Link building is on top of the list of priorities of serious marketers and bloggers. After all, links remain to be one of the most crucial signals that influence your Google rankings.
It takes time and effort to build a strong backlink profile from scratch.
To achieve success in SEO, there are a ton of things that need to be done. Searching for prospects to get backlinks from, keeping tabs on your competitors, tracking your links, and more.
With so many strategies that exist to build links, you need the right tools that will take your campaign to the next level. Hopefully, these will position you at the number one spot.
Allow me to recommend to you only the best link building tools used by pros like Brian Dean, Ann Smarty, and Harsh Agrawal. These tools will make the entire process easier and more convenient for you.
Check out my list below.
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1. BuzzStream
In my search for the top link building tools, BuzzStream caught my attention. The reason why I chose this tool is that it helps me come up with a list of websites that make potential link partners in a fast and efficient way.
Instead of manually looking for the sites myself and getting contact details, BuzzStream makes it more accessible. As you use it, you have the option to create tags from your list based on the categories or niches your prospective sites belong to. In a few clicks, you’ll be able to send an outreach email to these sites at once.
What you’ll like about BuzzStream is that it values the relationship part of link building. It does that by showing you the performance and history of your outreach emails and templates so that you can personalize and improve the messages you send.
2. Majestic
Who hasn’t heard of Majestic? It’s formerly called Majestic SEO. The fact that Majestic has billions of backlinks in its index should be your main reason to include it on your list of link building tools. Majestic gives you a wealth of information about your external backlinks, anchor text, referring domains, and more.
You can dig deeper to investigate each of your backlinks so you can see metrics such as trust flow and citation flow. Spying on your competitors’ link profiles is also another huge benefit of using Majestic. Download their link profiles, study them, and find weaknesses where you get the chance to rank higher.
Not all tools have the massive number of backlinks that Majestic has. If you’re just starting out with Majestic, make sure to check out their collection of training videos. They’ll teach you how to use the tool.
3. Raven Tools
An SEO tool founded in 2007, Raven Tools has a feature or program called Link Manager dedicated to link building. What it does is that it helps you research link prospects and manage those thousands of prospects you come across.
It automatically provides you with the contact details of site owners for easy outreach on your part. If you’re following specific links in your backlink profile, Raven Tools will let you know of any changes that transpired for those links. That way, you’re sure to keep your best backlinks forever.
Along with Link Manager, you can also take advantage of other functionalities in cases where you need to work on and improve your on-site SEO. Overall, Raven Tools has multiple options for boosting your SEO efforts. It provides users with automated reports.
4. MozBar
Researching great link prospects has never been easier and more convenient with MozBar. MozBar is a leading Chrome, and Firefox extension downloaded millions of times by SEOs worldwide.
Once you install this free toolbar, it allows you to instantly check the domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) of the websites you come across.
It also tells you the page load time of a site. You need to make sure that the site you outreach for link building loads fast so people will click on the link to your site. MozBar also shows you which links are dofollow, nofollow, internal, and external.
5. Ahrefs
The popular all-around SEO tool Ahrefs also has a massive database of backlinks similar to Majestic. Consider it part of your link building tools selection because it gets you extensive reports, great graphical representations, and ensures accurate real-time information.
Here are the many things you can do with Ahrefs when it comes to link building. Use its Site Explorer tool to get a complete backlink profile of a link prospect or competitor. It’ll help you know referring domains, anchor texts used, and backlink types as well.
You’ll also be able to set up alerts for specific websites or URLs where your links are on. Ahrefs will notify you if you have gained backlinks or lost the ones you have. Get instant SEO metrics of a site as well using Ahrefs’ free SEO toolbar. There are still many SEO features within Ahrefs which are worth checking out. Use the tool with ease by following this Ahrefs guide.
6. HARO
What is HARO and how does it work for building backlinks? HARO is short for Help a Reporter Out. It’s a platform where journalists approach you (via email after you sign-up for HARO) and ask you to help them answer questions and come up with content through your expertise on a topic.
You should know that HARO is not a tool purely for link building, rather an opportunity for you to share what you know on a topic you’re knowledgeable about. You gain free publicity and a chance to link back to your site for as long as you provide thoughtful, well-researched responses. Along with your response, provide your author bio and link to your website.
To be successful in using HARO, only choose to answer queries that you can answer well. Also, remember to treat HARO like you would treat any outreach campaign. Use the service for free or subscribe to their paid accounts for more opportunities.
7. Followerwonk
There are times when you’ll come across opportunities that you would expect to be potential link building tools. Followerwonk is one of the best you should try. Followerwonk is mainly a social tool that lets you discover influencers to connect with on Twitter.
