These tools make the process of getting backlinks to your website a whole lot easier. In a nutshell, if you had to pick only two kinds of links to base your SEO on, it would be backlinks and outlinks.
These two types of link building are a deciding factor for SERP rankings too.
Top Ten Link Building Tools In 2021
Here are 10 of our favorite, high-quality link-building tools that come in handy for increasing the number of links that point back to your website. As a bonus, we’ve also described a link building strategy for each, that tells you how to best use each tool.
Pricing: Free; $49 -$399 per month
Summary: Hunter.io gives digital marketers and outreach professionals an easy way to accumulate contact information for the websites they’re targeting for backlinks.
Pros:
- The website has an inbuilt email verifier.
- The free version allows 25 searches and 50 verifications each month.
Cons:
- The base plans are overpriced ($49 for 500 searches).
How it Helps: External websites don’t just magically decide to link back to your website.
Outreach professionals need to contact external websites with similar or related content and “pitch” a piece of content on their website to the external site.
Repeating this process over and over again is cumbersome. Luckily Hunter.io helps in automating the collection of contact information.
2. Monitor Backlink’s SEO Checker Tool
Pricing: Free; $25+ per month
Summary: This SEO checker tool doesn’t help in generating backlinks per se, but it does help you compile a list of existing backlinks that point to your site.
Pros:
- Multiple ways to organize lists (by trust flow, URL, or date)
- Offers metrics like citation flow.
- Shows whether the links are do-follow or no-follow.
Cons:
- The free version only allows you to look at your backlink list.
How it Helps: The most common way people use the free plan is by monitoring their lists regularly to see if backlinks are increasing or decreasing.
For example, if a new website gives you a backlink, your outreach team should take the opportunity to discuss further linking.
That tactic is far more effective than simply “cold calling” other industry-related websites.
3. Atom Broken Link Checker (Chrome Extension)
Pricing: Free
Summary: This tool scans every single link on a webpage and highlights the broken ones in pink.
Pros:
- If a link is indeed broken, the error code is displayed (400, 401, 404, etc)
- Works on all chrome framework browsers (Brave, Opera, Mozilla)
Cons:
- None
How it Helps: If you’re browsing a website that is relevant to yours and you’re trying to get a backlink from them, use the extension and scan relevant content to look for broken links.
If you do find a broken link, reach out to their team and offer a solution: use your link instead!
Websites disappear all the time — out of the 1.7 billion websites on the internet, only about 200 million are active and functional.
Because you’re helping their website, the administrators may be more open to rewarding you with a backlink. This is certainly one of the more creative link building strategies.
Obviously, you can also make use of the extension to monitor your own websites for broken or expired links.
4. Linkody
Pricing: Free; $15 per month.
Summary: Linkody is the best free link building site out there. It helps webmasters understand and generate a “backlink profile” for their site.
Pros:
- Has multiple advanced result filtering tools.
- The free version doesn’t need a credit card.
Cons:
- The free version only lasts 30 days after which you need to sign up with a new email.
How it Helps: Backlink profiles are what search engines use to evaluate your website’s authority and relevance to the searched keywords.
Linkody lists your backlinks in order of domain authority, meaning that you can easily flag irrelevant links and earmark them for upload to a disavow.txt file later on.
5. Google Alerts
Pricing: Free
Summary: Google’s “alerts” tool allows users to monitor the web for specific keywords or topics, and have updates delivered to an email or RSS feed.
Pros:
- Allows result filtration by region.
- You can choose to receive results as they happen, per day, or even per week.
- You can choose the source as well: blogs, videos, web, or even books.
Cons:
- None
How it Helps: The early bird catches the worm, so if setting up an alert, use the “as it happens” feature. If you can get to a piece of relevant content before your competitors, you are more likely to get a backlink.
6. Whitespark Citation Finder
Pricing: Free, $39 – $149 per month
Summary: This tool allows users to plan and map out their SEO campaign by analyzing keywords and location.
Pros:
- Provides extremely relevant links that are helpful for SERP rankings.
- Is mainly focused on the niche of “local SEO”.
Cons:
- The free version only allows 3 searches per day.
How it Helps: You can create a list of campaign keywords and it will find you relevant directories where you can solicit citations and backlinks.
When creating a new campaign, the website will collect a lot of location-based demographic data which is later used to determine relevant citation and backlink opportunities.
7. URL Profiler’s SERP Scraper
Source: Screenshot
Pricing: Free
Summary: A SERP scraper helps you to generate a list of domains around a related theme or keyword.
Pros:
- Outputs results in a .csv format (editable in MS Excel).
- You can choose to get results from any country in the world.
Cons:
- You need to know the ins and outs of your campaign keywords for this to be even remotely useful.
How it Helps: This tool, like many other SERP scrapers generates a list of users or domains that are centered around a particular theme — very useful for outreach efforts.
As a bonus, this scraper allows you to import existing data from other tools to analyze link metrics and audit suspicious/ poor links.
Removing poor backlinks is just as important as generating new ones to boost your SEO.
8. OpenLink Profiler
Pricing: Free
Summary: This tool is basically a backlink profiler on steroids. Aside from letting you know which sites are linking together, it also displays Google’s indexing of a page.
Pros:
- Displays additional backlink metrics such as social media shares, Google’s SERP rank, etc).
- Shows a LIS (Link Influence Score) as a percentage beside the anchor text.
Cons:
- Using the tool effectively requires in-depth SEO knowledge.
How it Helps: Similar to other backlink profilers, OpenLink enables users to see the highest volume backlinks that point back to their sites that are currently on the internet.
The tool also does a pretty decent job of giving each link a percentage score on the results page. This score lets you know the quality of the link.
9. Ahrefs Inbound/ Outbound Backlink Checker
Pricing: Free; $7 for the 1st week; $179 per month thereafter
Summary: The Ahrefs checker allows you to see all your broken backlinks at a glance.
Pros:
- You can see both inbound and outbound broken links.
- The site can also check internal broken backlinks.
Cons:
- The paid version is a bit pricey for small outfits.
How it Helps: With the Atom broken link checker listed above, you can only check one particular page at a time.
With the Ahrefs checker, you get to check entire web pages, but the free version only allows you to see the “top ten” broken links.
Think of it like this: if you want all broken links, go page-by-page with the Atom checker, else, Ahrefs’ checker is the one for you.
10 . Semrush SEO Link Analyzer
Pricing: Free; $199 – $449 per month with a 17% discount if bought annually.
Summary: The Semrush suite provides a very comprehensive backlink analyzer that includes keywords, referring domains, lost referrals, and even an overall toxicity score.
Pros:
- Extensive suite of data analysis tools available.
- Provides a “top anchor” keyword list that can potentially show you which content to focus on.
Cons:
- You only get 10 free searches per email after which you need to upgrade or use a new email.
How it Helps: With the Atom broken link checker listed above, you can only check one particular page at a time.
With the Ahrefs checker, you get to check entire web pages, but the free version only allows you to see the “top ten” broken links.
Think of it like this: if you want all broken links, go page-by-page with the Atom checker, else, Ahrefs’ checker is the one for you.
Which Ones Should You Use?
That’s the beauty of it — there’s no real line here. We split the list anyways though:
- For digital marketers, tools number 1 through 4 are super useful.
- For content strategists, you’d find tools 5, 6, and 7 to be slightly more up your alley.
- And lastly, tool numbers 8, 9, and 10 are more suited for website management teams.
Naturally, there’s no point in limiting yourself by those three points though — they’re simply suggestions!
