L ooking for the best link building tools?
Link building is a powerful strategy that can boost your search engine ranking and increase your brand’s visibility. With a new blog, landing link opportunities can be difficult, though. However, with help from the best free link building software, you can find and build quality links to your site from jump street.
Keep reading to check out the best link building tools for 2024!
Key Takeaways On The Best Link Building Tools: Free and Paid
In This Guide:
- 1. AIOSEO – is an SEO toolkit that helps optimize websites for search engines to improve visibility and attract backlinks.
- 2. MonsterInsights – is a Google Analytics plugin that provides insights into referral traffic and link building opportunities.
- 3. HARO (Connectively) – connects bloggers with journalists looking for expert insights, enabling them to earn backlinks through contributed content.
- 4. Hunter.io – is an email finder tool that assists in locating and verifying email addresses for outreach campaigns.
- 5. Semrush – offers link analysis, auditing, and link building tools for managing outreach strategies.
- 6. Ahrefs – is a popular backlink research tool with a vast index of live backlinks for analyzing backlink profiles.
- 7. Buzzsumo – helps discover high-performing content, influencers, and potential link building partners within your industry.
- 8. Buzzstream – is an outreach platform for building prospect lists and sending personalized emails to earn backlinks.
Below are more in-depth looks at each link builder tool!
But first, let’s quickly go over why link building is important…
Why Are Backlink And Link Building Opportunities So Important?
Backlinks are links from other websites to your site or blog. They are like a vote of confidence from another site that your blog and your content are good. And since these links are one of the 2 most important criteria in Google’s page rank algorithm – the more votes or backlinks you have, the better your search engine ranking.
As you can imagine, this comes with a lot of benefits, including:
- Higher Search Engine Rankings. To get eyes on your new blog and its content, your site must show up in search engines like Google and Bing. Building backlinks for your blog improves your SEO score so your site ranks higher in search and your audience finds your content.
- More Traffic to Your Blog. When other blogs link to your content, it drives their traffic straight to your website. Users who click on the links will be directed to your blog so you can increase engagement and build a larger readership.
- Boosts Brand Authority. When verifiable, credible websites link back to your blog, it positions you as an authority in your industry. It’s easier to trust a blog that other well-known blogs endorse because it shows you’re trustworthy and your information is reliable.
If you’re new to backlinks, you can check out our detailed guide on how to get backlinks for more information.
Now that we know the importance of getting backlinks, let’s go ahead and dive into the list of the best link-building tools.
1. AIOSEO: Best Free Tool To Attract Link Opportunities
For a successful link building strategy, you must first optimize your website for SEO. This will help you appear in search results so that other popular websites will notice your content and be encouraged to link to you.
AIOSEO, also known as All-in-One SEO, is a comprehensive SEO toolkit for WordPress. It makes it easy to optimize your website and its content so that they perform well in search engines.
It has a helpful setup wizard to get you started with the proper SEO foundations. Simply follow the prompts to automatically choose the best SEO settings for your site.
The SEO Audit Checklist will analyze your entire site to detect any critical errors and provide you with instructions for improvement. And with each new page or post you create, AIOSEO also gives you an actionable checklist to ensure every piece of your content is ready for search.
AIOSEO comes with other powerful features like:
- Smart XML sitemaps
- Local SEO
- Google News sitemaps
- Rich snippets schema
- 404 error tracking
- Internal linking assistant
- Social media integration
- And more…
And I want to make a special shout out to the Link Assistant feature.
This list is primarily focused on external link building, however, internal links are a powerful strategy that you have complete control and power over. And with Link Assistant you can get special tips on the best pages to add inbound links to your pages. This way you can spread out your link juice across your site and avoid orphan pages – FAST.
Pricing: Starts at $49.60 for a Basic plan. But there’s also a lite version you can try out that’s completely free.
2. MonsterInsights: Best Insights Into Your Traffic Sources
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It makes it super easy to understand your website’s analytics and see how users navigate your content straight from your WordPress dashboard.
A great way to build links and find opportunities is through your referral traffic. Referral sites link to your blog and give you a backlink. By finding out which sites are linking to you and what type of content they like, you can create similar content for new backlink opportunities.
With MonsterInsights, it’s easy to view your referral sources and start a backlink strategy:
MonsterInsights lets you track other important information about your blog, like outbound links, affiliate links, file downloads, popular posts and pages, audience demographics, form conversions, and much more.
With MonsterInsights, you can also build links by:
- Using outbound links to form partnerships with other blogs
- Using popular posts and pages to create similar, high-quality content
Pricing: There’s a free trial with basic features. Upgrading to a premium plan starts at $99.50 a year.
3. HARO (Connectively): Best Free Link Building Opportunities
HARO, or Help a Reporter Out (now hosted on Connectively), is a free link building service that allows journalists and news outlets to request information on different topics. They can then use the experiences and stories of participants to add to their content and publish it. Thus, it’s a great way for bloggers to earn backlinks for their site.
You can reply with your story and information when you see a question relevant to your niche or industry. If the journalist or media outlet decides to use your story, they’ll publish it on their website with a link back to your blog. This drives their traffic to your site and helps you organically build backlinks and authority in your niche.
