche.

That includes the top Twitter profiles, Youtube profiles, and blogs that you can outreach to in order to secure backlinks.

Ninja Outreach also allows you to filters by number of followers, domain authority and other metrics to create really catered link building strategies.

Once you have build your lead list, Ninja Outreach then provides you with the email addresses, and tones of email templates which you can use to reach out to link prospects directly.

Ninja Outreach is priced primarily based on the number of emails you want to send. The Flex plan starts at $155 per month, and allows you to run 5 campaigns, sending 1,000 emails per month.

There are Silver and Silver Plus plans available for businesses and agencies looking for more scale.

Features we like

Influencer search - find the top influencers and bloggers in your niche
Email outreach - access templates to help with your link prospecting and get access to email addresses
Huge database - Ninja Outreach has over 1.2m influencers in their database (and growing)

Ninja Outreach pricing

Ninja Outreach offers 3 paid plans based on the number of email addresses and emails you wish to send.

Flex - $155 per/mo, 5 campaigns, 1,000 emails
Silver - $255 per/mo, 50 campaigns, 10,000 emails
Silver Plus - $459 per/mo, 100 campaigns, 15,000 emails

Why invest in link building tools for your SEO strategy?

Investing in link building tools is a vital strategy for SEO experts and website owners.

Link building tools help you to analyse your existing backlinks, audit competitors backlinks, and spot opportunities to fix broken links and build new backlinks that will build domain authority.

Why the big deal?

Alongside your content marketing efforts, building your backlink profile is one of the most important elements of any successful web strategy.

As displayed in the best link building tools like Majestic, and Semrush, the more referring domains that you build, the higher domain authority your website will generate (as long as those referring domains are from high quality sources).

Providing you then shape your content in the right way, and structure your website to adhere to SEO best practises, increasing domain authority should lead to higher search engine rankings.

In fact, AHREFs still place high quality backlinks as the number one ranking factor -verified by Google.

But when it comes to actually building backlinks, how do link building tools improve efficiency?

Backlink analysis and audit - link building tools allow you to assess SEO metrics relating to your backlink profile in seconds. Enter your domain, or your competitors domain and understand the top backlinks, top referring domains, when the backlink was generated, where it sits on the referring page, and so on. This intelligence can form your link building strategy by providing you with intel on where to focus
Inform link building campaigns - there is no point aimlessly contacting websites asking for backlinks without a solid strategy. It pays to run backlink audits in advance of your outreach campaigns to work out where you should focus your efforts. This could be targeting websites in specific niches, or by identifying those who are already linking to your competition
Fix broken links - there is nothing worse than building a backlink, and it being removed without your knowledge. The best link building tools allow you to audit your existing backlinks and spot any broken links so that they can be fixed and reinstated. Some tools also give you the ability to search for broken links on other websites so that you can can run broken link building campaigns, replacing their broken links with yours
Link prospecting - some link building tools act as outreach tools that can be used to find quality links, and contact information for site owners who already write about and link to websites in your niche. Check our tools like Just Reach Out and Ninja Outreach to find link building tools that can be used to inform your outreach emails and source contact information

How to pick the best link building tool for your business?

If you've decided to purchase a link building tool to help you with your link building efforts, then it's important to evaluate how you should use your budget to drive maximum impact.

Here's a breakdown of questions, you can use to shape your thinking.

Are you looking for an all-in-one SEO tool or a dedicated link building tool?
Do you need email outreach capability within your tool?
Are you looking to run backlink benchmarking vs your competition?
Do you need to understand link quality in isolation?
Are you happy to carry out guest posting on other websites?
Is it important to understand link context?
What is your budget level? Can you afford multiple tools?

All-in-one SEO tools like Semrush, SE Ranking, and AHREFs provide marketers with a range of link building tools like backlink audit reports, competitor backlink audits, and the ability to drill down and understand anchor text, and link context at scale.

However, they do not include the same level of detail that dedicated link building tools like Majestic offer - allowing you to break out trust flow, and citation flow scores to analyze links.

Likewise, the big all-in-one SEO tools do not have the same email outreach functionality that tools like Buzzstream, Just Reach Out and Pitchbox feature.

The big bonus of using dedicated link outreach tools is that you can search for relevant blogs, publications, and podcasts in your niche, and then create email funnels and cadences based on templates that work to drive responses.

These tools also give you the ability manage your email outreach from one central inbox, and monitor status per opportunity via easy to read reports.

At Visualize Value, we rely on a mix of link building tools to monitor backlinks, benchmark vs our competition, and ultimately drive new backlinks using email outreach.

Sign up to the best SEO link building tools

Click through and get started with the best link building tools on the internet.

If you're looking for the best dedicated link building tool, check out Majestic - it's our top pick for understanding your backlink profile, and what is working for your competition.

For all-in-one solutions, our picks are Semrush, SE Ranking, and AHREFs. There are also other great tools available for executing your outreach campaigns and generating backlinks.

For email outreach, check out Buzzstream, and Just Reach Out to get started.

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