The 11 Best link-building Tools For 2021

Backlinks are essential for your website’s SEO. 13% of search experts go as long as to call it the most important search SEO tactic.

Here are a few more link-building stats to consider:

46% of marketers spend $10,000 or even more on their annual link-building campaigns. And 41% marketers in a study said they expect the cost of link-building to rise in the future.
More than half (51%) of marketers believe it takes between one to three months to see the effects of their link-building efforts.
And 41% of marketers said link-building was the toughest part of SEO.

Now, it is evident that link-building is costly, takes time, and is not an easy task.

However, you cannot just skip it either. It is expected to remain one of the most vital ranking factors in the future according to 92% of marketing experts.

But you don’t have stress over link-building anymore. With the right link-building tools, you can reduce the time, effort, and money you spend on link-building and also increase the number of high-quality backlinks that you get.

But there are plenty of paid and free link-building tools available in the market. Which ones should you choose?

Well, we did the heavy lifting for you. We reviewed and tested 45+ tools and found the 10 best ones that can help you rank faster and get better backlinks.

For link-building newbies, these tools would make your first flight way simpler. And the link-building pros can use these tools to further streamline the process.

The guys at Increaseo.com have written an in-depth article discussing link building, guest posts, and natural links, click here to read their insights.

10 Best link-building Tools For 2021 and Beyond

1. Moz Open Site Explorer – Competitor Backlink Analysis and Audit

Analyzing your competitor’s link profile and getting your own backlink profile audited is the first step to starting a link-building campaign. And Moz Open Site Explorer is the best way to do that.

It is a flagship feature of Moz Pro and is surprisingly simple to use. All you need to do is enter your competitor’s URL. It would return with all the backlinks that your competitor has along with metrics like the site’s Domain Authority. You can do the same for your own domain and then understand where your website stands.

The best feature of the Moz Open Site Explorer is its Anchor Text Analysis facility. It helps identify the most common anchor text used in backlinking.

2. Link Prospector – For Easy Link Prospecting

Finding link-building opportunities manually is a pain. It would take you hours, and you might still not stumble upon a gold nugget. Most other link-building tools will fetch a thousand opportunities for you in minutes. But leave you just there. You still need to find the best on your own.

Link Prospector is a welcome outlier in the category. It uses the Link Target Score and thus, gives you websites that are related to yours. It is basically a golden hen and keeps laying golden eggs for you.

However, it isn’t for the newbies. Serious link builders and agencies can use it to speed up their link prospecting efforts by 2 to 10 times with it, though.

3. BuzzSumo – Finding The Right Influencers in Your Niche

Yes, BuzzSumo is a content marketing tool. And yes, it still deserves a place on the list of top link-building tools.

It can make your link-building efforts more focused and result-yielding if you know how to use it right.

For one, you can use it to find the topics that people want to read about. When you create popular content, it automatically becomes more likely to get backlinks.

Then you can use BuzzSumo to find influencers in your niche who gave backlinks to your competitors. You can also approach the same influencers and match up to your competitors.

Also, BuzzSumo helps you find unlinked brand mentions. And then, with a simple and polite email, you can ask the influencers and webmasters to give you links for brand mentions.

4. Hunter.io – Find the Right Contact Information

Tired of sending emails that get no replies? Maybe you are knocking on the wrong door. But with Hunter.io, you can find the right contact information, not once, but always. And when you have the right contact address, your outreach emails would definitely get more responses.

Hunter.io is better than other similar tools because of two reasons. One, it does not depend on just one website for getting the contact information. This makes this insanely fast contact finder 100% accurate.

And two, it also verifies the email addresses that it finds for you. This means you won’t be sending emails to inactive accounts anymore.

5. BuzzStream – For link-building Outreach

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If you are still struggling with labels in your inbox and Spreadsheets that you hardly know how to operate to manage your outreach campaigns, it’s time to upgrade to BuzzStream.

You can start by finding websites for link-building using their in-built discovery tool. Or you can upload the list of websites you have found in your niche.

The BuzzStream Chrome extension makes finding out contact information super simple. And you can connect your email with BuzzStream for outreach and follow-up efforts.

6. JustReachOut – Find Out and Pitch to Journalists and Reporters

Bloggers are an important part of your link-building efforts. But journalists and reporters would be even more helpful, right?

