Oct 22, 2024
Casey Bjorkdahl is one of the pioneering thought leaders in the SEO community. In 2010, Casey co-founded Vazoola after working for a Digital Marketing Agency for five years in New York City. Vazoola is now one of the fastest growing and most widely recognized SEO marketing firms in the country.
The number of SEO tools has exploded in recent years, and we’ve tried almost all of them.
We’re going to narrow it down to only the best automated link building tools so you can supercharge your efforts. Whether you’re creating a link building strategy from scratch or getting into the nitty gritty of execution, we have the best SEO link building tools you need to get to the next level.
Some tools are designed for link research, while others are used for outreach, monitoring and reporting. Other essential link building tools are multipurpose, offering an all-in-one solution for multiple link-building tasks.
Link building takes a lot of time and effort to do effectively, but tools make it easier. We use some of these tools to build links for our own clients on a regular basis. We’ve found these tools useful for a variety of client needs and situations.
Keep reading as we go over 13 of our favorite backlink-building tools, some of which we believe every SEO should be using. Employ these tools to automate your process and campaigns.
Our Favorite Link Building Tool Choices
There are so many options but it's best to narrow in on the best ones that help power your strategy and workflow. SEO tools for link building can be leveraged in every step of link building from strategy formulation through execution. Here are the best link building and backlink analysis tools for SEO.
Check out our link building list of tools, both free and paid.
Keyword Research Backlink Builder Tool
The problem: Many businesses and SEO professionals find it challenging to find relevant keywords that have both high search volume and low competition. Without reliable data, keyword selection becomes a guessing game. That leads to poor rankings and ineffective content strategies.
The solution: Keywords Everywhere provides a browser extension that shows critical keyword data—search volume, cost-per-click, and competition level—right in your search results. It helps users make informed decisions about which keywords to target in real-time.
Specific Application: This tool is excellent for on-the-go keyword research. It lets users gather data directly from Google, YouTube, and other platforms. Whether you're building content, optimizing for SEO, or planning ad campaigns, Keywords Everywhere provides actionable insights at your fingertips.
How we use it: We use Keywords Everywhere to quickly assess keyword viability while browsing the web. This allows us to stay agile in our SEO efforts and identify opportunities without needing to switch between tools.
Why we love it: The best feature of Keywords Everywhere is its seamless integration with popular search engines. The ability to view keyword data in real time without leaving the search page saves time and provides valuable insights instantly.
Pricing: Keywords Everywhere memberships range from just $6 for 400,000 credits annually to $80 a month for 8 million credits a year. Memberships are billed on an annual basis.
Try Vazoola’s free keyword research tool.
Anchor Text Generator
The problem: Maintaining a balanced and optimized anchor text profile is needed for SEO success. Manually tracking and diversifying anchor text can be difficult. Over-optimizing or under-utilizing keywords in anchor text can hurt your rankings and even lead to penalties.
The solution: Anchor Profiler simplifies the process by analyzing your website’s anchor text distribution. It offers detailed insights into the frequency, variety, and type of anchor texts used. That helps you make sure you have the right balance between branded, generic, and keyword-rich anchors.
Specific Application: The link builder tool is ideal for monitoring and optimizing anchor text diversity in your link-building campaigns. By understanding how your anchor texts are spread across your backlink profile, you can avoid over-optimization and improve your search engine performance.
How we use it: We use Anchor Profiler to regularly audit our anchor text profile, ensuring that our link-building efforts remain diverse and natural. It helps us spot any imbalances early on and adjust our strategy accordingly.
Why we love it: The best feature of Anchor Profiler is its comprehensive reporting on anchor text types and frequency. It provides clear visualizations that make it easy to identify areas that need improvement.
Pricing: If you want to start using Anchor Profile, you can subscribe to the tool for as little as $15 a month, although more features are available for the $29 and $99 monthly plans.
Learn more about anchor text best practices.
While Anchor Profiler tracks the diversity of your anchor text, use Keywords Everywhere to research the competitiveness of the anchor keywords you're using. This ensures you’re balancing anchor text optimization with keyword relevance and competitiveness.
Link Prospecting, Outreach & Management Tools
The problem: Managing large-scale outreach campaigns for link building can quickly become overwhelming. Tracking emails, responses, and follow-ups across multiple prospects requires time, organization, and effort.
The solution: Pitchbox is an all-in-one outreach and link-building platform designed to automate prospecting and manage outreach campaigns. By providing link building outreach tools for personalized outreach and automating follow-ups, Pitchbox helps streamline the entire link-building process.
Specific Application: The tool is perfect for handling high-volume outreach campaigns. It helps manage relationships with potential link partners, and it automates the process of following up with unresponsive contacts.
