21 Best Free Link Building Tools for Businesses in 2024

Link building is the foundation of a strong SEO as it boosts your website authority and increases your search rankings. Link building is a task that takes time however you can reduce the effort by using reliable link building software.

In order to be a successful digital marketer, it is important to prioritize link-building software and tools. We have given a list of the best link-building software to empower your initiative in 2024. This software will help you find new opportunities and improve your link-building campaign. For each software, you will learn about the pros, cons, pricing, and usage.

 Which Software is Right for Me?

There are several methods for various people. Depending on your goals, the table below should assist guide you in the proper route.

ToolsCompetitor AnalysisEmail OutreachFinding EmailsGuest PostingFinding Broken LinksDigital PRUnlinked Mentions
Ahrefs
Semrush
Moz
Linkody
Hunter
Contactout
Majestic
Respona
HARO
PitchBox
BuzzStream
MailShake
Monitor Backlinks
Ninja Outreach
Google Alerts
Check My Links
Cognitive SEO
Raven
Link Prospector
URL Profiler
Never Bounce

1) Ahrefs- Link Building Software

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a great link-building software for junior marketers as well as SEO experts.

Some of the simple and actionable uses that you can try with ahrefs is:

  • You can see how much search traffic your competitors get.
  • Check which pages bring search traffic to your competitors.
  • You can analyze what people are searching for on Google.
  • Measure the full search traffic potential of a topic.
  • Find the factors that hurt your website’s performance in Google.
  • Check the ranking difficulty of any keyword.
  • Check out where your competitors got their backlinks.
  • Discover your competitor’s linkable assets.
  • Monitor your ranking progress for many keywords.
  • Look for gaps in your content strategy.
  • Find more than a hundred quality link prospects

Ahrefs site explorer

Ahrefs site explorer

It will show you how much search traffic your competitors get and allow you to analyze your own search traffic against them. You need to open the site explorer and insert the site you want to audit. You will get an overview of the website’s organic performance.

marketing lad

Marketing Lad gets over 80 visitors every month.

Please note: These 3rd party tools don’t give you the accurate organic traffic number.

With Ahrefs, you can check the metrics specific to links such as the total number of referring domains and backlinks for a particular website that you’re auditing.

You can analyze the website’s backlink profile and see how the number of referring domains has grown over time. You can also check the website’s most linked pages.

marketing lad

In a study done by folks at Authority Hacker, Ahrefs traffic estimations were the most accurate and most consistent among all major SEO platforms. We still doubt this study!

My Favorite feature: A small search engine for link builders is Ahrefs Content Explorer.

The Bottom Line: The preferred SEO tool for experts is Ahrefs. If you don’t mind the more complex interface, it’s a good Semrush substitute.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by Ahrefs.

Ahrefs pricing

2) SEMRush

Semrush Pricing

SEMRush is another excellent tool for link building. You can uncover millions of national & local keywords, analyze any domain’s backlink profile, run technical SEO audits and track your SERP positions daily.

Semrush

Below is the screenshot of the dashboard which we get when we log in to our SEMRush account.

semrush

My Favorite feature: There is an outreach tool included into Semrush.

The Bottom Line: Semrush should be your one and only link-building tool of choice.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by SEMRush.

3) Moz

Moz is one of the oldest SEO tools in the market. This tool covers many SEO features like site audits, rank tracking, backlink analysis, keyword research, etc.

Moz has an all-in-one link-building tool called Link Explorer.

moz

Reverse engineer your competitor’s backlinks

You can enter your competitor’s domain (or specific URL) into the link explorer and see all of their backlinks including a site’s domain authority.

My Favorite feature: View the most prevalent anchor text in a website’s backlink profile quickly.

The Bottom Line: The third-best link analysing tool available is called Moz Link Explorer. However, a Moz membership also includes a number of other features (like as an on-page assessor) that may be worth the money.

Pricing

Moz Link Explorer is a free SEO tool.

