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Loading...- Which Is the Best Link Building SEO Tool?
- Check Your Competition’s Links
- Link Research
- Outreach
- Summary
Which Is the Best Link Building SEO Tool?
Are you wondering how to check your competitors’ backlinks, find valuable domains, improve indexing or start your outreach activities? Of course, you can analyze all these elements manually by scrutinizing each and every website of your market rivals one at a time. However, the process might take ages. This is when SEO link building tools come in handy! What are the best link building tools in 2023? Keep reading to discover our ranking of 16 solutions that will make your backlink analysis easier!
Read also: How to Do a Competitive Link Analysis to Boost Visibility by 25% & Reach the Top of SERPs
Check Your Competition’s Links
Ahrefs
Of course, our list of the best link building tools in 2023 couldn’t exist without Ahrefs. What makes Ahrefs so special and effective in backlink analysis? This tool has billions of websites in its database (and this database is still being expanded), so you can quickly check all backlinks of almost any website. How to do it right? You have two fantastic features offered by Ahrefs that will give you really great backlink insights: Site Explorer and Content Explorer (we’ll use the latter in the link research section).
The Site Explorer feature and the amount of information it offers is really impressive. All you have to do to obtain the data is to enter the URL of the website you want to analyze.
The tool will generate a report with such basic data:
You can see how many backlinks your website has and how many domains link to it.
What’s more, Site Explorer will also show you a chart with the number of referring domains and pages over time:
If you click the Backlinks section, you’ll be able to analyze all referring pages. You can find it here:
You’ll see a report with a list of all the backlinks, which can be sorted by Domain Rating (DR), URL Rating (UR), traffic, referring domains, linked domains, external backlinks, or keywords.
What’s more, Site Explorer also allows you to apply various filters. So you can analyze your backlinks by language, platforms (blogs, e-commerce, CMS, etc.), or link type (dofollow, UGC, sponsored, redirect, etc.).
Majestic
Have you ever heard about the Majestic link building tool? If you’re looking for an SEO tool similar to Ahrefs and Moz, then Majestic SEO will be a great choice (especially for those looking for slightly more affordable solutions).
Majestic SEO, just like other best link building tools, has developed its own metrics to determine the quality of domains, these are:
- Trust Flow – evaluating the quality of backlinks of particular pages or websites, the higher the Trust Flow, the better the quality of links,
- Citation Flow – denoting the quantity of backlinks of particular pages or websites, Citation Flow focuses only on the number of backlinks and doesn’t assess their quality,
- Visibility Flow – this metric is used to find awesome editorial-style links on pages with high Trust Flow,
- Topical Trust Flow – determines the topical relevance of a website compared to other websites from the same category.
Check our link building services!
Moz
Moz Link Explorer is by far the most popular feature offered by Moz. Many SEO experts evaluate domain quality based on the metrics developed by Moz. How does it work? Just enter your competitor’s URL and the search bar:
And then Moz will give you a list of all backlinks with key data such as Page Authority (PA), Domain Authority (DA), the number of linking domains, anchor text, and spam score.
This information should be enough to decide if it’s worth obtaining backlinks from a given site.
Moz is a quality tool for backlink analysis. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that its database isn’t as impressive as the database of Ahrefs. Therefore, it won’t provide you with so many insights.
Semrush
Semrush is another indispensable tool in backlink analysis. It’s well-known primarily for competition analysis and keyword research features, however, it also provides many other quality functionalities such as the Link Building Tool. Would you like to see what websites link to your competitors? If so, Semrush is just perfect for you! Once you enter the URL of your website and your competitors, the tool will generate the following report:
Backlink Analysis, another feature offered by Semrush, works in a similar way to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Shows data and metrics such as:
- the number of backlinks and referring domains,
- categories of referring domains,
- backlink types (text, image, form, frame),
- link attributes (follow, nofollow, sponsored, UGC),
- pages with the biggest number of referring domains,
- top anchors,
- countries from which the backlinks come.
