This post contains a comprehensive list of link building tools, after providing an overview what links are, why they matter, and how they work.

The word "link" is an abbreviation of hyperlink, and hyper means "jump".

A hyperlink is a jump from one web page to another.  

Links have two parts.

Links have a number of possible attributes, one of which matters for SEO, another of which matters for the User Experience.  

This is mentioned here and will be discussed more fully later in this article. The default attribute is “dofollow”.  

It’s called target and it determines “where” the link is opened. The most common “places” are 1) In the existing browser tab, or 2) In a new browser tab.  

This attribute does not affect the SEO benefits of the link and is listed here for information purposes only. When you create links on your site, you want links to other sites (external links) to open in new browser tabs so as not to “take people away” from your website.   

The idea that links could be used as the basis for Internet search started as a research project at Stanford University in 1996. The two students conducting this research are now world-famous, as this research led to the formation of the most successful search engine on the Internet, that being Google.

However, in the beginning, Larry Page was interested in how academic papers cite each other and how the “value” of the academic paper increases when it is cited more, and how the value of its citations increase as the value of the paper increases.   

This research project was called BackRub and it started as an analysis of the link structure of the World Wide Web.  

Very quickly they realized that creating a mathematical model of the link structure of the web based on how academic papers cited each other led to really good search results.  

The rest, as they say, is history.  

In the beginning, there was one and only one search signal. It was named PageRank (as it was invented by a guy named Larry Page).  

The basic idea is described above and is repeated here for emphasis.    

Pages and Links have values assigned to them.    

The value of a Page is determined by the aggregate values of the Links coming into the page.    

The value of a Link is determined by the value of the Page the Link originates on and the number of other Links that originate on that Page.    

While it’s true in the years since Google launched as a search engine the number of search signals has increased. Rumor has it there are now more than 220. But there is no denying or disputing the value of links to the SEO ranking of websites.  

Simply put, without links to your site, it will NEVER rank well.    

No. Definitely not. In fact, some links to your site are harmful.  

When it became clear to everyone that links were all important to Google rankings, people started gaming the system. This created a market in “Link Farms” which were large numbers of servers that simply provided links to anyone who paid. 

Google has (long ago) updated their algorithm so links from link farms not only do not help your SEO, they hurt it.

Know beyond any doubt, not all links are equal. Some help a little, some help a lot, some hurt.

And while only Google knows for certain what the rules are, there are some rules about links we easily infer. 

As stated earlier, DoFollow links provide SEO benefit and NoFollow links do not. That does not mean NoFollow links should be rejected in every instance? No. If someone offers (or provides) a NoFollow link from a very high traffic website, by all means, say thank you.  

However, when you pursue Link Building, you’re interested in there being more DoFollow links from other websites.  

Link building is the process of actively working to increase the number of sites that provide DoFollow links to the content on your website.  

In shortL: publishing, and the promotion of what you’ve published.  

In order for people to link to your website, it must contain content people WANT to link to.  

Google intends to reward content that is of high quality, AND Google provides a very detailed definition of what High Quality means. It’s in a document titled the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.  

To learn more about it, click the link in the prior paragraph. In the very briefest of summaries, content that is of high quality contains a high degree of what Google calls E-A-T, which is short for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.  

In the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines document, Google has stated we perform searches with one of the following intentions:  

For general (not local) SEO purposes, the "know" and "do" intentions are most important.  

At the risk of overstating the obvious, you want to attract visitors and convert visitors into leads. You want to sell stuff.  

Content that:

For that last one, please understand there IS a place in content marketing for cat videos. Just don't get carried away, unless what you're selling is advertising, then, by all means, get carried away.  

When you’re thinking of a topic, Google for articles on the topic that have already been published. Strive for your stuff to be better than any of the existing first page results.  

This is not easy. This takes effort. But, in order for people to want to link to your stuff, it has to be good.  

Your “link profile” is the set of backlinks to your site. Every link from every page on every site that links back to yours. The aggregate of that is a large factor determining how well your site ranks. The tools that show this are marketed to SEO and advertising agencies who provide reports to their clients.

Agencies must show improvement to the client over time. Doing this requires them to compare the current link profile to link profiles in the past. 

 However, knowing your link profile does not cause your ranking to improve. For that, you need to obtain more, preferably better, backlinks.

I personally believe businesses who are looking to improve their ranking should prioritize tools that help you obtain new links, over tools that report your link profile.