Imagine the impact it will have on your backlink-building strategy if you got a link from high-authority new sites like Forbes or the New York Times?

Well, JustReachOut can make that possible. With its sizable and always up-to-date database of journalists and reporters and has an in-built CRM that you can use to manage your outreach efforts with ease.

Plus, it also lets you find source requests from platforms like HARO, Twitter, and ProfNet. This way, you can reach out to journalists who’d be actually willing to give you backlinks (and feature you in their content piece too.)

7. Ciphers Digital Marketing Agency

Pitching themselves as experts out to correct all the half-truths and outright misinformation flooding the internet on matters SEO, Cipher Digital Marketing Agency prides itself in providing the best possible SEO resources. These resources would be invaluable to both newbies just getting started on the SEO trade, and established experts looking for those cutting edge tips to bump up their SEO results.

Some of the great resources one ought to get from this company includes, Free SEO Tools (comes with a back link builder), deep-dive analysis on Google new CLS (Cummlative Layout Shift), and the new Google SEO Warnings for Businesses.

8. cognitiveSEO – Identify Unnatural Links

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cognitiveSEO is a link analysis tool. But didn’t we already mention Moz Open Site Explorer as the best tool for that? Well, cognitiveSEO deserves a special mention here because one of its features that other similar tools lack.

It can help identify unnatural links and shady link profiles. This helps you clear them from your backlink profile. And also, give a helpful heads-up to sites that you want links from. Helping others would go a long way in getting help from them, you see. A mail that tells site owners about shady links on their site and a clean alternate link is highly likely to get positive responses.

Also, if you are on a budget, it is a pocket-friendly alternative to the big shots.

9. Disavow.it – Quickly Creating A Disavow File

Link penalties still exist. Shocking, but true. If you don’t want spammy and unnatural links to harm your link-building efforts, it is important to get them removed.

But you cannot send an email to all the webmasters of shady sites that you don’t want links from and request for link removal. Instead, just tell Google that you don’t have anything to do with these links. But this process of disavowing takes time and patience.

Without Disavow.it, you’d have to manually create the files to submit to the Google Search Console. And then pray that you get the formatting right. (But not all prayers are answered.)

Disavow.it not just quickly creates a disavow file for you but also lets you know which of the links will get disavowed and which won’t.

10. Check My Links – Finding Broken Links

Broken links are a nuisance. For you, us, and everyone else. But thanks to Check My Links, you can quickly crawl any website to find external and internal links that show an error 404.

How’s that related to link-building?

An email asking for backlinks might not get a positive response every time. But if you help webmasters find broken links on their site, it would warm them up to you. And then asking for a backlink would become simpler. And your request would stand a higher chance of approval.

11.Google Search Console – Tracking Your Efforts

Google Search Console is a free and powerful tool for all SEO specialists and site owners. But it is especially helpful for link builders.

Once your site is verified by Search Console, you should pay attention to the Links section. That’s where you can find information about internal and external links, top sites linking to your domain, and top linking texts. All this information would help you understand and track the results of your efforts so far. And also help find the direction in which you should move forward.

Most people fail to use Search Console for their link-building efforts, but you should make sure you don’t do that.

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12. Sitechecker – Backlinks generation and analysis.

The multifunctional SEO platform Sitechecker will help you create quality backlinks to your site for free. A Backlink Generator is an online tool that lets you add special SEO links to your content by creating them automatically from other websites.

Also, with the help of this platform, you can conduct a qualitative analysis of your backlinks and constantly monitoring them. The Backlink Checker tool analyzes the entire backlink profile of the site you are linking to. You can use it for free to audit your competitors’ backlinks.

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Before You Go…

Even with link-building tools, the process of building and earning high-quality backlinks is complicated. And due to the complexity of the task, 36% of businesses outsource link-building to a link-building services company.

According to 61% of companies, they spend up to 10% of their digital marketing budget on link-building alone. Now, when you are spending so much on a tactic, it is best to get it done right.

You can hire link-building contractors like Uplers, who offer not just basic link-building, but other related services too.

Their global team of link builders analyzes and audits your backlink profile, builds high-quality links for your website, and even offers competitor link prospecting services.

With the right experts on board and armed with the right tools, you can see your rankings soar, and your backlink profile will get better each day.

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