In this article we’ll review the five best tools that will make link-building easy and effective for you in 2022.
We will show you how each tool works, why we like it, and what it will cost you if you invest in it.
So, buckle up and read on to learn how a few simple link-building tools can overflow your website with high-quality links and get you ranking faster!
Google Alerts — Best for Brand Mentions
When it comes to link building, Google Alerts is probably not the first tool that comes to your mind.
But this free platform is actually an excellent tool for your ”fresh mention” link-building strategy. Meaning that you can reach out to a site owner who randomly mentions your brand name or products and convince them to actually link to your site.
Why We Like Google Alerts
- Informs you when content relevant to your target keywords is published online. You can then get in touch with these content owners to create links for your site.
- Alerts you every time your brand name or products are mentioned on the web. And you can use this opportunity to reach out and turn your brand mentions into links.
- You can monitor the web to see how many links your competitor websites are getting. This will help you figure out who is talking about them and, hopefully, how you can get the same people to link to your site.
Our favorite feature about Google Alerts is that once you create an alert, you can customize the settings to choose when and how to receive them. This will let you laser-target the alerts to get the most relevant ones.
How Google Alerts Works
For starters, move over to the Google Alerts page and set it up.
While you can technically set it up without a Gmail account, it’s best to have one. You can set up your Gmail account here if you don’t already have one.
Now all you need to do is insert a search query — say content marketing — and you’ll create an alert every time content marketing is mentioned anywhere on the web. Going forwards, the tool will send all the relevant alerts straight to your inbox.
Finding these alerts is vital because you can reach out to these websites, and if they’re relevant, you can ask them to mention you on their site and hopefully get some backlinks. If that’s not possible, you can ask them to at least mention your brand or product name.
Pro Tip: If you’re concerned about emails relevant to each word from your query (in this case, the words ‘’content’’ and ‘’marketing’’) flooding your inbox, you should try adding quotation marks. For instance, adding quotation marks to content marketing will turn it into ‘’content marketing’’ and help you find alerts relevant to the exact phrase.
What’s Google Alerts Best For?
The tool is best for keeping track of real-time mentions, media outlets, and new content without investing in a pricey monitoring service.
Linkody — Best for Monitoring Competitor Backlinks
Next on our list of the best link-building tools in 2021 is Linkody. And the reason why we’ve included it here is that it’s:
- Cheap
- User Friendly
It provides you with a complete profile of your (and your competitor’s) backlinks, which you can use to see how your site is doing against them. You can then use these powerful competitor analytics to incorporate strategies employed by your competitors to get more inbound links to your website.
Why We Like Linkody
- Lets you remove spammy damaging links with the disavow option.
- You can view the backlink data in an easy-to-understand format on the dashboard.
- You can analyze where your competitors get their backlinks and execute a similar strategy.
- Lets you view the SEO value of your backlinks, which can keep you from wasting your efforts on low-quality websites.
- It informs you when new backlinks to your website are created or when active ones go down with daily notification alerts.
How Linkody Works
Linkody uses data from multiple sources, including Moz DA and Alexa Rank, to give you specific metrics like DA, spam score, and anchor text usage, which you can use to find high-quality backlinks to your site.
- The first thing you need to do is start a backlink analysis by adding the domain of your competitor’s website to the tool.
- To enter the domain, you click the button marked +ADD Domain and add the correct URL.
- Linkody will start searching for backlinks that you can analyze based on the metrics provided by the tool. You can then spot the most high-quality opportunities for your own backlinking efforts.
Linkody Pricing
Once your 30-days free trial is over, you can choose from the following five pricing plans:
- Webmaster — at $14.90 per month, you get 2 domains, 500 monitored links, and 1 user.
- Advanced — at $24.90 per month, you get 5 domains, 2000 monitored links, and 1 user.
- Pro — at $49.90 per month, you get 20 domains, 5000 monitored links, and 3 users.
- Agency — at $99.90 per month, you get 50 domains, 20,000 monitored links, and 5 users.
- Agency XL — at $153.90 per month, you get 100 domains, 40,000 monitored links, and 10 users.
If you opt for the yearly payment plan, you can enjoy a 90-days free trial.
Moz Link Explorer — Best for Determining a Site’s Authority
Used by marketing agencies and individual SEO experts alike, Moz is a powerful link-building tool with an easy-to-understand user interface and a detailed analysis of backlink data.
