The number of active websites has been growing exponentially in the past few years. Currently, there are over 200 million. To stand out in a market full of competitors, your websites must follow the best practices of an ever-evolving SEO landscape.
One way to make your site more visible online is through link building. That’s how you gain authority and move one step closer to the much-desired top positions in Google SERPs.
Today, we’ll highlight the best link-building tools marketers, SEO professionals, and website owners can use to enhance their online presence and credibility.
Here’s our handpicked list:
1. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a full-scope SEO tool that provides backlink analysis features. Currently, Ahrefs’ crawler is the fourth most active, giving way to Googlebot, Bingbot, and Qualys. Ahrefs’s index database stores over three trillion live backlinks and is updated every fifteen minutes with fresh links. You can leverage all that power once you start using it to identify link-building opportunities.
Let’s see what you can do with Ahrefs.
Exploring the Site Explorer tool for backlink analysis
Ahrefs Site Explorer allows you to enter a domain name or URL and analyze its link profile. This can be any site, but usually, SEO experts use this menu to gain insight into competitors’, their own, or clients’ websites. There, you can find the number of backlinks and referring domains to a website, its organic traffic and keywords, and a ton of other useful metrics.
However, if you want to peek into the links of your rival, the Backlink profile is the feature you need. You can explore all new, lost, and broken links, as well as their anchors, and try to replicate the high-quality backlinks.
Utilizing Ahrefs’ Content Explorer for content ideation and outreach
The Content Explorer menu is the other place to search for link prospects. The idea is to look for topics that gain lots of attention and backlinks and write about them in your blog. Additionally, you can search for guest blogging opportunities by entering your niche keywords. Another option for acquiring valuable backlinks is to discover broken links that you can replace with your own.
A helpful tip for anyone leveraging HARO for link building is that through the Content Explorer, you can find unlinked brand mentions. Once you notice that you’ve been mentioned without a backlink, you can kindly ask the website to link back to you.
Analyzing competitor backlinks with Keyword Explorer
The other Ahrefs menu where you can dive into competitors’ metrics is the Keyword Explorer. When you type in a key term, scroll down to the bottom, and voila—your competitors show up in the SERP overview. You have their backlinks and referring domain numbers right there, all in one place. From there, you can further explore their backlink profiles and compare them to yours.
2. SEMrush
SEMrush is considered one of the best link-building tools for SEO out there. It’s known for the quality of its backlink database, built-in outreach function, and lost links notifications. It’s storing over 43 trillion backlinks, and that number is continually growing.
SEMrush is also an all-in-one platform for marketing insights and tracking SEO performance.
Conducting link analysis using SEMrush’s Backlink Analytics
Through the Backlink Analytics tool, SEMrush’s up-to-date database allows you to see the links your competitors built over time. You can also analyze the link profile of any website, including your own, just by entering a domain. Furthermore, with the site backlinks comparisons, you discover what link opportunities you’ve missed compared to other websites in your niche. What’s more, you’ll be timely informed about deleted links.
Discovering new link-building opportunities with the Link Building tool
The Link Building tool of SEMrush offers an easy three-step approach to creating backlinks, which includes research, connection, and tracking. It’s designed that way to serve as an outreach campaign assistant for link acquisition.
You can set up a link-building campaign, identify your competitors and best link prospects, discover the contact information of the prospective websites within the SEMrush platform, reach out to them, and measure your new links’ success afterward.
Monitoring competitor backlinks and strategies with the Competitive Research toolkit
In the Competitive Research section of SEMrush, there is an entire toolkit for monitoring your competitors’ websites. You can get deep insights into their traffic by device, channel (direct, paid, referral, etc.), or country, as well as discover missing keywords on your site that the competitor has.
In terms of link building, the Backlink Gap is the tool you need to compare your website links with up to four other competitors. There, you can uncover the link prospects you’re missing out on and take steps to add them to your link profile.
