In theory, building links is quite simple – you just need to persuade someone at another website to link back to yours. However, as we’ve shown before, link building can be very complex and very expensive in practice.
You need quite a lot of training, experience, processes, people, and last but not least, tools.
Today, we’re going to be tackling tools and showing you some of the very best link building tools every link builder needs in their toolbox. We’re going to cover the tools we use for our clients, as well as some others you should pay attention to.
Ahrefs – for link building research
When we want to discover what websites to reach out to and what kind of links we should build, Ahrefs is the starting point. There is a good reason this tool has become an SEO powerhouse, used by expert on-page SEO professionals, technical SEOs and outreach teams.
Here are just some of the many things Ahrefs can help you do:
- Run a backlink audit of your client’s website
- Do a competitor analysis and find out where your competitors have links from
- Research link targets and determine if they have the right metrics (organic traffic, domain rating, URL rating, countries where the traffic is coming from, etc.)
- Look at the long-term growth of your target websites (how the traffic, keywords and domain ratings are developing over time) so you can avoid spammy web pages
- Use the Content Explorer to find potential targets
- Check for new and broken links coming to your or your client’s website
- Do keyword research to find the ideal keywords to use as anchor text
While it may sound overwhelming to learn all of these features at once, Ahrefs has a great blog with plenty of learning resources to help you get started.
The only downside of this SEO tool is the pricing. The cheapest plan comes in at $99 per month and it’s very limiting because most actions you take will require purchasing additional credits. If you’re big on content marketing, keyword research and SEO in general, purchasing Ahrefs is more than worth it. However, if you just want to build backlinks, it may not justify the investment.
Price: starts at $99 per month
SEMRush – for all things link building
In the world of SEO tools, the battle of Ahrefs and SEMRush is kind of like Coke and Pepsi. It’s hard to determine which is better and it all depends on personal preferences. In recent years, SEMRush has built a vast number of features that make it a superb choice for SEOs and not just for finding backlink opportunities.
Here are just some of the many things you can do in this tool:
- Do extensive keyword research to find key metrics (including search intent, which is a feature exclusive to SEMRush)
- Analyze a website’s backlink profile to find new targets to reach out to
- Use the backlink checker to find new, lost and broken backlinks
- Do bulk backlink analysis of target referring domains
- Use their Link building tool to find prospects at target websites and plan out your outreach
- Get notifications about lost backlinks
Like Ahrefs, SEMRush is not just for link builders looking to get an accurate link profile for their clients. It’s an SEO powerhouse with many features for keyword research, on-page optimization, SEO audits and more. If you want to invest in SEO and content marketing in your team, it’s a worthwhile investment.
Price: starts at $119.95 per month
Hunter.io – for cold email outreach
Once you’ve identified your list of prospects, you’re going to need to reach out to them. You could use social media platforms like LinkedIn but your chances of success there are pretty slim. What you really want is your targets’ email addresses and many times, a simple Google search won’t give you accurate contact details.
You can go to the target websites and hope to find them, but the best SEOs automate the process. With Hunter.io, you can find just about any email address on the internet. If you want to find webmasters to ask for guest posts or an editor to place a link, this tool can help you find the right email to send a message to.
Simply type in the domain you’re searching for and the name of the person you want to contact. Hunter.io gives you the exact email you need and you can even verify it to make sure it’s still being used and that it’s free of typos and errors.
Hunter.io comes with extensions and integrations, allowing you to connect it to your browser, Google Sheets and your favorite CRM. All you have to do is start sending out emails in your link building campaigns.
Price: free (up to 25 emails per month); paid plans start at 34EUR/month
Buzzstream – the one outreach tool for everything
When you determine you want a link from a website, that’s just the easy part of the work done. Finding contact information, doing blogger outreach and follow-ups is the tedious, more difficult part. Buzzstream helps you do all of this in one place.
If you send out a large number of outreach emails per month, doing so in Gmail quickly becomes overwhelming. Buzzstream helps you find contact information for each website, including the emails, social media handles and more.
You can then send personalized emails at scale and get in touch with each target on your list in just a few clicks. You can automate your follow-ups with scripts and templates and get a birds’ eye view of your outreach in a dashboard.