4) Linkody

Linkody is one of the cheapest and most user-friendly link building tools.

linkody

Linkody gives you information regarding some important metrics like DA, spam score, and anchor text usage. It also allows you to connect with more data sources like Google Analytics and Ahrefs. In the below screenshot, you can see how Linkody curates different metrics like Moz Rank, etc

linkody

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by Linkody.

My Favorite feature: Comprehensive backlink monitoring and analysis capabilities. 

The Bottom Line: Linkody proves to be an indispensable tool in maximizing the effectiveness of your link building efforts

5) Hunter – Best for Finding Emails

hunter

Hunter lets you find professional emails in seconds without even registering. It offers many features like domain search, email finder, email verifier, simple cold outreach campaigns, etc. You can paste the domain name into the search bar and wait for the tool to do its magic.

Hunter Dashboard

My Favorite feature: User-friendly interface and powerful email-finding capabilities

The Bottom Line: Hunter.io remains a top choice for professionals, marketers, and businesses seeking to expand their networks and reach the right people with confidence.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by Hunter.

Hunter pricing

6) ContactOut – Email Finder

LinkedIn is the perfect platform for anyone in need of professional connections. With such a large pool of users, it’s easy to find people i.e. website owners or webmasters who can help you achieve your business goals.

Contactout makes it easy to find the right email for your LinkedIn prospects with its Chrome extension tool, reducing the number of bounced emails. Another useful feature is its Search Portal on the dashboard where you can search prospects by name, company, job title and etc.

My Favorite feature: User-friendly interface and seamless integration with LinkedIn and other platforms.

The Bottom Line: ContactOut’s email-finding capabilities prove to be a valuable asset in establishing meaningful connections and driving successful communication strategies.

PRICING

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by ContactOut:

7) Majestic – Best for Alternative Data

Majestic

Majestic is another great backlink analysis tool. It maps the web to bring you the link intelligence data that you need to dominate your market.

You need to insert the URL of the site or webpage in the site explorer tool and after that, you will get a series of graphs and metrics. They include:

  • Trust flow: It represents the quality of links that point to URLs and websites. A web page with more Trust Flow than Citation Flow will usually have great quality links.
  • Citation Flow: It is a score that reflects the number of links that point to any given website. It doesn’t care whether a link is of good quality or poor quality.
  • Visibility Flow: The Visibility Flow score assists you to find suitable editorial-style links on high Trust Flow pages rather than directory-style links.
  • Topical Trust Flow: With a score that shows where a website is positioned compared to the very best sites in over 800 categories, it illustrates the topical relevancy of a web page.
  • Flow Metric Scores: Each score indicates a different measure of the result of your content. You can gain great insight from investigating where the balance between Flow Metric scores differs from the norm.

My Favorite feature: Topical Trust Flow

The Bottom Line: The link database of Majestic SEO is enormous. But the UX is outdated and challenging to use. However, for $50 a month, you definitely get your money’s worth.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by Majestic.

Majestic Pricing

8) Respona – Link Building Made easy

Respona

Respona is another great tool to build quality backlinks to your website and take your organic traffic to new heights.

You can manually insert opportunities or use Respona’s built-in search engine. It uses a four-step process for setting up a new campaign. It allows you to manage email communications via Respona & build links for your target pages.

respona

My Favorite feature: Respona locates the appropriate individual for each website automatically, providing their confirmed email and Linkedin profile.

The Bottom Line: Respona is an effective link-building tool for both external teams and internal teams. Running outreach initiatives at scale is made much faster by its automated features.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plan offered by Respona.

Respona Plan

9) HARO – Marketplace For Journalists

Haro

HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out and it works as a two-sided marketplace for journalists and sources.

For Journalists:

You need to provide your name, contact information, and media outlets. Your source request should meet their guidelines and then you can submit it to the HARO editorial team for review. The HARO team will send relevant pitches straight to your inbox and HARO account.

For Sources:
First, you need to register, and then you can monitor source requests. Check your inbox three times a day and look out for source requests relevant to you or your client’s industry, expertise, or personal experience. Pitch the masked email address listed in the source request. Include answers to the journalist’s questions and a bio with your client’s contact information. The journalist will reach out to you if they are interested.