3. Moz Pro
Moz Pro is an all-encompassing SEO tool that can be used for link-building purposes. It assists with finding new link opportunities and making the most out of your existing ones. Its database tracks 40.7 trillion links on 718 million domains. The Moz platform translates the complex world of SEO into easy-to-understand metrics and visually appealing reports.
Leveraging Moz’s Link Explorer for in-depth backlink analysis
In the Link Explorer by Moz, the metric you should pay close attention to when building backlinks is Domain Authority. It gives you a hint about the strength of the domain you’re looking to get links from. The closer to a hundred, the better.
As with the other aforementioned tools, here, you can also explore the backlink metrics of your own site or any other competitor. It gives you a full set of tools to conduct an in-depth competitive backlink analysis.
Link Explorer even shows the Spam Score of the links leading to your website so that you can take the necessary actions to improve your link quality profile.
Utilizing Moz’s Link Intersect feature to identify link-building opportunities
The Link Intersect is a function under the Link Explorer. It serves as a gap analysis tool displaying the domains you don’t have a link from but link back to your competitors. This feature helps you to build a link outreach campaign and earn those missing links. What’s more, you get to see the Spam Score of all links, so you can filter only the ones that will add link equity to your site.
Tracking link-building progress and monitoring website performance with Moz Pro Campaigns
The Moz Pro Campaigns section covers a wide range of SEO features, such as links, crawling, ranking, and page optimization. However, we’ll only focus on the Links menu overview. It’s full of a ton of detailed information about backlinks—yours and competitors’. You can analyze Inbound Links, which are the links coming to a site from external sources, i.e., other websites. They all come with Page Authority, Spam Score, anchors, followed or nofollow, and other useful SEO metrics.
4. Pitchbox
Pitchbox is an all-inclusive link-building and outreach automation software. It helps brands and SEO agencies find the best publishers and bloggers to pitch to and get a link from. Pitchbox combines over 20 prospecting tactics all in one tool so that you find link opportunities faster. It also has an Ahrefs, Moz Pro, and SEMrush integration option, allowing you to extract and analyze link data in one place. It’s one of the best link-building tools in terms of scale and functionality.
Streamlining prospecting and relationship building with personalized outreach templates
By leveraging popular white-hat link-building strategies and tactics, the platform helps link builders find the right websites in no time. The SERPs-based option is particularly useful for discovering high-potential blogs and sites in any industry and niche. You can build new relationships with custom outreach templates or strengthen existing ones using your own database.
Managing outreach campaigns and tracking responses efficiently
Link management with Pitchbox is made easy as it personalizes outreach campaigns and automates follow-ups, simplifying the process of gaining those precious high-authority links. With customized link outreach campaigns, you should achieve exceptional results in terms of response rates and deliverability. The responses are embedded into the platform so that you can efficiently track all your pitching efforts from there.
Analyzing outreach performance with Pitchbox’s comprehensive reporting features
With Pitchbox’s sophisticated reporting system, you can measure the ROI and other KPIs of outreach campaigns. Additionally, you can track goals and team activity and present to clients how much link-building effort goes into their websites.
By analyzing outreach campaigns’ data, you can decide whether to choose a different strategy or stick to the one that’s working.
5. BuzzStream
BuzzStream is an end-to-end outreach platform for link-building and online PR. It acts like a CRM (customer relationship management) system that assists in organizing SEO link prospects, press lists for pitching, and influencers for better content reach. The platform delivers insights about valuable metrics and contact information of potential outreach partners.
Managing link-building campaigns effectively with BuzzStream
One of the purposes of the BuzzStream software is to speed up the link-building process. It facilitates the research phase, gathers websites’ metrics automatically, and creates prospects’ list so that you focus on SEO strategizing rather than making spreadsheets.
BuzzStream checks the SERPs for the most relevant websites for link outreach and delivers a list of URLs. Moreover, you can upload your own site lists and let the software analyze the best entries. It pulls out their performance stats, contact information, and social media data in seconds.