Moz analyzes over 40 trillion links, 700 million domains, 7 trillion pages to give you metrics like:
- Spam score
- Page Authority
- Domain Authority
Using all this data, you can determine how authoritative a site is. In general, you’ll want links from sites with a higher Domain Authority than your site.
Why We Like Moz Link Explorer
- Allows you to quickly discover new, lost, and broken links for any website.
- Locates “spammy” links so you can disavow them and enhance your rankings.
- Helps you discover who’s linking to your competitor’s website to find all of their backlink sources.
- Merged with Moz’s domain authority, it lets you check how well your overall SEO strategy is doing.
Our favorite Moz feature is the spam score, which you can use to identify low-quality backlinks and stay clear of them. If a website has a high spam score, it probably includes features that are penalized or banned by Google and won’t be ideal for reaching out for link-building opportunities.
How Moz Link Explorer Works
Using Moz Link Explorer to find link-building opportunities is easy.
Once you’re on the Moz tool, head over to the link explorer and insert your or your competitor’s domain
Next, click on the Analyze button, and you will be directed to valuable backlinks data, including:
- Lost links
- Dofollow links
- Linking domains
- Newly discovered links
- Inbound links along with sources and anchor texts
- Top pages — to check for pages that acquired the most backlinks.
Once you’ve all the backlink data available and you’ve established a prospect’s site authority, you can use it to reach out to the relevant sites and get high-quality backlinks.
Moz Link Explorer Pricing
All of the following four pricing plans include a 1-on-1 walkthrough and 24/7 online support:
- Standard — at $99 per month, you can add 3 websites, track 300 keyword rankings, and perform 5000 backlink queries.
- Medium — at $179 per month, you can add 10 websites, track 800 keyword rankings, and perform 20,000 backlink queries.
- Large — at $299 per month, you can add 25 websites, track 1900 keywords, and perform 70,000 backlink queries.
- Premium — at $599 per month, you can add 50 websites, track 4500 keyword rankings, and perform 100,000 backlink queries.
You can save 20% by paying yearly.
Semrush — The Most Comprehensive SEO Tool
If there is only one link-building tool you use for your website, let it be Semrush. That’s because link-building is just one aspect of SEO. There are many other things involved, and Semrush allows you to tackle all of them under one roof.
With its 45 SEO tools and 7-million-strong user base, it is the perfect way to identify multiple backlink opportunities, all the while focusing on other aspects of SEO as well.
Why We Like Semrush
- Easily discover active, lost, broken, and rejected links to your site.
- Includes a backlink gap tool that lets you compare your link profile with your competitors and see where you’re lacking.
- Lets you analyze your competitor websites, check who is linking to their sites, and grab those link-building opportunities for your site as well.
- Helps you identify and fix any technical issues on your site via the site audit option to increase your brand’s credibility and find better link-building opportunities.
- Includes a Social Media Management tool that lets you efficiently manage your social media accounts and reach out to other website admins to link to your content.
- Integrated with an incredible keyword research tool that you can use to optimize your content. This will attract other site owners in your niche to your blog and increase your chance of getting some backlinks.
How Semrush Works
Here’s how you can use Semrush to help you discover the highest quality backlinks in your industry.
- Simply head over to the link-building tool and either add new project if you haven’t already set it up or hit set up if you’ve already loaded a project.
- Next, you can enter your target keywords and your competitor domains.
- Now, all you need to do is hit the Start Link Building button.
- You can now reach out to any of the host of link-building opportunities that the tool will give you. You’ll be able to dive deeper into each prospect and check the quality of the opportunity with the ‘ratings’ dropdown and the Authority Score.
Pro Tip: After choosing your link-building prospects, move them to the In Progress tab using the ”+” sign. Here you can send your outreach emails, track your progress, and get reminders for new opportunities.
Semrush Pricing
- Free — you can manage one project and track 10 keywords.
- Pro — at $119.95 per month, you can manage 5 projects and track 500 keywords.
- Guru — at $229.95 per month, you can manage 15 projects, track 1500 keywords, and access backlink analytics, historical data, content marketing platform, and Google data studio integration.
- Business — at $449.95 per month, you can manage 40 projects, track 5000 keywords. In addition to the features mentioned earlier, you can also access a share of voice metrics and API.
You can save up to 17% by paying yearly.
