14 Best Link Building Tools Compared (2024 Edition)

best link building tools compared featured

Hoping to build backlinks to boost your search visibility? Below, you’ll find a list of the best link building tools for the job.

Link building is one of the most important parts of SEO. It helps you boost your website authority so that you can rank higher on Google for your target keywords. 

The only problem is that link building is notoriously difficult. But arming yourself with the right tools can make things easier.

With that in mind, we’re about to reveal what we think are the very best link building tools available right now.

We’ve used these many of these link building tools ourselves to acquire a ton of backlinks from authoritative domains, and now, we’ll show you how to do the same.

The best link building tools – summary

TL;DR:

  1. BuzzStream – Best link building tool overall. An all-in-one tool for sending outreach campaigns. Includes link tracking, influencer discovery, CRM, and more.
  2. Link Hunter – Best for simple outreach campaigns. Collect link targets and send outreach emails from a single tool.
  3. SE Ranking – Affordable all-in-one SEO tool to assist with link research.
  4. Mailfloss – Powerful tool to verify email addresses & improve campaign deliverability.
  5. Brand24 – Use this tool to find link opportunities via social media.

#1 – BuzzStream

BuzzStream is our top pick for the overall best link building tool. It’s an all-in-one outreach CRM that can help with every aspect of your link building campaigns, from prospecting and discovery to email outreach, link tracking, and beyond. And it can cut the time you spend on link building in half.

buzzstream homepage

The core of BuzzStream is its CRM system. You can use it to manage and organize your entire link building campaign from start to finish and keep your team in sync so that everything runs smoothly. This makes it a great choice for agencies and marketing teams.

For example, you can segment up your link prospects based on their stage in the outreach progress with Custom Fields. 

That way, your team members will be able to see, at a glance, who’s already been reached out to and who hasn’t. who’s agreed to add a link to your site and who’s already rejected the request, etc. 

And as a result, you don’t end up with multiple team members sending emails to the same sites or wasting time pursuing dead-end leads.

Aside from the CRM, BuzzStream also comes with a ton of features to help you discover backlink opportunities, build qualified prospect lists, send personalized outreach emails at scale, and track all the KPIs that matter.

Everything’s fully integrated into the platform ecosystem, so you can do all of that in one place, instead of piecing together a bunch of random spreadsheets and inboxes. 

Here’s how a typical campaign might look in BuzzStream:

First, use the Discovery tool to trawl through the web and identify the best link building opportunities, qualify them with publisher and influencer metrics, then add contacts to your prospect list.

Alternatively, you can upload your own list of sites in your niche that you’d like a backlink on, and use BuzzStream to uncover contact information for each site.

Once you’ve got your list ready, you can start sending personalized outreach emails from within the platform. To save time, you can utilize pre-built email templates, send out bulk emails, and automate follow-up messages.

Then, you can keep track of the status of every email and measure your performance with stats like open rates, reply rates, etc.

Pricing

BuzzStream plans start at $24/month. Higher-priced plans come with additional team members, higher usage limits, and premium features.

You can get started with a 14-day free trial.


#2 – Link Hunter

Link Hunter is the best link building tool for anyone that wants to keep things simple. It has a really intuitive UI and lets you discover link targets and send outreach emails from one platform.

LinkHunter Homepage

The great thing about Link Hunter is how simple and fast it makes the link building process. The streamlined interface makes it possible to find thousands of prospects and send hundreds of outreach emails in no time.

Unlike BuzzStream, it’s aimed more at individual users and small businesses than large enterprises and agencies. And as such, it’s designed to be much easier to use. And everything is condensed into a few steps.

Here’s how it works.

First, you choose your link building strategy and click Create Campaign. There are three options: guest post on other sites, have bloggers review your products, or pay a blogger to write about you.

Next, name your campaign and select a few topics related to your niche. Link Hunter will then scour the web to discover hundreds of sites in a similar niche that you might want a backlink on and display them in a running list.