If you’ve got a large content marketing budget, fine. For smaller business who have to occasionally rob Peter to pay Paul, spend money on tools that enable action, rather than tools that enable measurement.  

Google Search Console is a free tool that gives a “good enough” capability to companies who are careful with their cash.  

While a backlink is a backlink, when it comes to prospecting for backlinks, there are three primary methods. The way you prospect differs depending on the link building strategy you’re pursuing. Bear in mind you SHOULD be pursuing all three, but they’re different so the way you prospect for links differs between them. The methods are defined below.  

This is when you’ve published an excellent post on your website and you invite others to link to it.  

This is when you look for opportunities to publish original posts on other websites, and in the blog post, you link back to a webpage on your website.  

This is when you look for websites with broken outbound links. A broken link is one that points to a webpage that (generally) no longer exists. Attempts to load the page generate a 404 error (Page not found). You bring the broken link to the attention of the web site manager and provide a web page on your website as a substitute.  

One of the great things about prospecting for broken links is once you find that Site A has a broken link to web page X, you can find out other sites that also link to web page X and solicit them to also link to the page on your site.  

Conceptually, it’s pretty straightforward.  

The list you build for Content Promotion will be different from your list for Guest Posting, which will, in turn, be different from your list for Broken Links.  

What you say in your outreach messages is also different, depending on the type of you’re sending it to.  

Pretty straightforward. The most common means for sending messages is email, although I suspect in the future the software tools that do this will support the use of social media messages and the use of Contact Us forms on websites.  

Again, pretty straightforward. If someone does not respond, do you send them a 2nd message? When someone does respond, what step do you take next?  

Before we get into specific tools, we will first categorize what the tools do. The abbreviations below are not industry standard. I made them up so I could fit the table below into this article. To make the columns thin enough, I had to abbreviate the tool functions.  

The reason this matters, is some tools perform only one function, while others perform several. The table below indicates which tools provide which functions.  

The abbreviations are defined below.  

These tools produce reports that show the link profile of a website (in extreme detail), and changes to that link profile over time.  

These software tools compare the link profiles of two (or more) websites. This is useful when you’re working to “close the gap” with a competitor.  

These are standard social media tools like Hootsuite and BuzzStream which allow you to send out a steady stream of social media updates. I refer to this as Content Promotion as a background activity, as compared to the much more targeted content promotion of a specific blog post to a specific set of websites and contacts.  

These software tools make it easy to create a list of website and contacts to whom you plan to promote a specific page on your website.  

Similar to Prospect List Content Promotion, except rather than building a list of sites and contacts to pitch a blog post to, you’re creating a list to pitch a guest post to.  

Again, conceptually similar to a Prospect List for Content Promotion or Guest Posting, but you’re building a list of sites (and contacts) with broken links where you’ve got content you’re asking them to link to instead.  

These software tools take the lists generated earlier and are used to perform the actual outreach and monitoring of responses.  

I do not claim this list of link building tools is all-inclusive. There may be tools I don’t yet know of (although I’ve looked).  

I have not personally used all these tools. For some tools, the description is based on what I am able to glean from their website and from demonstration videos I’ve found. I state which tools I have and have not personally used  

NOTE: If you're viewing this post on a phone or narrow tablet, the table below might not be shown, as it won't fit on the screen.

The column “Entry Cost” provides the lowest cost for the use of the tool in question. Descriptions of the various tools (sorted in alphabetical order) appear below this table.

Advanced Web Ranking reports (among other things) on the link profile of your website.   

They have a tutorials page on their website.  

There are four price levels. The standard plan is for businesses who do not need to generate reports. Agencies which need to provide clients with reports need at least the professional plan.  

AeroLeads is a tool that provides the email addresses of an individual based on specific details you provide about the individual (i.e.: first name, last name, domain). 

For link building, this fulfills part of the puzzle of prospecting, when you don't know the person's email address, but do know enough information with which to find it.

There is also a Chrome extension so you can find email addresses as you browse websites.  

I found a short demo video on their website.  

There are three price levels and an enterprise version that must be quoted.  

Based on the promotional video on their website, the name of this product is very well chosen. This software tool reports on a wide array of analytics for various aspects of digital marketing: SEO, PPC, Social Media, etc. This product is definitely targeted to agencies, rather than businesses managing their own SEO. Having said that, they do have a pricing tier called Freelancer which is $49 a month. For link building, the video contains a brief mention of the ability to track backlinks to your site.