Voila Norbert — Best for Finding Emails
Now that you are done with your backlink analysis and have narrowed down prospective sites, it’s time to contact their owners via email.
With the correct email address, you can also reach out to other marketers in your space and convince them to link back to your content.
And no tool can find you an email address better than Voila Norbert.
Why We like Voila Norbert
- Offers a 50-leads free trial period.
- Lets you find emails in bulk using a CSV file.
- Comes with a Linkedin tool that lets you hunt down emails from Linkedin profiles.
- Includes an API that allows easy integration with other software, including Google Sheets.
- Integrates seamlessly with 3rd party apps like Google Chrome, Drip, Salesforce, Hubspot, and Zapier.
- Includes an email verification tool that verifies all email addresses to ensure that every email you send to is a real person.
- The email enrichment option provides helpful information behind an address like the name, company, and social media handles. This helps you write more effective emails.
Our favorite thing about Norbert is its accuracy rate, which is 98%. This is higher than all other email-finders in the market, which means with Norbert, your link-building efforts will be smooth.
How Voila Norbert Works
Because Voila Norbert comes into action when you’ve already vetted link-building prospects, it’s usually the last step in your link-building journey.
All you need to do to find an email is to feed your prospect’s:
- Name
- Website Link
Then click the go ahead Norbert button and let Norbert do its magic.
Voila Norbert Pricing
After you’re done with the 50-leads free trial period, you can opt for the following four plans, which all include unlimited team members access, API usage, and bulk email-finding features.
- Valet — at $49 per month, you get up to 1,000 leads.
- Butler — at $99 per month, you get up to 5,000 leads.
- Advisor — at $249 per month, you get up to 15,000 leads.
- Counselor — at $499 per month, you get up to 50,000 leads.
You get a 20% discount when you opt for the yearly payment plan.
Hunter – Best for Cold Email Outreach
Cold email outreach as a link building strategy can yield amazing results if done the right way. Most editors despise cold emails and associate those with spam as link builders tend to send non-personalized templated emails using the “shotgun” method — reaching as many people as possible and hoping for the best.
If you’re looking to launch cold email campaigns that generate high-quality, relevant backlinks for your website, then Hunter might be a good fit for your needs.
Hunter is an all-in-one solution for sending personalized cold outreach campaigns. It includes tools like the Email Finder, Email Verifier, Bulk Tasks, Domain Search, as well as detailed analytics.
Why We like Hunter
- Offers a free plan with 25 searches and 50 verifications per month.
- Includes an API that integrates with tools like Zapier, HubSpot, and Google Sheets.
- Domain Search is an amazing feature that helps you find relevant email addresses associated with any domain.
- Enables you to find and verify email addresses in bulk, which can save you a lot of time.
- Author Finder allows you to find the email address of any blog post author.
- Additional Chrome extensions make finding email addresses an effortless process.
- MailTracker Chrome extension integrated with Gmail notifies you when a recipient reads your emails.
Once you find and verify email addresses, you can import them to Hunter and create personalized outreach campaigns.
How Hunter Works
Hunter lets you find publicly available email addresses associated with domains you want to reach out to. When you find email addresses, you can verify them using the Email Verifier to ensure high deliverability.
Once you have a list of email addresses, you can import it to Hunter Leads and create personalized email campaigns in Hunter Campaigns.
You can track the performance of your campaigns using Hunter’s detailed analytics and use the insights to adjust your outreach strategy accordingly.
Hunter Pricing
At the moment of writing, Hunter offers a free plan and four paid plans:
- Free – Includes 25 searches and 50 verifications every month.
- Starter – Includes 500 searches and 1,000 verifications. It supports sending outreach campaigns from up to 5 email accounts, with up to 2,500 recipients per campaign.
- Growth – Includes 2,500 searches and 5,000 verifications per month. It supports sending outreach campaigns from up to 10 email accounts, with up 5,000 recipients per campaign.
- Pro – Includes 10,000 searches and 20,000 verifications per month. It supports sending outreach campaigns from up to 20 email accounts, with up to 7,500 recipients per campaign.
- Business – Includes 30,000 searches and 60,000 verifications. It supports sending outreach campaigns from up to 40 email accounts, with up to 10,000 recipients per campaign.
About The Author
Mihael D. Cacic is a content marketing consultant at 21writers, a content marketing agency helping SaaS companies scale from $5 Mil onwards.