Alongside each site, you can see their domain authority (a good indicator of how valuable a backlink from the site would be), so you can quickly pick out the best opportunities. Plus, you can preview the site within Link Hunter to qualify it without having to open a new tab.

When you see a site you’d like to try to get a backlink on, just click the email icon next to it to send an email with your request. 

Link Hunter will automatically discover the right contact for the site and input their email address for you. You can select a template to create a ready-to-send email in one click, and customize it manually as needed, or use dynamic fields to automatically personalize it.

If the site only has a contact form, you can submit contact forms inside Link Hunter too.

LinkHunter will keep track of all the sites you’ve reached out to so you can see what stage they’re at: contacted, followed-up, responded, or links acquired.

Pricing

Plans start at $49/month. You can get started with a 7-day free trial.


#3 – SE Ranking

SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO platform that comes with some powerful link building tools. It’s great value for money and offers a good balance of features at an affordable price point.

SE Ranking Homepage

SE Ranking comes with tons of different built-in tools to help with all areas of your SEO campaign, like keyword research, competitor analysis, etc. But the two most important tools for link building are the Backlink Checker and Backlink Tracking Tool.

You can use the Backlink Checker to run a complete backlink analysis of one of your competitors’ domains and uncover their complete backlink profile. You can see all the sites that link to your competitors alongside key SEO metrics like authority, trust score, anchor text, etc.

With this information at your fingertips, you can reverse engineer their whole backlink strategy and ‘steal’ their most valuable links by targeting them in your outreach campaigns.

Another cool feature in the Backlink Checker is the backlink gap tool, which lets you compare your own backlink profile with up to 5 competitors, so you can find untapped opportunities.

The Backlink Tracking Tool lets you track your existing backlinks and get notified of any changes. This means if you lose a valuable link, you’ll know about it and can follow up with the linking site to get it replaced. 

There’s also a Keyword Rank Tracker, which can track your organic ranking positions for your target keywords over time. This is useful for measuring the success of your link building campaigns as it can help you to determine whether or not the new links you acquire have improved your SEO performance.

Pricing

SE Ranking has a flexible plan model, with prices starting from $23.52/month depending on your usage, ranking check frequency, and subscription period. 

A 14-day free trial is available.

Read our SE Ranking review.


#4 – Snov.io

Snov.io is another powerful CRM platform and sales toolbox used by over 130,000 companies including big names like Zendesk, Canva, Payoneer, Dropbox, etc. It was built primarily with sales teams in mind, but its tools are also really useful for link builders.

Snov.io Homepage

Snov.io’s collection of sales tools includes an Email Finder, which comes in useful when building a prospect list for your link building outreach campaigns. 

It helps you to collect contact details from websites, blogs, and search results pages. You can also use the LinkedIn Prospect Finder to find contact information on LinkedIn pages.

The Email Verifier can then validate the contacts in your prospect list before you email them. This is useful as it reduces your bounce rate and improves deliverability. 

The Email Warm Ups feature further helps to boost your deliverability rates by improving your sender reputation. And the better your deliverability, the lower the chance of your link building outreach emails getting routed to your recipient’s spam folders.

Once you’ve got your list, you can use Snov.io’s powerful Email Drip Campaigns feature to automate your email outreach campaigns, with unlimited personalized follow-ups. Create complex flow charts with branching logic for super-personalized campaigns.

There’s also an Email Tracker to keep track of things like engagement, opens, clicks, etc.

Pricing

Snov.io offers a limited free plan that you can use to get started. Paid plans start from $39/month.


#5 – Hunter 

Hunter is our favorite link building tool for finding contact information. When you discover a website that you want to get a link on, you can use Hunter to grab their email address so you can reach out.

Hunter Homepage

Trying to find contact information manually can be a headache. Many blogs and websites don’t have a ‘contact us’ page, so you have to really do some digging if you want to get in touch. 