I have not personally used this tool.  

The closest thing I found is a video on YouTube that compares Ahrefs to Agency Analytics. It clearly positions this product as a direct competitor to Ahrefs. The demonstration of Agency Analytics starts at 11:20. The person conducting the demonstration states the backlink reporting in Agency Analytics is not as robust as Ahrefs and that if you’re really concerned about backlinks, he recommends Ahrefs.  

There are four price levels.  

Ahrefs is one of the better-known SEO analytics tools. Like Agency Analytics it is marketed to agencies that provide reports to their clients. They too have a less expensive plan which would be suitable for a business monitoring their own SEO. For backlinks, Ahrefs provides both a detailed analysis of the backlink profile of a website and has the ability to do what I call a “gap analysis” of your website against another.  

I have not personally used this tool.  

Ahrefs has an extensive collection of videos on their YouTube channel, each one of which is short. As of this writing, they have 186 tutorial videos and 185,000 subscribers.

A number of them are specifically about backlinks:

On the main website, there is a collection of video tutorials known as Ahrefs Academy, in which some of the YouTube videos are organized into a structured course of study. For example, lesson number 7 is the last of the YouTube videos I list above. 

There is a concept of a Login to Ahrefs Academy, and when I attempt this I am prompted to sign up for the Standard plan at $179 a month. However, I saw no restriction on my ability to watch any of their videos without logging in or signing up.

There are four price levels.  

Their website describes it as a tool for web and social monitoring.

I was unable to find a demo video.

There are four price levels, the lowest cost option if $109 a month. There is a 14 day trial period.

Broken Link Builder is from Citation Labs and is focused on finding broken links that are relevant to the topic of your website. While I have not (yet) used this tool, Citation Labs has a good reputation.  

The demonstration video on their website looks good.  

As with all Citation Labs products, every query/report you run costs “credits” which you’ve purchased. Each report you run costs 1 or more credits. I recall from previously that they have 3 monthly subscription plans, the differences being the number of credits per month. Having said that, I'm not seeing their pricing on their website right now, and at the top of their home page is the phrase "Currently Under Construction".  

Buffer is a social media management tool that makes it easy to schedule social media updates in advance. I DO personally use this tool. I choose it over Hootsuite because I find it easier to use. In addition to the tools user interface, there is a Chrome extension that makes it easy to schedule whatever webpage you’re currently browsing. It is also easy to schedule a specific social media update to be sent multiple times (such as every 3 days for the next 21 days).  

Buffer has a YouTube channel. It’s cluttered with fluffy videos with titles like “How to Start ROCKING Your Instagram Marketing Game”, and “Top 5 Marketing Books All Entrepreneurs and Marketers Should Have in Their Library”. I did find some good videos on that channel, I just had to search for them.  

I found a good demo video on the YouTube channel of Ken German, CPC.  

There are three price levels. The biggest difference between them is the number of social media “profiles” you can specify, and how many scheduled posts can be queued up. A profile is an account, a page, etc.  

BuzzStream is for managing link building outreach. I did once use BuzzStream but felt it wasn’t good enough to justify the then $19 a month cost. After 3 months I reverted to storing my email templates as Gmail templates and tracking my outreach efforts in Excel.  I've heard it's much better now.

BuzzStream seems to be the only tool on the market that manages the outreach portion of link building. By outreach, I mean the sending of messages to prospects and the tracking of responses.  

You can:  

BuzzStream has a YouTube channel, which contains a series of tutorial videos that look useful. I like that they’ve created a large number of short videos.It’s easy to find a video to help with whatever specific task you need to learn about.  

There are 3 pricing plans.  

The single user level that once cost $19 a month is not listed on their website pricing page. I sent a message to the company through their website. I was told the single user version of BuzzStream exists and is now $24 a month.  

BuzzSumo states they help you create better content, where better is determined by what existing content gets the most engagement. BuzzSumo helps you identify the influencers who are helping to amplify your content. It does this by showing you analytics for several social media platforms.  

In terms of backlinks, you can view the links pointing to any domain or page (yours or a competitor) and view social shares.  

Integral to how the product works and is priced is the concept of Alerts and Mentions, neither of which are directly related to backlinks.  

A Mention is when an article mentions your keyword, when your competitor publishes a breakout post, or when a specific author publishes an article. 