SEO SpyGlass
SEO SpyGlass is a tool that enables conducting a comprehensive backlink audit. It:
- offers more than 50 metrics used to evaluate backlinks,
- is cost-effective and can be tested for free,
- offers a user-friendly interface,
- is integrated with Google Search Console and Google Analytics which ensures you get a comprehensive list of backlinks,
- allows you to check the status of each link,
- gives you the email addresses of website owners who created spammy links to your site,
- offers Penalty Risk metric that helps you check if your links are toxic,
- enables easy competitor analysis,
- makes it possible to create a disavow file with spammy links that should be deleted.
Link Research
- site: – limits search results to a specific domain,
- filetype: – shows the results only for the indicated file formats, e.g. PDF, DOCX, TXT,
- “brackets” – if you insert some words or even an entire sentence in the brackets, then you’ll get exact-match search results
- intitle: – searches for words in title tags,
- inposttitle: – searches for words that appear in blog post titles,
- inanchor: – shows all pages that are being linked to the indicated anchor text,
- inpostauthor: – if you’re interested in content created by a particular author, this operator will show you all blog posts.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is another outstanding SEO link building tool that will notify you whenever someone publishes content on topics that are of interest to you. This tool comes in handy if you want to monitor your brand mentions or reviews (even those that don’t contain a link to your website). With Google Alerts, you’ll stay on the cutting edge and get an email notification each time fresh content matching your interests and settings appears.Brand24
This is a great tool for finding unlinked brand mentions and outstanding link building opportunities.
By creating a free account, you can monitor your brand mentions, comments, reviews, blog posts, or news. If you notice that some of the mentions don’t include a link to your page, contact the website owner and ask them to complement the content with a backlink to your site.
It’s an effective and efficient recipe for building backlinks.
Ahrefs
Yes, it’s Ahrefs again. This time we’ll take a closer look at the Content Explorer feature. It’s another popular solution offered by Ahrefs. Although the name may suggest that it’s not a backlink analysis tool, it can really help you find valuable domains you can obtain links from.
Just select the Content Explorer section from the menu and provide your website address.
How can Content Explorer support your backlink analysis and research?
For example, you can contact website owners and ask them to add a link to your website or you can offer to write a guest article for them. It’s a great opportunity to obtain quality links!
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is an extremely popular tool for content marketing. But who said it couldn’t be used for backlink analysis and link building?
BuzzSumo provides information about popular topics that attract users’ attention, increase their engagement, and, as a result, boost the number of natural backlinks to the site:
By entering a keyword or domain that’s of interest to you, you can check brand mentions, and find backlink opportunities.
Nofollow Plug-in
In the link building process, it’s crucial to mark individual links with appropriate attributes that will guide search engine robots. Would you link to check if particular links have nofollow or dofollow attributes? Check out the nofollow plug-in. A simple browser extension that will show you all the nofollow, UGC, and sponsored links once you enable it. How to recognize nofollow links? It’s easier than you think. Each link with this attribute will have a red frame:
Read also: 14 Link Building Strategies That Will Work!
Outreach
HARO
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a platform that allows bloggers and journalists to request expert opinions on a range of subjects. So, if you share your view on a given topic, you usually get a backlink to your (source's) website in exchange. This solution benefits both journalists and people who decide to voice their opinions. You can get backlinks from a reputable website, while the journalist receives assistance and quality content. It’s a renowned outreach and link building tool.Hunter
Hunter is another outreach tool ideal for email lead generation. With its help, you can easily find the email addresses of people associated with a given website.
Thanks to it, you can quickly reach reputable pages and their owners, contact them and offer them cooperation.
Just provide the URL of a website that’s of interest to you and the tool will do the rest for you.
Why should you use it?
Because once you analyze your competitors and their backlinks, you should try to obtain links from the same quality domains. Hunter will help you connect these domains.
Thanks for the list, Matt. I’m now using the Majestic tool – should I stick to it or try to combine it with maybe one or two new tools. Would it help the process?
Hey, you missed one! That’s Postifluence! It’s a great guest posting sites finder that finds the top-ranking guest posting sites and builds do follow links 24/7 easily. I think you should add this one too in your blog.