So how does Followerwonk help you build links when it’s focused on social media? It allows you to do that by building relationships with people that have a strong social media presence. Most likely, these individuals have authoritative websites where you can guest post on.
A good tactic to start building relationships with link prospects is to leave insightful and valuable comments. Followerwonk lets you pre-qualify your prospects by showing you a person’s social authority, number of tweets, follower size, and the number of people he or she follows.
8. Link Prospector
If you’ve been having a hard time acquiring backlinks to boost your page or content, look no further. Link Prospector makes the process much faster and easier. This tool returns to you huge amounts of link prospects depending on your niche or topic.
I consider Link Prospector to be one of the most convenient time-saving link building tools. All you need to do is create your campaign with your preferred campaign name, select a report type (Guest Posts, Links Pages, Directories, etc.), and enter your key phrases. You can enter as many as 5 phrases to refine your search.
Within Link Prospector you’ll find unlimited link building opportunities which you never thought existed. After you get your list of links, download them to BuzzStream. That way, you can start sending prospects personalized outreach emails.
9. Link Detox
Gone are the days when more links are desirable. Link building has changed a lot over the years. Now, Google focuses on links that are relevant and coming from sites with good metrics and quality content.
Link Detox boosts your SEO and increases your rankings by helping you avoid penalties and manual actions through bad link detection. And if you’ve been penalized because of those bad links, Link Detox helps your website recover.
The tool analyzes up to 60,000 of your backlinks and gives you recommendations of the ones you need to remove or further look into. Automatically create a disavow file after identifying all harmful links. Then you can upload the file to Google Search Console.
10. BuzzSumo
Most content marketers use BuzzSumo to look for topic ideas to tackle for their next blog post. But what they don’t realize is that it can be one of their best link building tools. BuzzSumo helps you acquire quality links by doing two things.
First, it shows you the latest trends in your niche through its list of published pieces of content with the highest engagements and number of backlinks. Now, you can write similar topics that are likely to be shared on social media and naturally linked to. Second, BuzzSumo shows you the people who’ve shared popular content. These people may have websites that make potential link prospects.
Now you can come up with linkable topics and industry influencers to connect with. BuzzSumo has also paid plans. Those paid plans let you run unlimited searches for topics and influencers. You’ll be able to track your most valuable backlinks as well.
11. Rmoov
Another tool to clean up your bad backlinks or your clients’ is Rmoov. Regardless of the penalty you received or the number of links you need to remove, Rmoov makes the removal process easy and hassle-free so that you get better rankings in no time.
Before you use Rmoov, make sure that you already have a list of those links you want to remove. Simply copy and paste or upload your list to Rmoov. Rmoov will then run through your list and retrieve contact information of those websites.
Note that you won’t be able to get complete contact information because certainly there are websites with private whois information. You need to fill in missing information yourself and complete everything. That way, Rmoov can start sending emails to webmasters so they will remove those bad links.
12. Market Samurai
Market Samurai does not belong to your classic list of link building tools. Its main purpose is to research the right keywords in your niche. If you take a look at its list of features or modules of the software, you will not find anything that says “link building.”
So how does Market Samurai contribute to your link building campaigns? Notice that one of its modules is Find Content. Using Find Content, not only will you get inspiration for your future topics, but you can also look for potential blogs and directories to get dofollow and nofollow links from.
Since you can also see the backlinks of the keywords your competitors optimized for, you might want to look at the metrics of some backlinks (using another tool) that also make future link prospects.
13. Google Webmaster Tools
It’s such a shame that most site owners never think of Google Webmaster Tools as part of their link building tools list. It may not be the primary tool to immediately help you more inbound links from quality sites but it helps you keep an eye on the health of your website.
You can prevent negative SEO from bringing down your rankings by detecting any questionable sites that link to you. Google Webmaster tools also show you your most linked pieces of content. Through that data, you can create more similar content that will compel authority sites to refer to you.
Also, since your most linked content gives you a clear picture of your inbound link distribution, you may want to spread out your link building efforts to focus on other pages of your site that need attention.
Conclusion
Not all the link building tools on this list will do the work for you from start to finish. In the process of using any of these tools, you may realize that you need another on the same list to streamline a process.
For example, use MozBar to get a quick glimpse of a site’s metrics and Ahrefs to dig deeper. Then you can send, track, and improve your outreach using BuzzStream. Every tool here deserves your attention and boosts your rankings in a certain way.
If you have more tools to recommend, I would love to know what you’ve tried in the comments below.