An Alert is where you define the criteria for what is a mention.

I have not personally used this tool.  

The BuzzSumo YouTube channel seems to have good tutorial videos in it, but for some reason, they have a fairly small number of subscribers (1,970 as of 8 Dec 2020). 

Having said that, they have one video titled BuzzSumo Practical Tips for Backlinks, which is EXCELLENT. It’s 26 minutes long, but do yourself a favor and watch it. It does a great job of explaining why certain strategies are effective and provides a little information on how you do them.

There are 4 pricing plans.  

CognitiveSEO seems to be a well-designed tool, with the main focus on Content Social Visibility and Link Analysis. In terms of Link Analysis, their dashboard looks well designed and they provide the ability to directly compare two domains.  

I have not personally used this tool, but expect I probably will later.  

While CognitiveSEO has a YouTube channel, with only 23 videos and 326 subscribers (as of 9 Dec 2020). However, there are dozens of demonstration videos posted by various SEO consultants, which I consider to be a good sign.

A video titled cognitiveSEO Review Backlinks Analysis Software, speaks highly of CognitiveSEO.

There are 4 pricing plans.  

Dibz is a Link Prospecting tools, which means it makes the job of finding people to pitch to easier. While I have not personally used this tool, I have to say that based on the demo video on their homepage, it looks good. It is built for SEO agencies, but there is no reason a business can’t use it for themselves. I have not personally used this tool, but expect I probably will later.

There is one thing I really like and one thing I really dislike about this product.  

I really like that in addition to other website quality metrics such as Domain Authority and # of Referring Domains, they calculate a SPAM score for a website, and they provide clues as to what increases the SPAM score.  

I REALLY dislike that they provide no obvious way to contact them to ask questions. 

For example….. Their pricing is based on the number of results returned and the results depth, but they never define what those terms mean. Results per query? Results per month? And what does Results Depth mean?

They do provide a link to their Facebook Page, so I sent them a query via Facebook Messenger. 

And the good news is, they responded to my query early on the first business day after I submitted it. You need to think of the results returned by Dibz as analogous to a Google Search Engine Result page, except that with Dibz, some results are filtered out by the criteria you specify.

Result: One query response (analogous to one Google Search). 

Result Depth: How many SERP pages are searched through to provide results. For their lowest priced tier they provide a result depth of 50, which means your search criteria will return 50 search results, to which your defined filters will then be applied. 

Check out the demo video on their homepage.  

There are 3 pricing plans.  

Domain Hunter Plus is a free Chrome extension that makes it easy to find broken outbound links on the webpage you’re currently browsing. One nice feature is it’s easy to export the list of broken links.  

The company who provides this tool is Netvantage Marketing and they have a good demo video on their YouTube channel.  

Free  

Email Hunter is a tool that provides email addresses in response to you entering a domain name. They claim their product will find email addresses and/or verify that specified email addresses are deliverable. 

For link building, this fulfills part of the puzzle of prospecting.

There is also a Chrome extension so you can find email addresses as you browse websites.

I had not used this tool before but installed the Chrome extension a few minutes ago. 

I found a good demo of using the Email Hunter Chrome extension.  

Surprisingly (to me at least) there are 5 tiers of pricing.  

Found is a UK based digital marketing agency, who provides a free SEO audit tool on their website, presumably as a way to generate leads. It seems to audit only the home page of the website, which is common with free SEO audit tools.

I did test drive this free tool. 

Since it’s free, simply click the link in the section title and give it a go.  

Free  

Google Advanced Search is a way of performing much more precise Google searches. It allows you to search via very narrow search criteria.

There are two ways to do this:

Use the Google Advanced Search front-end form

Use the Google Advanced Search command line arguments

Perhaps unknown to you, some of the software tools listed in this article use the Google Advanced Search command line arguments when they perform searches for websites, but of course we have no way of knowing which ones.

I do use this on occasion. 

Just try it.  

Free

Google Reverse Image Search is the ability to perform a Google search where what you start with is an image. This is very useful when your topic is very visual, such as architecture, jewelry, food, pets, etc.

When you do this, you either provide the URL of the image, or you upload the image.

I use this tool a lot when I have a licensed image and I’m looking for one that is similar but licensed for reuse.

Just try it. Once the screen loads, select the camera icon within the search bar.  