How we use it: We use Pitchbox to organize and scale our outreach efforts for link-building. It allows us to customize emails, track responses, and automate follow-ups. That saves us hours of manual work while making sure nothing falls through the cracks.
Why we love it: The best feature of Pitchbox is its automation capabilities. The tool’s ability to send follow-up emails automatically, based on predefined triggers, makes sure we maintain consistent communication without manual intervention.
Pricing: The Pitchbox Pro plan costs $165 each month. For more users and even more emails, the Advanced plan is $420 a month.
Automated personalized outreach with Respona and Pitchbox. Use Respona to identify prospects and personalize your outreach at scale, then manage larger campaigns and automated follow-ups through Pitchbox.
The problem: Personalized outreach is key to securing high-quality backlinks. But manually crafting individual pitches takes time. Without a streamlined process, it's easy to miss out on valuable link-building opportunities.
The solution: Respona is an outreach platform that combines link prospecting with automated, personalized outreach. By offering a database of influencers, journalists, and bloggers, Respona allows you to find the right contacts. It also helps you reach out with tailored messages.
Specific Application: Respona is ideal for businesses looking to secure backlinks through PR-style outreach, particularly with journalists and bloggers. It helps automate prospecting. That way, outreach is personalized without sacrificing efficiency.
How we use it: We use Respona to identify key contacts and send tailored outreach emails. That saves time while increasing the chances of securing backlinks from high-authority sites.
Why we love it: The standout feature of Respona is its ability to automate personalized outreach. The platform allows us to customize pitches based on the recipient’s profile, increasing the likelihood of a successful response.
Pricing: Respona’s starter plan, which is ideal for side projects, is $198 a month. The platform also has a pro plan for $495 a month and an unlimited plan for $799 a month.
Get Vazoola’s link prospecting guide.
Backlink Analytics Tools
The problem: Tracking and analyzing your backlink profile is a must if you want to understand your site's authority and uncover opportunities for improvement. However, managing and interpreting all that data across multiple campaigns can be a complicated process.
The solution: SEMRush offers a comprehensive backlink analytics tool that monitors your backlink profile and provides insights into your competitors’ backlinks. It helps identify strong link-building opportunities, while it ensures your site’s backlink profile remains healthy.
Specific Application: SEMRush is perfect for evaluating the quality of your backlinks, spotting toxic links, and researching competitor backlinks to uncover new linking opportunities.
How we use it: We use SEMRush to audit our backlink profile, analyze the backlinks of our competitors, and make sure our links are authoritative and relevant. The tool allows us to make informed decisions about which links to pursue or disavow.
Why we love it: The best feature of SEMRush is its ability to provide in-depth backlink data in real time. The platform’s competitor analysis tool gives us a clear picture of where we stand and where we can improve.
Pricing: SEMrush offers a Pro plan for $139.95 a month for newbies and small teams. Its Guru option for $249.95 a month is perfect for agencies and mid-sized businesses. For $499.95 a month, the Business plan is designed for large agencies and enterprises.
Optimize your anchor text strategy by using both Anchor Profiler and Majestic’s Trust Flow metrics. Analyze how anchor text is distributed across your links, and ensure that you maintain a healthy mix of branded and keyword-rich anchors while focusing on high-trust domains.
The problem: Not all backlinks carry the same weight. It's important to distinguish between high-quality and low-quality links. Without a way to measure the strength and trustworthiness of your backlinks, your SEO efforts can be undermined by poor-quality links.
The solution: Majestic is a specialized backlink analysis tool that provides unique metrics like Trust Flow and Citation Flow. The data measures the quality and influence of backlinks. The metrics help you assess the value of links pointing to your site, so you focus on building strong, authoritative links.
Specific Application: Majestic is excellent for evaluating backlink quality, identifying link-building opportunities, and monitoring your link profile’s trustworthiness.
How we use it: We use Majestic to assess the quality of our existing backlinks and identify high-authority sites for future link-building efforts. The Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics help us prioritize our link-building targets.
Why we love it: The standout feature of Majestic is its focus on backlink quality through Trust Flow and Citation Flow. The unique metrics provide deeper insight into the strength of your backlink profile. It lets us make smarter link-building decisions.
Pricing: Majestic’s Lite plan starts at $49.99 monthly. It also offers a Pro plan for $99.99 a month and an API plan for $399.99 a month. Each level builds upon the features included with the last.
Learn about 9 link-building metrics you should measure.
Local SEO, Citations & Reviews
The problem: Managing local citations, reviews, and business listings across multiple platforms is a time-consuming process that’s prone to errors. Without proper management, your local SEO performance can suffer, leading to poor visibility in local search results.
