Building your website involves SEO and ranking strategies. The more you know the better your rank. With these awesome link-building tools, you can attract high-quality traffic to your website and ace the ranks online today. Here are the top 14 hand-picked tools for building your next website in 2023.
3 stages of link building:
It is important for us to first understand the 3 stages of link building before we dive into the top 14 list.
Prospecting:
Find an audience that is interested in linking to you, your website, or your blog. These are people who have visited a competitor and showed interest in your niche. Also called ‘prospects’.
Vetting:
To evaluate your prospects and identify if you want a link from them. This is done by a manual review, judging the quality of the content, SEO metrics, and whether or not the content is relevant to your niche.
Email outreach:
This is when link builders contact prospects and request a link.
Now that we understand the 3 stages, you can look over the list below and identify which stage you need your tool for and how you can implement it.
1. Google alerts:
Now this famous name has the largest index of web pages. How can we use this? You put in a search query that will create an alert for you. Alerts will notify you once there has been some activity giving you prospects you can reach out to.
2. Ahrefs :
The website offers an all-in-one SEO toolkit with a host of tools for your research. This SEO powerhouse is one of the biggest names in the segment. The Site Explorer feature is a blessing. Once you put in a search and audit the results, you get an organic performance overview. This in turn makes Ahrefs one of the top tools for high-quality back-link data.
3. Hunter.io :
This email-finding tool helps in finding relevant email addresses for your prospects. The free plan allows you 25 searches per month. Finding emails are crucial for the vetting stage.
4. Neverbounce :
Neverbounce allows you to sift through the addresses found on Hunter.io and identify valid and deliverable email addresses. This tool is vital as sending a host of emails to addresses that will not respond is a sheer waste of time effort and even money. Neverbounce has a free-to-use trial, so make sure you try it out first.
5. Pitchbox :
The tool finds itself in the vetting & email outreach stage. Pitchbox allows you to use its email outreach module in a workflow fashion. This particularly helps when working in a large team. Inspect, personalize and compose are the sections in the workflow to help your team to inspect SEO metrics, add personalization and then compose the email at the end.
6. SE Ranking backlink checker:
Another all-in-one software with many aspects like a backlink checker, backlink monitor, and website audits to name a few of the 30 more tools. The backlink checker gives you a full overview of a website’s backlink information in a snap of a finger!
7. BuzzSumo content discovery:
Content discovery with BuzzSumo is super easy. How? All you need to do is search a topic, hit enter, and find an array of search results along with the metrics. Filter your search results, find your criteria, and plan the execution.
8. HARO(Help A Reporter Out):
Used as a PR tool in the prospecting stage, the software is known as a link-building tool, however, it markets itself as ‘ a marketplace for journalists and sources.’ This tool will help you link to quality reporters wanting resources for an article or media coverage. A great opportunity to add links.
9. Mozbar:
One of the first in the SEO game, Moz released a browser extension. The search results give you: Page authority, Domain authority, and the Number of links. Adding to this, Mozbar is completely free to use! No subscriptions or plan structure. One of the few free tools that come on this list. Backlink monitoring, Link processing, and Link prospecting all together!
10. Scrapebox:
Deemed as the “ Swiss army knife of SEO ”. The tool requires you to use proxies. Which is the only bump on the road whilst using it. As the name suggests, by entering a search query, you can scrape the relevant searches which fit your niche. Once done you can then plan your next step. Scrapebox has features like SE harvester, proxy harvester, keyword harvester, and it also helps to research pay-per-click advertising. However, you must target organic search results. Also known as white-hat. Staying on the white-hat side of things is the one thing to keep in mind while using Scrapebox to keep things clean on your end and avoid negative ranking.
11. Ontolo:
Dedicated to link prospecting, this nifty tool has an enormous database of URLs on the internet. 400,000,000 per day to be specific. Now, Ontolo helps you find valuable prospects from the entire database and comes in the vetting stage of link building. The user interface of the tool is super simple to use making it a personal favorite in this list.
12. Respona:
Seamless link building is what Respona strives for and promises to deliver. The website is built for finding perfect link-building opportunities and connecting with them easily. You can build relationships with all the authentic prospects in the database, manage your emails, and target those prospects all in one destination.
13. Majestic SEO:
Just like you add keywords into the search bar like many others in this list, the results in Majestic are displayed in graphs, scores, and a metric called Trustflow. Trustflow is the reason why this is one of the best tools on this list. The visual representation of information allows you to interpret data and quickly understand the backlink status of a website. After which you can plan your next step.
14. URL Profiler:
After you download the application you can find many integrated tools mentioned on this list and make them work in unison. The data can be extracted in a well-organized.csv file. Scrapebox does something similar, but Profiler does not involve proxies, giving it an edge over what we can call ‘Its counterpart’. Auditing is great with Profiler and it’s a favorite for many users.
Last words:
SEO and SERPS are Greek and Latin without these wonderful tools. Think of it as a lens through which we can interpret this data and put it to great use. Choosing from the list is easier by identifying the stage you find the most challenging. Once you’ve done so, you know which one to go for. A quick tip: An all-in-one tool along with free-to-use tools will be your best bet whilst link building. Will also help you stay on budget! For example, Ahrefs + Google alerts are used together to give you all that you need for building quality links.
