Link building is at the heart of SEO. The backlinks that you establish will forge a path for which a search engine can crawl to discover pages on your site better. The backlinks to your website will build site recognition with those search engines and ultimately increase the site’s rank.
These are some of the best SEO link building tools that help tremendously with not only getting started with backlinks but also keeping up with tracking the effectiveness of those links and how much traffic they bring to a site.
Top 6 Link Building Tools
1. Best SEO Link Building Tool Overall
Ahrefs is, by far, the best SEO link building tool in 2020. Although, Ahrefs software also has many other highly useful SEO tools that can make all the difference with search engine ranking.
Ahrefs crawls billions of web pages to assemble an organized index of backlink data. All you have to do is enter a website or URL into the Ahrefs site explorer, and it shows everything you need to know about the backlinks to that site, its traffic, and ranking position. That information can then help to determine what sites you should work on reaching.
With Ahrefs, you receive a general index on the backlinks for a website, as well as an advanced report that dives deeper into the SEO metrics.
Also Read: Link Building for Off-Page Optimization: What you need to know (and avoid!) in 2020
2. Best SEO Link Building Tool for Link Analysis
When outside sources link to your site, it counts as a vote. That vote counts toward how well your site ranks. However, some votes count more than others. Some websites will have a more significant effect on your site’s rank because of their higher-authority and level of traffic.
When going through the process of link building, you will need a tool to help you discover which sites you want to get backlinked from, over all other sites. This is where link analysis tools come in.
Most SEO software comes with a link analysis tool, but the level of intelligence and quality of the software will determine how well they break down the link analysis for you and how well they help with the interpretation of those results.
SEMrush is the best SEO tool for link analysis right now, and when you use SEMrush, there are many other SEO tools they provide as well, such as keyword research, advertising research, product listing ads, traffic analytics, and market exploring.
3. Best SEO Link Building Tool for Link Prospecting
BuzzSumo is extremely helpful with link prospecting and finding link opportunities.
When you begin prospecting for links, you will need to do a bit of keyword research, but not the usual keyword research you would use with SEO. These keywords are vague and general to a specific industry or market. They describe the industry using common words from media and publications within your market.
Find “keywords that bring in a lot of traffic but few sales because there’s no buyer intent.”
These narrowed-down keywords will then translate to finding the links that will be the most effective.
Use the BuzzSumo Content Research, Backlinks tools to find links that get the most social attention, receive notifications for new links created, and export backlink reports to Excel spreadsheets.
The BuzzSumo Monitoring, Backlinks tools also help with turning mentions into links and building relationships into partnerships.
4. Best SEO Link Building Tool for Contacts
Outreach campaigning is going to be the next step in the link building process, but before you launch an outreach campaign with a collection of emails, they need validation.
Hunter is the best SEO link building tool for contacts because it is simply the most convenient. It can act as an extension right in Google Chrome and even allows you to find email addresses based on the URL of a prospect’s LinkedIn account.
Every step of the link building process needs to be extensive and provide you with reliable information, so this step should not be overlooked.
5. Best SEO Link Building Tool for Outreach Management
For your outreach management campaign, on the pursuit for more backlinks, make use of BuzzStream.
BuzzStream can help with every aspect of outreach – managing bulk emails and their responses, scraping contact information from a list of domains and juggling thousands of prospects. It will also track the overall effectiveness of the campaign.
This level of outreach is the only way to truly get ahold of the level of backlinks you need to make a significant change to your site ranking on search engines.
6. Best SEO Link Building Tool for Tracking & Reporting
Google Sheets is a useful tool for many SEO tasks. Tracking and reporting are just one of its many capabilities.
For link building, use the Search Analytics for Sheets Add-On in Google Sheets to find out the top-ranking queries and their ranked page URLs. Aggregate other SEO metrics directly into the sheet from SEMrush or other SEO tools, using the VLOOKUP function. This is the perfect way to view all the tracking in one place, along with backlinks data.
Also Read: How to Use Long-Form Content and Link Building For Your Content Strategy
Why Is Link Building Important?
Successful link building tends to have a direct effect on search engine ranking.
With the way search engines use link building, it allows website who have been recognized by major news networks and highly relevant or trending sources to receive a higher rank than websites who have not.
However, if your website currently has very little recognition, link building is a way to boost your rank and get to a point where you are more likely to become recognized just like those other sites.
Link analysis is pretty much the most important tool for link building. All the work can be said and done, but it will not matter if the links you use are from low authority websites since these will have a lesser positive effect on your site’s rank than a single high authority website.