And when you’re trying to run link building campaigns efficiently, at scale, that can really slow you down.

Hunter solves that problem by doing all the hard work for you. Just search for a domain and Hunter will scrape the web to find all the relevant email addresses for different points of contact. It’s lightning fast and insanely accurate.

Plus, it even automatically verifies email addresses as it grabs them, so you can be 100% sure you have the right contact details before you hit send.

Aside from the domain search feature, you can also install a Hunter extension on Chrome or Firefox and grab email addresses as you browse the web.

Pricing

Hunter offers a free plan for up to 25 searches/month. Paid plans start from $49/month.


#6 – Semrush

Semrush is the most complete all-in-one SEO tool on the market. It comes with over 55 tools to help with all aspects of your SEO, SEM, and content marketing campaigns, including link building.

Semrush Homepage

Semrush aims to be a one-stop shop for SEO professionals and includes everything you need to optimize your site, including keyword research tools, site auditing capabilities (useful for identifying broken links and for broken link building), competitive research tools, etc.

As far as link building goes, there are 5 tools you need to know about.

The backlinks analytics tool helps with prospecting. You can use it to discover, evaluate, and track tons of backlinks on your own domain or your competitors’ domains. 

It’s powered by Semrush’s huge link database—the largest and freshest database of links in the world. You can evaluate the strength of link opportunities easily with tons of metrics, insights, and rich filtering options.

Then, you can use the main link building tool to automate your email outreach campaigns. There’s also a backlink gap tool, bulk backlink analysis tool, and backlink audit tool. Plus dozens of other powerful features to explore.

Pricing

Paid plans start at $139.95 per month when billed annually. There’s also a limited free plan you can use to try Semrush out.

Read our Semrush review.


#7 – Mailfloss

Mailfloss is the best link building tool for validating email addresses. You can use it to remove invalid email addresses from your prospect list before they hurt your deliverability rate.

Mailfloss Homepage

To maximize the success of your link building outreach campaigns, you’ll want to make sure as many emails as possible land in your recipient’s inboxes, without getting routed to the spam folder.

That’s where Mailfloss comes in. It validates the email addresses on your list so that you don’t accidentally email invalid addresses. 

This matters because when you email invalid email addresses, the email bounces and negatively impacts your deliverability rate. And having a high deliverability rate helps to keep your emails out of the spam folder.

Pricing

Plans start from $17 per month and you can get started with a free 7-day trial.


#8 – Brand24

Brand24 makes it easy to find link building opportunities that your competitors aren’t looking for. Particularly on social media.

Brand24 Homepage

Here’s how it works. When you sign up for Brand24, you can set it up to monitor the web for keywords related to your business, like your brand name, URL, etc.

Once you’ve set it up, it’ll let you know instantly when anyone mentions your tracked keyword anywhere online, including across social media, news stories, blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.

You can then reach out to the people talking about your brand and ask them to link back to you. People who’ve already mentioned your brand online are much more likely to agree than random domains, which makes this a super powerful link building strategy.

Aside from link building, Brand24 can also help you to monitor brand sentiment, manage your online reputation, and gain useful insights into what people are saying about your brand.

Pricing

Plans start at $49/month billed annually. You can get started with a free trial.


#9 – Mangools

Mangools is another great SEO toolkit aimed at beginners. It includes several tools that can help with your link building efforts.

Mangools Homepage

The SERPChecker tool analyzes the search result pages for any target keyword and lets you see the authority of websites that are ranking. This can help you to discover high-authority domains in your niche that you might want to target in your outreach campaigns.

The LinkMiner tool helps with link prospecting. You can use it to analyze your competitor’s backlink profile and discover new opportunities.

The SiteProfiler is another useful tool that lets you analyze specific domains to validate and prioritize the prospects in your list.

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start at €29/month, save 35% with an annual subscription. Mangools offer a 48-hour full refund policy.