Free

Google Search Console is a tool I use very often. It gives you a Google Eye view of your website. It is useful for knowing if Google is seeing crawl errors (which you need to deal with), or has issues reading your sitemap.xml file.

Before you can use Google Search Console, you need to add your website, then prove you own the site. They allow 5 different ways you can verify you own the site.

In terms of backlinks, it allows you to see all backlinks to your site (that Google knows about, which is about as much as can be known).

To find the backlinks to your site, login to Google Search Console, then from the menu on the left side of the screen, select Search Traffic -> Links to Your Site.

You can download all the links into a Google Docs or CSV file, and when you do so periodically you can compare files to learn what changes have occurred over time. 

As with other free Google tools, just try it and play around a little.  

Free

Hootsuite is a social media management tool like Buffer. Some people I’ve met prefer Hootsuite over buffer as they have a superior dashboard in which you monitor your accounts and see what’s going on.  

While Hootsuite has a pretty active YouTube channel, the best demonstration video I found is on the YouTube channel of Evan Charmichael.  

Hootsuite has 3 price plans. The differences are the number of social profiles (such as a LinkedIn account, a LinkedIn Business Page, a Google+ account, a Facebook account, a Facebook Business Page, etc), and the number of users.  

LinkAssistant runs on your system (Windows, MacOS, or Linux). You buy it once and own it.

The following claims are made on the Link Assistant website: 1) Hundreds of link opportunities at one click, via guest posting, commenting, forums, directories, etc. 2) Sorting prospects by Domain Authority. 3) Easy outreach from inside the app 4) Link verification. And 5) Customized reports (most useful for agencies).

I have not personally used this product. 

LinkAssistant has a YouTube channel.

I found one demo video on YouTube. The video is 5 years old so it might be a little out of date.

There are two pricing tiers.  

Link Detox is specifically designed to help you recover from Google Penguin and Manual Actions.

Their website copy claims their tool performs an audit of all the inbound links to your site, then provides detailed quality ratings of each, allowing you to easily disavow the ones you need to disavow.

I have not personally used this product. 

There is what looks like an excellent demonstration video at the bottom of their homepage  

Link Detox is a subset of the full tool, which is Link Research Tools. Link Detox is not priced separately. For pricing, refer to the Link Research Tools section below.  

Link Prospector is a tool from Citation Labs that does nothing but identify prospects to reach out to. It does not do the outreach, but it saves you time in compiling your prospect list. While the demo video on their website looks lame, the product itself looks promising.

I have not personally used this product, but expect I will, even if only at their pay as you go pricing in order to check it out myself. 

The demo video on their home page looks good, and I found what looks like a very good demo video on YouTube. Having said that, this video has been up for 5 years and has only 13,300 views. The official Citation Labs YouTube channel has only 233 subscribers and 28 videos. The most recent video was published 4 years ago.  

They have one pay as you go plan that costs $5.00 per credit, and three monthly plans which differs in the number of credits per month.

When you run queries/reports in Link Prospectors, you spend “credits” which you’ve previously purchased. Most queries cost one credit, but if you want to exceed certain predefined thresholds or run reports that are not predefined, you will need to spend more than one credit.

Link Research Tools is the full set of tools this company provides, whereas Link Detox (described above) is one of their specialized tools that exist within their tool suite.

Their website makes really big claims about their software tools. Too many to fully list here.

Via the link in the next section, you’ll find videos on using their tools to do the following: 

A series of brief sales and demo videos on their website seems to give an excellent overview of their tools. 

When I wrote the Link Detox section above, I failed to realize that pricing included a fuller suite of tools and not one specific tool focused on finding and eliminating toxic links. As such, the pricing for this is identical to that for Link Detox.

There are Four pricing tiers. The differences between them are the number of domains and links you can manage. 

Linkody is a backlink monitoring tools that informs you when you site gains or loses backlinks, and when your competitors gain backlinks. It comes with a disavow tool.  

I found only one demonstration video. It’s in French and as I’m writing for an English speaking audience, I did not link to it.

There are screenshots on their website they identify as their tour. 

There are five levels of pricing, and the differences are the number of domains, monitored links, and users.  

Majestic is a very full service SEO tool that does backlink analysis and much more. Their website claims they have the planet’s largest link index database, which is immediately a bit suspicious, as I’m pretty sure that honor belongs to Google.

This tool does A LOT:

Site Explorer allows you to deep dive into the SEO analysis of a site in extreme detail.