My Favorite feature: You are the first to hear about press possibilities thanks to the “Head Start” (paid feature).

The Bottom Line:One of the strongest strategies for mass-producing high-authority backlinks is HARO.

Pricing

The screenshot gives an overview of the plan offered by HARO.

haro

10) Pitchbox – Best Link Building Tool for Outreach

pitchbox

Pitchbox is a great influencer outreach & Content Marketing Platform for Publishers, SEO agencies, and Brands.

It is an end-to-end Link Building Productivity Platform, it gives you everything you need to stay organized, build more links, and reach your goals.

Pitchbox Link Building

After you sign up or log in to their website, then first you need to create a Project and choose the type of campaign you want to run. There are a lot of pre-built campaigns like Blogger Outreach, Advanced Search, Product Reviews, Hot off the press, Competitor backlinks, and Link Removal. Once you start a campaign, the workflow is built-in to guide you through all the steps. From finding high-quality prospects to grabbing contact information and sending cold outreach emails, you can create personalized fields that make outreach emails personalized and many people can work on a single outreach email. You can set up an automated email sequence to automatically follow up with people that don’t reply to your first email.

My Favorite feature: Metrics Filters

The Bottom Line: Pitchbox is a link building tool that combines “powerful features” with “easy to use” functionality. Although it is not the most affordable tool available, if you have a sizable outreach staff, I strongly suggest it.

Pricing

For pricing, you have to contact the company via its website.

11) BuzzStream – end-to-end outreach platform

Buzzstream

BuzzStream is an end-to-end outreach platform that helps you stay organized and grow your digital PR and link-building results, whether you are a team of one or twenty.

They have many free tools to find link opportunities, conduct link research or automate link-building tasks.

  • They have an email research tool in which you can enter a name, company, and website and this tool will generate Google searches to find their email address.
Credentials For Buzzstream
  • You can extract a domain from a URL using their free tool which takes a list of URLs, extracts the domain, and saves the list as a CSV file so it can later be imported using a CSV importer.
  • Extract Page Title, Description, and Keywords from URLs.You can enter a list of URLs and this tool will return the title tag, keywords, and description for them.
  • Link Building Query Generator helps to automatically create link-building search queries to help you find link opportunities.
  • Build outreach lists from blogrolls. Enter a set of URLs and this tool will find their blogrolls and build an outreach list that includes blogroll members.

My Favorite feature: Custom Fields

The Bottom Line: One of my favourite link-building CRMs is BuzzStream. It might assist you in keeping track of your outreach if you engage in a lot of outreach or collaborate with a group of link builders.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plan offered by BuzzStream.

Buzzstream Pricing

12) Mailshake

12) Mailshake

12) Mailshake – scale your link-building outreach

Mailshake simplifies your outreach workflow.

It has an email writer with Artificial Intelligence which is powered by Intel. You can scale your link-building outreach with mass personalization and automatic follow-ups. It has proven link-building templates to increase your link placement rate. It allows you to personalize emails at scale with powerful mail merge features. You can schedule follow-up emails if a recipient clicks a link or doesn’t reply. You can try their free tool on the website.

Email Copy Analyzer

My Favorite feature: Intuitive and user-friendly email outreach campaign builder.

The Bottom Line: Mailshake empowers you to build meaningful connections and drive results in your email outreach endeavors.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by Mailshake.

Mailshake Pricing
Monitor backlinks

It is one of the best monitoring tools for backlinks and keywords. It is a must-have tool for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs.

Monitoring Backlinks

You can build great links, monitor your brand and create relationships with Influencers , recover lost links, track keyword rankings over time, reverse engineer competitors’ keyword and backlink strategies, fight negative SEO by efficiently disavowing bad links and simplify all your backlink data in one place.

Link Analysis

It has an easy dashboard with big insights, you can get your traffic,  backlink changes, and keyword rankings in one place. Manage your keywords with tags and filters. Get local pack, traffic volume, competition and CPC data. Its unique feature is Disavow tool which lets you filter the bad links easily and quickly generate a disavow list for submission to Google. You can also save time with useful email reports and alerts.