Read our Mangools review.


#10 – Linkody

Linkody is an affordable backlink tracker that’s very easy to use. You can use it to keep track of your backlink building campaigns.

linkody homepage

You can use Linkody to monitor your backlink profile over time so you know when you gain or lose links. 

Plus, gather insights about your competitors’ link building strategies, analyze link profiles against tons of key metrics, identify and disavow links that are hurting your SEO, and more.

And despite the rich feature set, Linkody is super cheap. There’s a generous 30-day free trial and the entry-level plan offers great value for money.

Pricing

Plans start at $11.20 per month. You can try it out for 30 days for free.


#11 – Mailshake

Mailshake is a sales engagement and automation platform that you can help with the cold outreach part of your link building campaigns.

Mailshake Homepage

It offers a ton of unique features that you don’t get with other outreach tools, including an AI-powered Email Writer (that helps you to write emails that drive results), a split-testing tool,  multi-touch LinkedIn outreach, etc.

There’s also a powerful automation builder that enables you to send personalized cold emails at scale and built-in analytics so you can track things like opens, clicks, replies, etc.

Pricing

Plans start at $58/user/month billed annually with a 30-day money-back guarantee.


#12 – FollowUpThen

FollowUpThen is a super simple tool that reminds you to follow up with the link building prospects that you’ve emailed.

followupthen homepage

The cool thing about FollowUpThen is its simplicity. Unlike the other link building tools on this list, it’s not jam-packed with features. It only does one thing—but it does it really, really well.

It works like this: You copy-paste the FollowUpThen email address to your email bcc field, specifying when you want to be reminded to follow up in the email address itself. Then, you’ll receive a reminder at the appropriate time to follow up.

For example, let’s say you email a prospect reaching out to ask for a link and you want to follow up with them in 3 days if they don’t reply. You can add 3days@followupthen.com to the bcc field and 3 days later, you’ll get a reminder in your inbox.

Pricing

You can get started with a limited free plan or a 30-day free trial. Paid plans start at $5/month.


#13 – Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is one of the most advanced backlink checkers and link building toolsets on the market. It’s home to one of the best link databases, plus a ton of unique proprietary metrics and advanced features.

Majestic Homepage

You can use Majestic to explore all your competitors’ backlinks and uncover new link building prospects. Advanced tools like Link Context help you to better analyze backlink prospects and identify opportunities your competitors might have missed.

You can analyze the strength of any prospect domain with Majestic’s proprietary metrics like Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Domain, Visibility Flow, and more.

Pricing

Plans start at $41.67/month if you pay annually.


#14 – Google Alerts 

Google Alerts is one of the best free link building tools on the market. It’s a web monitoring tool that marketers can use to identify new link building opportunities as soon as they become available.

Google Alerts

All you have to do is sign up and let Google know the keywords or topics you want to monitor. Then, you’ll receive daily, weekly, or instant alerts whenever Google finds new content relevant to your target keywords, and you can use this to inform your link building strategy.

For example, you can use it to find mentions of your brand name and then email the websites behind those brand mentions asking for a link.

Or let’s say you want to guest post on websites in the travel niche. You could create an alert for something along the lines of ‘Travel guest post’ to find travel-related websites that have already published guest posts, and then reach out to them.

Pricing

Google Alerts is completely free to use.


What is the best link building tool for your business?

That concludes our roundup of the best link building tools. All of the platforms above could have a place in your link building strategy, and there’s no need to stick with just one. 

That said, our top three picks are BuzzStream, Link Hunter and SE Ranking.

BuzzStream is our #1 favorite link building tool. It’s an all-in-one solution that can help you discover opportunities, send outreach emails, track links, and manage your campaigns.

Link Hunter is the best choice for simple outreach campaigns. It makes the process of collecting link targets and sending emails fast and efficient.

SE Ranking offers an affordable way to gather backlink data that can be used in your campaigns.


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