Backlink History Checker does what the name implies. It allows you to know the backlink profile of a site, as well as know details about the history of those backlink profiles. 

There is an extensive “How To” library on their website.  

There are 3 pricing tiers. 

MeetEdgar is really cool. I have not yet used it, but when the time comes I will. The basic idea behind MeetEdgar is as you post stuff to social media you categorize it. You then configure MeetEdgar to post from category X on (for example) the 1st Tue of every month at 11:15 am.

Once you’ve laid out your schedule of what post category publishes when, MeetEdgar runs on autopilot, keeping your pipeline of social media updates full. Then as you create more content, you simply add it to a category and MeetEdgar adds it to the queue for that category.

When the queue for any given category is exhausted, it starts over. 

I found a video that shows how MeetEdgar works and also explains why you might prefer it over HootSuite or Buffer.  

There are two pricing tiers.

The demonstration video (link below) shows what looks like a useful product, which I have not yet used. This tool allows you to monitor your backlinks, and get alerted when new ones appear and old ones disappear. You can also be alerted when a competitor website gains a new backlink.

What seems to set this product apart from Majestic SEO and Moz is it provides much LESS detail, which (if done right) is a good thing. Those other tools provide much more detail than is needed. 

On their homepage is a sales video that gives an overview, and there is also a demo video on their YouTube channel.  

There are 3 plans, the differences being the number of your domains you want to monitor, competitor domains you want to monitor, referring domains, and keywords.  

MoonSearch is a free “website valuation” service that at first glance seems useless. One of the things it purports to provide is information about backlinks, but for our website, it provided nothing.  

Since it’s free, just head over and submit your URL. I’m interested if you get any useful information. I didn’t.  

Free  

MozBar is a free Chrome extension that provides you with details about the webpage (and website) you’re currently browsing, OR the pages you’re viewing in a Search Engine Result Page (which is where you can see a link analysis). I’ve been a fan of MozBar for 18 to 24 months now.

Moz maintains the own index of website detail (including links) and (as with everyone) it’s not as comprehensive as the index maintained by Google. If your site is new, or small, Moz may not have details about your links as they may have never crawled your site. There is no way to manually submit a website to Moz, so patience is required. 

Moz provides an article that shows you what to expect.  

Free

Like Majestic SEO, MozPro is a full-featured SEO analytics platform which provides enormous (perhaps even too much) detail about the SEO of your website. Among the details provided is a detailed link analysis of your site, as well as the ability to compare the link profile of your site to that of another site (such as a competitor).  

Moz has an active YouTube channel (72,000+ subscribers, hundreds of videos going back years) and some of the videos provide demonstrations of MozPro. For example, this link is to a video describing how to use Social Media to build backlinks.

Additionally, on the Moz website, there is the Moz Learning Center, which contains a wealth of information on how to do SEO. 

There are four plans. The main differences are the number of campaigns that can be run, keywords whose ranking is being tracked, and pages that will be crawled per week.  

Ninja Outreach is a tool that helps you find and contact social media influencers. Finding influencers is based on keywords, and this product contains it’s own CRM which is used to track outreach activity. Their “getting started” video (link below) claims they have the ability to send automated emails in batch.

I have not personally used this tool. 

Ninja Outreach has a YouTube channel. It contains only 57 videos and has only 536 subscribers as of 9 Dec 2020. However, the videos look good. Here is a link to their overview video titled Getting started with Ninja Outreach.  

There are three tiers. The main differences are the numbers of users and contacts that can be stored.  

Oktopost describes themselves as The B2B Social Media Management Platform. The product seems full featured. I have not personally used it.  

Oktopost has a YouTube channel with tutorial videos that seem current. As of 9 Dec 2020 the newest video is 2 days old. 

Their pricing is not listed on their website. The text below was copied directly from their website.

Oktopost's cloud-based SaaS pricing is determined by your company's organization structure (number of marketing teams), user seats, social advocates, and social profiles. You can also purchase additional features like Marketing Automation integration and Twitter Insights. Our trained experts will consult with you to configure the right package for your business. 

Ontolo is a prospecting tool that makes it easier to create lists of prospects for content promotion and guest posting (and more).

Their website claims Ontolo prospects from more than 80 sources and provides prospect data and insights available nowhere else. Based on their website copy it looks like this tool builds lists of contacts, but does not manage outreach. 

I have not personally used this tool.  