The queries will look something like this:
If you can provide valuable insights, it’ll be easy to get multiple answers published and drive the right traffic to your website. It’s important to only answer questions about your niche so that your pitches are successful and the right audience finds and engages with your blog.
Pricing: Free
4. Hunter
Hunter is a popular link building software that searches and indexes email addresses. This can help you with your link building outreach to organically build links to your blog and form professional connections with leaders in your industry.
Hunter.io makes it easy to find these email addresses, verify their validity, and send cold email campaigns. Each email address goes through a verification check and will show a verification status and a unique confidence score to determine its accuracy.
To find an email address, you only need:
- The full name of the person you want to contact
- The domain name used for emails by the company, organization, or website
It’s a complete outreach tool, because when you’re ready, Hunter.io will help you to create, personalize, and schedule email campaigns.
Reaching out to brands for potential partnerships shows initiative, and personalizing each email is crucial for a pitch’s success.
You can choose from hundreds of pre-built templates, track each email’s performance, integrate your own data, and so much more.
Pricing: Free for up to 25 searches a month, then it starts at $34 per month.
5. Semrush
Semrush is a powerful SEO tool with tons of link building features tofr help you build backlinks across blogs in your niche.
It’s not a free tool – but they do offer a relatively competitive free plan / free trial for 14 days.
The Backlink analysis feature lets you evaluate and compare every detail about your competitor’s backlinks and your own. You can monitor any domain’s link building progress, spot new backlinks, get informed when backlinks are deleted, and more.
With the backlink checker audit tool, you can clean up your link profile and help you find and remove any potentially harmful inbound links.
There’s also a Link Building Tool that will collect a list of link building opportunities for your domain. This makes it easy to manage a link building outreach strategy to get new backlinks.
Other powerful SEMRush features include:
- Backlink gap
- Keyword magic tool
- Track blog post rankings
- Site audit
- Domain overview
- And more to help make it one of the most complete marketing tools on the market…
Pricing: Starts at $129.95 per month.
6. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is perhaps the most popular link research tool. Its backlink index contains more than 3 trillion live backlinks, providing the most current information.
Type in any domain or URL in its Site Explorer, and you’ll get an extensive list of all associated backlinks. You can see the domain rating, domain traffic, page traffic, and more for each referring page. You can filter the results by do follow, no follow, backlink type, and other details.
You can also use Ahrefs to find dead pages and build broken link building campaigns on any given topic. You can build links by recreating those dead web pages and suggesting blogs link to your website instead.
It’s one of the most valuable tools to help with backlink research and access link data.
Ahref’s other tools include:
- Keywords explorer
- Content explorer
- Domain comparison
- Rank tracker
- Link Explorer
- Link intersect
- And more…
Pricing: Starts at $129 per month.
7. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content analyzing tool that allows you to discover high-performing content, analyze competitors’ data, identify potential influencers, and track trends.
Its Content Analyzer makes it easy to find relevant keywords and topics your audience is bound to love and likely to link to. You can also use it to discover influential creators and potentially work with them to build your backlinks and gain authority.
You can discover content by:
- Time period
- Social network
- Content type
- Domain
- Author
BuzzSumo consistently crawls the web to share the best-performing content in your industry and give you a headstart on your link building strategy. You can get notified when new links are created, export reports into Excel, receive real-time updates, and more.
Pricing: It has a limited free version and an upgrade to the premium starts at $199 a month.
8. BuzzStream
BuzzStream is an end-to-end outreach platform that helps you organically build links and boost visibility for your brand.
BuzzStream uses automatic prospecting to gather the most relevant results and news searches from the web to build your prospect list. Additionally, you can add new bloggers, sites, and social profiles to your link prospecting list with the click of a button while browsing the web.
With BuzzStream, you can also send personalized, targeted outreach emails to build professional connections in your niche.
It’s also easy to manage your link-building projects. On BuzzStream’s dashboard, you can see where each link building campaign is in its development, set reminders for follow-ups, and share tasks with your team members. This allows for a more fluid process where goals are met on time, and everyone is on the same page.
Other features include contact info discovery, open, click & reply tracking, Twitter conversation tracking, and more.
Pricing: Starts at $24 a month.
Best Free Link Building Software in Closing
And that brings us to the end of our list!
These are the best link building tools for increasing your website search rankings, building your authority, and driving more traffic to your blog.
We hope you found this article useful. For more helpful information, check out our post on how to rank for multiple keywords.
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That was an awesome list! Although I am surprised why Postifluence is not on your list. It is a great tool I believe. I even heard it to be an affordable and user-friendly tool as well. Please add this one too to your list.
Really nice blog very helpful for a beginner.
This article is very informative, updated and transparent.
What a useful information provided by this blog! It’s remarkable. Thanks for helping me out
Now a days link building is even tough task as most of the websites quality is not good such as social bookmaking, directory submission, blog sites and more.
Really nice blog with awesome list of link building tools. Keep sharing such helpful content
Each tool looks helpful. Few bloggers understand the power of building high quality, relevant backlinks. Those who do tend to outshine everyone else.
Ryan