My Favorite feature:  Comprehensive backlink monitoring and tracking capabilities. 

The Bottom Line: The backlink monitoring function of Monitor Backlinks is a useful tool for SEO specialists, marketers, and website owners to keep track of their link-building initiatives, enhance search engine rankings, and guarantee a solid and healthy backlink profile for long-term online success.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by Monitor Backlinks.

Monitor Backlinks Pricing

14) Ninja Outreach –  creates influencer marketing campaigns

Ninja Outreach

It creates effective influencer marketing campaigns by filtering through millions of influencers’ insights to find the one that captures your target audience’s attention.

You can build backlinks faster with its all-in-one link-building software solution. You can search their websites and blog database, write outreach templates or use premade ones, and track results with built-in CRM.

The main features of its Pro Link Building Software are Competitor link building, expert roundups, broken link building, link roundups, guest post link building, infographic link building, resource page link building, and podcast link building.

Ninja Outreach Link Building

My Favorite feature: Email outreach feature. 

The Bottom Line: With its all-in-one influencer prospecting, email outreach, and relationship management capabilities, Ninja Outreach empowers marketers, PR professionals, and businesses to effectively connect with influencers and expand their network, driving successful influencer marketing campaigns and establishing valuable partnerships.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by Ninja Outreach.

Ninja Outreach Pricing

15) Google Alerts – Detect content CHANGES

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service offered by Google which allows you to detect content changes.

Google Alert Link Building

It is a  helpful tool for a specific type of link building namely unlinked mentions. There are many websites that have written about your brand but have not provided a link. It’s a simple form of link prospecting. You can create an alert for your brand and when someone mentions your website, Google will send an email to you.

If the webpage doesn’t link to your site, you can reach out to the editor asking for a link. Google alerts allow you to set up alerts for your competitors. You can customize the alerts according to your language, region, etc.

My Favorite feature: Real-time updates and relevant information on topics of interest.. 

The Bottom Line: Google Alerts’ real-time updates and customizable options make it an invaluable tool for individuals, businesses, and professionals to stay informed, monitor their online presence, and track industry insights and trends with ease and efficiency.

Pricing

It’s free of cost.

It is an extension developed for web designers, developers, etc.

Check my Links

A link checker crawls through your webpage and looks for broken links. When you are editing a website or a web page that has lots of links, this tool helps you to swiftly check all the links on the page. It highlights the valid ones in green and the broken ones in red.

This way you can copy all bad links to your clipboard with one click. This tool is a browser add-on for Chrome. Just head to the Chrome Store to install it. Once the extension is installed you can go to that specific webpage and click on the icon to check all the links.

My Favorite feature: Efficiency in quickly scanning web pages for broken or dead links.

The Bottom Line: “Check My Links” proves to be an essential tool for anyone looking to maintain a healthy and functional website by efficiently managing broken links and enhancing overall website performance.

Pricing

It’s free of cost.

17) cognitiveSEO – monitoring your site’s evolution

Cognitive SEO

CognitiveSEO is a great tool for SEO professionals, Digital Marketing Agencies, or Brands for increasing traffic or monitoring your site’s evolution.

It’s a complete SEO Software Suite that will uncover all your traffic issues, its keyword and content optimization tool will boost your rankings, its on-page website crawler & SEO Audit will help you fix your site, and it has backlink analysis, content audit, and rank tracking for every site. One of the unique features of this tool is that you can detect unnatural links for both algorithmic and manual penalties.

Content Optimization

My Favorite feature: In-depth and comprehensive backlink analysis.

The Bottom Line: CognitiveSEO’s backlink analysis feature proves to be an invaluable tool for SEO professionals, marketers, and website owners to gain a comprehensive understanding of their website’s link profile, improve their backlink strategy, and enhance their overall SEO performance.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by cognitiveSEO.