The solution: Brightlocal offers a comprehensive platform to manage local SEO efforts. It includes citation building, review monitoring, and local search rankings. The platform streamlines local SEO tasks and provides clear insights into how your business is performing in local searches.
Specific Application: Brightlocal is ideal for businesses with a local presence that need to manage their citations and reviews across directories like Google My Business, Yelp, and others. It helps ensure consistent information across all listings, and it improves local SEO rankings.
How we use it: We use Brightlocal to monitor and update our local business listings, track customer reviews, and optimize citations for improved local search visibility. It simplifies the process of managing local SEO tasks in one central platform.
Why we love it: The best feature of Brightlocal is its ability to automate citation building and review monitoring. It saves us a significant amount of time while ensuring accuracy across all listings. Its reporting tools give us even more valuable insights into local SEO performance.
Pricing: You can start using Brightlocal to track your local search rankings for $39 a month. You can better manage your local backlink profile for $49 a month, and you can use the SEO link building tool to grow your business for just $59 per month.
Get Vazoola’s guide to improving your local search rankings.
For local businesses, use Brightlocal to manage citations and reviews, while using Moz Link Explorer to discover local link-building opportunities. Together, they provide comprehensive management of your local SEO strategy while identifying authoritative local sites for link-building.
Toxic Backlink Checker
The problem: Toxic backlinks can significantly harm your website’s SEO, leading to penalties and drops in search rankings. Identifying and removing these harmful links is essential, but manually tracking them is both time-consuming and complex.
The solution: Ahrefs offers a powerful backlink checker that helps identify toxic backlinks by analyzing your link profile. It allows you to spot harmful links and disavow them before they negatively impact your website's SEO performance.
Specific Application: Ahrefs is perfect for monitoring backlinks, identifying toxic links, and ensuring that your site’s backlink profile remains healthy. It provides detailed reports on each backlink’s quality and potential risk.
How we use it: We use Ahrefs to regularly audit our backlink profile, specifically looking for low-quality or toxic links that could harm our rankings. One of the best link building tool options, it lets us proactively disavow harmful links and maintain a strong, clean backlink profile.
Why we love it: The best feature of Ahrefs is its detailed backlink analysis, which includes metrics like Domain Rating and URL Rating. These metrics help us quickly identify and address toxic backlinks, ensuring that our SEO efforts aren’t derailed by bad links.
Pricing: Ahrefs plans start at $129 a month for small businesses, and they range up to $449 per month for advanced SEO link tools and $14,990 per year for enterprise-level clients.
We answer: What makes a high-quality backlink?
Discover Link Opportunities
The problem: Finding high-quality backlink opportunities is a must if you want to elevate your domain authority and SEO rankings. However, manually discovering link-building opportunities across various sites can be both time-consuming and difficult.
The solution: Moz Link Explorer provides detailed insights into your site’s backlinks. It lets you explore competitor backlinks. By analyzing the quality, authority, and relevance of backlinks, it uncovers new opportunities to improve your link-building strategy.
Specific Application: Moz Link Explorer is perfect for discovering potential link-building opportunities by analyzing both your own and your competitors’ backlink profiles. It helps identify high-authority sites that can improve your SEO performance.
How we use it: We use Moz Link Explorer to regularly review our backlink profile and discover new link opportunities. We also employ the tool to analyze our competitors ‘backlinks and uncover potential link-building prospects.
Why we love it: The best feature of Moz Link Explorer is its ability to reveal high-quality linking domains. It provides actionable insights on where to focus our link-building efforts. The Link Intersect tool, in particular, helps identify sites linking to competitors but not yet to us.
Pricing: Moz offers a variety of tools Moz Local is available for just $14 each month, while Moz Pro costs $99 a month. Moz’s STAT Search Analytics offers a suite of advanced features for $720 a month.
Combine SEMRush and Moz Link Explorer for competitor analysis. While both link building tools for SEO offer competitor backlink analysis, using them together provides deeper insights. Use SEMRush to uncover competitors’ backlink profiles, then dive into Moz Link Explorer’s Link Intersect tool to find common linking domains.
The problem: Securing backlinks from authoritative sites can be challenging, especially when you're looking to build a high-quality link profile. Many link-building opportunities require significant time and effort to find and secure.
The solution: Help a Reporter Out, now known as Connectively, connects journalists seeking expert quotes with industry professionals who can provide valuable insights. By contributing expert opinions, businesses can earn authoritative backlinks from media outlets and high-traffic websites.