Finding relevant influencers and conducting personalized outreach
BuzzStream is also a platform for promoting your content to influencers. It discovers people with optimal metrics who can help you reach a wider targeted audience. The software analyzes influencers’ social media posts, conversations, and engagement to determine whether they are the right fit for you.
Once you have that information, BuzzStream lets you create personalized pitch templates to achieve higher outreach campaign success. All pitch emails are sent through the tool. You can also automate follow-ups and set up alerts for them.
Measuring outreach success with BuzzStream’s reporting and analytics features
Tracking and analyzing outreach success is a thoughtful built-in feature of BuzzStream. Thus, all your email communication is in one place, along with an automatic result-measuring system, customizable reports, insightful charts, statistics, and trends. You can view links by anchors, type, domain authority, or linking domain metrics.
Furthermore, you can track the emails sent by particular team members and compare their performance.
6. 
Ninja Outreach’s backlink-building tool allows you to research blogs and websites in its database, reach out to them with readymade or custom templates, and monitor campaign results. You can filter your prospect searches by SEO metrics for link building or social engagement ratings for influencers. The platform has a database of emails where you can reach out to potential partners. It offers a variety of link-building opportunities, such as guest posting, broken links, expert roundups, interview backlinks, etc.
Utilizing Ninja Outreach’s extensive link prospecting and outreach features
Finding qualified link-building leads is made possible with Ninja Outreach’s extensive database of high-value emails and contact details of authoritative people and influencers. You can search for an unlimited number of contacts and automate unlimited white-hat link campaigns. Your outreach emails can use pre-made templates, and you can monitor which ones were more successful based on clicks, open rates, and responses.
Finding influencers and bloggers for collaborative content opportunities
Ninja Outreach is a great assistant for enhancing your influencer marketing campaigns. The tool facilitates the process of discovering bloggers and influencers in any niche as it uses its own database. Thus, you’ll have the chance to reach their engaged audiences and drive qualified traffic to your business that eventually leads to conversions.
Measuring and analyzing outreach performance with Ninja Outreach’s reporting tools
With Ninja Outreach, you can monitor outreach performance via email integration. You’ll receive in-platform notifications each time a lead replies to your message and reminders about follow-ups. Additionally, you can keep track of successful outreach templates that get the most opens, click-throughs, and replies. By setting up a template library, you access all outreach templates to reuse or improve later on.
7. Hunter
Hunter is a platform with email-finding capabilities for outreach. There, you can find the contact details of people related to your business and save them as leads. Hunter combines artificial intelligence (AI) and exclusive technology to authenticate and deliver contact information.
Leveraging Hunter’s domain search
In Hunter, you can enter a domain and get a list of company emails with department filters so that you know who’s best to reach out to. It pulls out those details from publicly available information. What’s more, there is a bulk domain search option where you can extract the contacts of multiple companies.
Email verifier for better prospecting
Another helpful option is the email verifier. If you have the email address of a lead, you can easily check if it’s authentic. Moreover, this can be done with an entire list of emails at once, and it takes just a few seconds. With verified emails, you also reduce bounce rates, which is a huge benefit for lead generation.
Conducting personalized email outreach and tracking results
The cold email outreach of Hunter allows you to build campaigns and relationships using automation. All you need to do is connect your email with the platform and start pitching at scale with personalized messages. You can track open and click rates, as well as manage responses within the tool.
Conclusion
Leveraging the power of the best link-building tools in 2023 may turn into a game changer for your SEO and outreach strategy. The benefits are many—gaining a competitive edge, faster reach out, better organization of resources, convenient tracking and analysis of results, etc.
So test these tools to speed up your link-building game and receive the sought outcome quicker.
Author
Velislava Georgieva is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Inbound Blogging, specializing in Content Marketing and Outreach Strategies. Besides her passion for digital marketing, she likes yoga, fitness, and hiking. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.