Cognitive SEO Pricing

18) Raven – search engine optimization tool

Raven

Raven is a search engine optimization tool for link building, research, and reporting.

Raven has many features which are related to SEO and link building. The features that are specific to link building include: 

  • Marketing Reports
  • Competitor Domain Research
  • Backlink Checker
  • Link Spy

My Favorite feature: Powerful and intuitive website auditor.

The Bottom Line: By utilizing Raven’s website auditor, users can enhance their website’s SEO performance, improve search engine rankings, and ensure their web pages are optimized for maximum visibility and organic traffic.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by Raven.

Raven Pricing
Link Prospector

This tool was designed to help link builders and content marketers find new outreach opportunities, to give their content the relevant amplification it needs to earn links and shares.

Link Prospector Link Building

Link Prospector removes the manual searching for resource pages in Google as it has hundreds of pre-made search strings built right into it.

My Favorite feature: Advanced and efficient link prospecting capabilities.

The Bottom Line: Link Prospector’s advanced link prospecting capabilities, users can save time and effort in finding valuable link-building opportunities and enhance their website’s authority and search engine rankings through effective link-building strategies.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by Link Prospector.

Link Prospector Pricing

20) URL Profiler – AUDIT LINKS SWIFTLY

url profiler

URL Profiler is a strong tool for SEOs to swiftly audit links, content, and social data. It doesn’t have a web application so you have to download it onto your device.

It offers many tools related to content and links and helps you gather data in one place based on a list of URLs you’ve provided.

url profiler link building

Once you give the URLs then you can choose the data that you want the URL profiler to extract from those URLs.After that, you will get an excel file with the results of your audit.

My Favorite feature: Ability to gather and analyze comprehensive data from various sources in a single, easy-to-read report.

The Bottom Line: By utilizing URL Profiler’s advanced data gathering and analysis capabilities, users can gain a deeper understanding of their website’s SEO performance, identify opportunities for growth, and make data-driven decisions to improve their overall online presence.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by URL Profiler.

Pricing

21) NeverBounce – real-time email verification

Neverbounce

It provides real-time email verification and cleaning services and offers integration with over 80 different email outreach platforms and CRMs. 

It offers three main solutions:

  • Bulk Email List Cleaning: You can verify and clean email lists for the perfect send. Simply upload your existing list and download your new and clean list, thus eliminating high risks in real time.
Neverbounce

Real-Time Email Verification: You can verify and validate customer emails directly at the point of entry. Simply add Verify to your lead pages, registration forms, or wherever emails are collected.

Never Bounce
  • Automated List Cleaning: You can automate your email list cleaning, and connect your email provider for automated cleaning, ensuring accurate and up-to-date data around the clock.

My Favorite feature: Powerful and accurate email verification system.

The Bottom Line:  By leveraging NeverBounce’s accurate email verification feature, users can improve their email marketing efforts, increase open and click-through rates, and maintain a positive sender reputation, ultimately leading to more successful and effective email campaigns.

Pricing

The below screenshot gives an overview of the plans offered by NeverBounce.

Neverbounce pricing

Conclusion

It’s a fact that links matter when it comes to promoting your blog and increasing your traffic so it is essential to choose the right tool for link building. We have given a list of the top tools that will be helpful for link building and SEO in 2024. It’s completely up to you to choose a specific tool based on your usage and budget.

Frequently Asked Questions

Link-building tools are those tools that help you to build an effective link-building strategy because they help you to find and acquire the highest quality backlinks in your niche.

Link building still remains one of the most effective SEO techniques. Getting backlinks will increase your ranking because high-authority backlinks let Google see your site as more authoritative.

There are so many SEO tools that rank at the top like Ahrefs, Respona, SEMRush, etc. The best tool for you is the one that satisfies your requirements and SEO budget.

The first step to automating link building is to gather data because there are some basic automation tools like ahrefs and Moz that can crawl the web and find backlink data and the best link-building opportunities for you. The above will tools help you to create a list of all pages that link to a specific domain or URL. Once you have the list, go ahead and set up the email outreach campaigns for building links.

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