10 Must Have Link Building Tools for SEO Dominance

 

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Link Research Tools

I consider research the process of determining what type of web sites you should be strategically be going after..This means you should be establishing high quality standards, and metrics to get the job done.  And do it with a vengence.

 

1. Ahrefs

• Pricing: Starts at $99/month (1 user only) and goes up from there

• Pages > Best by links: Two useful applications of this report are:
  • Identify competitors’ most linked content to influence your content strategies.
  • Identify type of sites that link to content you will produce.
• Pages > Best by link growth: This is a “trend” report that provides content that is generating links over the last 30 days. Find content here that is receiving a rapid number of links and create content that is more robust.

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Prospecting & Outreach Tools

Finding highly relevant sites, that will link to your content, is the most excruciating part of link building.

You can create a large list of sites and bulk outreach to save time, but when you’re evaluating your link building success on:

• Link gained per hours.
• The quality of those links.

Then it’s best to handle prospecting manually or in a semi-automated approach.

The tools I’ve listed below can be used for the most popular link building strategies.

2. Majestic

• Pricing: $79.99/month with 1 user

The amount of links in a great feature of Majestic.

Here are some ways to use it:

Topics: This data can be used to identify the types of sites you really desire to get backlinks from.  Consider running this report on the link profiles section  for top ranking sites, then finding sites that fit into particular niches.

• Referring Domains: Use this to evaluate:
  • The number of unique domains you should be focusing on building for your own personal site.
  • The trust/citation flow distribution is a must to consider.

 

3. Pitchbox

• Pricing: $99-$1,500+/month
• Strategies: Blogger outreach, influencer outreach, online PR
• Application: Prospecting, outreach

Pitchbox is certainly one of the pricier tools on the market when compared to email tools like MailChimp, but the integrated prospecting is helpful to reduce the time to qualify sites.

If it wasn’t for a few key features, it would truly be a glorified email system:

• Prospecting sites list builder
• SEO metrics integrated right into the opportunities report

4. Broken Link Builder by Citation Labs

• Pricing: Starts at $67/month
• Strategies: Broken link building
• Application: Prospecting

This tool is worth noting in the prospecting list as it can reduce the time it takes to find broken links.

Inside the Opportunities report, you will have a list of broken links along with the sites that are pointing to those links.

Check out my SEJ article on broken link building for tactical advice on using this data.

5. Agency Analytics

• Pricing: $149-$499/month
• Strategies: Influencer outreach, online PR, citations, directories, et al.

Agency Analytics automatically populates the dashboard with data from Moz and Majestic and connects that data to critical performance metrics, like ranking and organic traffic.

Qualified traffic that converts to leads or sales is the purpose of our link building and SEO efforts so reporting needs to make a connection between them.

6. Cyfe

• Pricing: $19/user per month – Now we’re getting reasonable 
• Strategies: Influencer outreach, online PR, citations, directories

This tool can be built out as a hybrid between Google Sheets and Agency Analytics, meaning it’s very customizable but can also automatically, and easily, aggregate data from multiple sources to create a meaningful report.

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7. BuzzSumo

• Pricing: $99-$499+/month
• Strategies: Blogger outreach, influencer outreach
• Application: Prospecting

Building lists of blogs, influencers, and authors.  This is the nuts!

Out of all the prospecting tools on the list, BuzzSumo has the best filtering options.

You can use the tool for a lot of purposes, but for link building, these are two effective use cases:

• Identifying authors: The content research and influencers sections provides lists of authors/influencers that is searchable by keywords in the content they shared or produced. One fine use-case for this is to search through the “most shared” report and find influencers that received more than 2,000 shares of their content then outreach to them to share yours. This can yield a lot of natural links.
• Identifying sharers/backlinkers: The second use-case goes a layer deeper than the first, finding those that have shared the content. Pull a list of shares or backlinking websites by content then create similar, but better content.

8. Ontolo

• Pricing: $97-$297+/month
• Strategies: Blogger outreach, influencer outreach, directories, blog rolls, resource linking
• Application: Prospecting

If you’re a technical link builder then Ontolo might be your tool of choice.

It certainly doesn’t have the user-friendly setup of BuzzSumo, but its robust features make up for it.

9. BrightLocal

• Pricing: $3/site or $2/side bulk
• Strategies: Local citations
• Application: Prospecting, outreach, citation submissions

Citation building is important for local SEO and should be considered a link building project.

One of the tools with the best value for submitting and managing citations is BrightLocal.

There are two components to BrightLocal: citation monitoring and citation building.

10. Link Assistant

• Pricing: $124-$299/year
• Strategies: Blogger outreach, influencer outreach, directories, blog rolls, resource linking
• Application: Prospecting, outreach

Part of the SEO Power Suite, this deceivingly simple tool has some surprises packed into the prospecting functionality.

I’m not going to talk to the older tactics that Link Assistant can be used for (e.g. forum linking), but the guest posting, giveaways, and links pages (resource pages) can yield a large, unfiltered list for you to dig through.

As you filter through the list of sites on any of the prospecting lists, you can create a custom email for each site.