Speaking of which, the dashboard functionality shows you statistics for your outreach, tracking the number of open, read and replied emails, you can refine your outreach.
Price: starts at $24 per month
Pitchbox – for advanced outreach
If you work in an agency or have to do a lot of link building, this means sending out thousands of emails every month. Doing this manually is not an option, and this is where Pitchbox comes in. If you’re familiar with sales, Pitchbox is like a CRM for outreach specialists.
It helps you identify targets, find their contact information and split up the outreach process into different stages. Prospecting, email creation, personalization, follow-ups – Pitchbox creates a list of tasks and walks you through it.
This is not just an ordinary outreach tool – it is made for link builders. This means that you can sort your targets according to your preferred SEO metrics – Moz domain authority, Majestic citation flow and trust flow and others.
Once you have a list of targets, you can assign different parts of the outreach process to your team members. This is definitely not a tool for beginners and it is more suitable for agencies, especially when you account for the pricing.
Price: starts at $495 per month
HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
This platform connects journalists and bloggers with sources for their stories. Many link builders use this platform to get HARO backlinks and while this can be a powerful tool, it requires significant time investments to get it right.
It’s simple: you sign up to be a source and tick off the categories you’re interested in. You’ll get a number of daily emails from HARO, asking you to answer journalists’ questions. If they pick your contribution, they’ll publish it with a link back to your website.
Succeeding with HARO requires keeping track of new queries, responding with useful answers in a timely fashion and keeping track of your success.
It’s highly recommended to outsource this job to an agency rather than doing it on your own because this outreach platform is pretty unpredictable. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could sink weeks of work into it without tangible ROI.
Price: free for now
Buzzsumo – for finding influencers and content creators
Building and maintaining relationships with bloggers and authors is a key part of link building. With Buzzsumo, you can type in a keyword or topic and find the most shared pieces of content on that topic online.
For each page, you’ll get a breakdown of shares and engagements across social media. It’s an effortless way to find out:
- Who shares content about your topics
- Where your competitors get mentions, shares and links
It’s more than just a tool for link building – any PR and digital marketing pro will find it useful if they want to keep track of the movers and shakers in their industry.
In fact, if you only want to use it for your link building process and link research, it’s going to be rather pricey.
Price: starts at $199 per month
Nofollow Chrome extension
If you want your link building efforts to be successful, you should ensure that most of your links are dofollow. As we’ve written before, dofollow links instruct search engines such as Google to give you “link juice” and take that link into account when ranking your page.
Determining if a link is nofollow or dofollow is easy if you use Ahrefs or SEMRush – because such link building software flags nofollow links in your dashboard. But if you’re just visiting the website where the link is placed, you want something quicker.
Instead of inspecting the HTML code of your target website, use the Nofollow Chrome extension which is completely free. It lights up all the nofollow links on a page, so you can see if your link or your competitor backlinks are nofollow.
Price: free
Bouncer – for email verification
To get high-quality backlinks, you need to go through a high number of emails. If you want to be successful with your outreach, you want to make sure that you’re sending to the right email address. This is where Bouncer helps.
Just feed your email list into this tool and it will show you:
- Outdated emails that are no longer used
- Disposable emails
- Emails with typos and formatting errors
Sending emails to these types of addresses has results far worse than getting no replies. You could get your address blacklisted and have your future emails going to spam. And for the price, it makes sense to occasionally validate and clean your email lists.
Price: starts at $8 for 1,000 emails
Are link building tools enough?
Having the right tools and paying for them is good, but it’s just a starting point to your link building strategy. You also need to know how to find websites to target, what metrics to pay attention to, how to identify the right person to pitch, what messages to send in your outreach campaigns and more.
In other words, just having these tools won’t immediately reveal amazing link building opportunities. You need extensive experience in order to go from tools to links.
This is where we can help. At Reportcard, we have all the right tools and a vast experience building links for clients from different industries. We’ll do all of the heavy lifting for you and deliver you links that move the needle and your search engine rankings.
Book a free call with us today so we can tell you more!