Specific Application: HARO is ideal for securing high-quality backlinks from reputable news sources and blogs. It helps businesses establish credibility and gain valuable links that boost SEO.
How we use it: We use HARO to respond to relevant journalist inquiries, providing expert insights in exchange for backlinks from authoritative websites. It’s an easy way to secure valuable media exposure while improving our link profile.
Why we love it: The best feature of HARO is the potential to earn backlinks from top-tier media outlets with minimal effort. The platform offers a simple way to connect with journalists and gain high-authority links that enhance credibility and SEO.
Pricing: You can get started with HARO for free, but additional paid features are available. The Core plan offers a variety of features for a single profile at just $19 a month. Additional profiles are available with the Pro plan at $49 a month, and the Premier plan offers even more features for $149 a month.
Read more: 12 methods to get backlinks
Bulk SEO Data Puller
The problem: Gathering comprehensive SEO data across multiple URLs can be overwhelming and time-consuming. This is especially true when manually pulling metrics for large-scale audits or link-building campaigns.
The solution: URL Profiler simplifies this endeavor by pulling bulk SEO data from multiple sources in one go. It retrieves information such as backlinks, social shares, domain metrics, and content quality. That makes large-scale SEO analysis more efficient and manageable.
Specific Application: URL Profiler is ideal for running bulk SEO audits, content analysis, and backlink profiling. It consolidates data from various sources, allowing for quick assessments of multiple URLs in a single report.
How we use it: We use URL Profiler to pull data for large-scale content audits, backlink analysis, and technical SEO checks across multiple pages. It saves us time by automating the collection of key SEO metrics from a variety of sources.
Why we love it: The best feature of URL Profiler is its ability to gather data from multiple sources in one bulk operation. It allows us to streamline our SEO audits and link-building efforts, which provides us with the data we need in minutes rather than hours.
Pricing: SEO Data Puller’s Solo plan starts at $19.95 a month, billed on a yearly basis. The Pro plan is $25.95 and the Agency plan is $64.95.
Identify Links to Avoid
Links that Rank Backlink Blacklist
The problem: Toxic backlinks can significantly harm your website's SEO. They lead to penalties from search engines and reduced rankings. Identifying and removing these harmful links is important to maintain a healthy backlink profile, Still, it can be difficult to know which links are damaging.
The solution: Links that Rank’s Backlink Blacklist is a tool designed to identify toxic backlinks that could harm your website’s SEO. It helps you find potentially harmful links, providing the data needed to disavow them before they impact your rankings.
Specific Application: This tool is perfect for auditing your backlink profile and identifying links from low-quality or spammy websites that should be avoided or disavowed.
How we use it: We use the Links that Rank Backlink Blacklist to regularly scan our backlink profile for harmful links. It helps us maintain a clean, healthy link profile by highlighting toxic backlinks that could negatively affect our SEO performance.
Why we love it: The best feature of Links that Rank’s Backlink Blacklist is its accuracy in identifying potentially damaging links. Its clear, easy-to-understand reports give us the confidence we need to take action and remove harmful backlinks.
Pricing: The Backlink Blacklist is free to use. Users can paste as many as 1,000 links to check the blacklist.
Use Ahrefs and Links That Rank’s Backlink Blacklist together to monitor for toxic backlinks. While Ahrefs excels at spotting toxic links, combining it with the Backlink Blacklist ensures you don’t miss any potentially harmful links.
Infinitely Free Link Prospecting
The problem: Finding relevant websites for link-building opportunities can be challenging without access to expensive tools. Many businesses, especially small ones, struggle to identify quality link prospects without paying for premium services. It’s one of the best free link-building tools.
The solution: Looking for a free backlinks tool? Google, as a free search engine, offers a simple yet powerful way to discover link-building opportunities by using advanced search operators. By tailoring search queries, users can uncover guest posting opportunities, resource pages, and relevant websites for outreach.
Specific Application: Google’s free link building tool is perfect for link prospecting at no cost. It helps you find relevant websites, blogs, and directories for building quality backlinks, making it accessible to businesses of any size.
How we use it: We use Google’s advanced search operators (such as "intitle post" or "inurl") to find potential link-building prospects. This free method lets us create a list of high-quality websites to target for outreach without any additional cost.
Why we love it: The best feature of Google for link prospecting is its flexibility and the ability to refine searches using operators. It's free, always available, and can yield a vast amount of link-building opportunities with the right search strategies.
Pricing: Google is always free to use.
When using the skyscraper technique, rely on SEMRush to identify high-performing content with lots of backlinks. Then use Ahrefs to analyze the quality of those backlinks. The combo helps you target the most valuable content and secure high-authority backlinks in the process.