Ontolo has a YouTube channel. It has only 6 videos, the most recent of which is 10 years old. There are 27 subscribers. One of the videos is titled

First Look: Ontolo Link Building Query Application. 

There are 2 levels, the main differences being the number of URLs in your index and the number that can be processed per day.  

Open Site Explorer is a full-featured SEO auditing tool from Moz. It’s conceptually similar to Ahrefs in terms of the capabilities. It pulls data from its own index, which it builds by crawling the Internet.

In terms of link building, the tool can analyze the link profile of your website, compare it to other sites, and help you identify link building opportunities.

Identifying link building opportunities consists of finding unlinked mentions of your company or products and finding broken links you can possibly steer to content on your site. The tool obtains contact information for the website when it’s available. Additionally, the tool can identify fresh content on the Internet that is relevant to the topics of your website, making it possible to reach out for backlinks while those articles are brand new.

I have not personally used this tool. 

Moz maintains an online learning center on their website. It contains lessons on various SEO topics, including lessons on link building.  

There are 4 tiers, the main differences being the number of campaigns, keywords being tracked, and pages crawled per week.  

PitchBox is software for building lists of prospects based on search terms, and managing outreach to those prospects. It looks very sophisticated and easy to use.

I have not personally used this. 

PitchBox has a YouTube channel. It has only 5 videos and 94 subscribers. One of the videos gives a good overview. There is a very good demo video on YouTube titled How We Use Pitchbox for Link Outreach, by a company named Webris.  

PitchBox has 4 levels. The differences are the number of workspaces (an SEO agency needs one workspace per client), outreach emails per month, and users.  

Ravens Tools is primarily a reporting tool, which includes reporting about backlinks. For backlink building, it provides tools for identifying link building prospecting, as well as link building outreach.

I have not personally used this tool. 

Raven Tools has a YouTube channel, with 59 videos. One of their videos is a replay of a Link Building webinar. It is mostly “lecture” about how to do Link Building, but does show some tool demonstration. It’s 25 minutes long.  

There are five levels.

SE Ranking describes themselves as an all include SEO monitoring tool (similar to Ahrefs and Moz Pro). They have a module devoted to monitoring backlinks. Their backlink monitoring module is different from most. You export a report of your backlinks from Google Search Console, then import that list into SE Ranking. SE Ranking will tell you if any of those backlinks went away. In a way, this tool is less Link Building, than mitigating the loss of existing links (which has value). I have not personally used this tool.  

SE Ranking has a YouTube channel with about 60 videos, one of which is about Link Building.

SE Ranking has an interesting pricing model. First, they’re relatively inexpensive compared to Moz Pro and Ahrefs. Second, they provide discounts based on how often things are checked. For daily checking, there is no discount. When you accept updates every 3 days, your discount is 20%. When you accept weekly updates, your discount is 40%. I’ve seen no other tool provide this pricing model.

Beyond this discount structure, there are four tiers. Prices below are undiscounted. 

Based on the web page where they describe their link building capabilities, this tool is focused on identifying and removing toxic links, rather than obtaining new links.

They promote their product allows you to easily: 

They claim they maintain a database of 2.4+ trillion links across 262+ million domains.

Based on how they describe their tool, it’s not so much link building (add new quality links) but bad link purging.

I have not personally used this tool. 

SEM Rush has a very active YouTube channel. 14,000+ subscribers and 881 videos. The most recent video was uploaded 4 days ago. Their tutorial video of Backlink Building in SEMrush is is about half an hour long (it’s a replay of a live webinar). They've also published a blog post about link building that is pretty good.  

There are 3 tiers, the main differences are results per a report, reports per day, and pages to crawl.  

SEO PowerSuite runs on your desktop (or laptop). It runs on Windows, MacOS, and Linux. You make a one-time payment, not a monthly payment.

As regards link building, their website makes the following claims: 

I have not personally used this tool.  

SEO PowerSuite provides a link assistant (what they call the link focused portion of their toolset) tutorial on their YouTube channel. 

There are 3 tiers. Differences are not about how many URLs can be scanned etc, but rather stuff like can data be exported, etc. Professional is marketed to businesses whereas Enterprise is marketed to really big businesses and SEO agencies.  

Social Flow presents themselves as a very high-end social media management platform. They claim to solve social monetization for publishers. Their website provides very little information and every “Learn more” type link takes you to a sales form.

I have not personally used this tool. 

SocialFlow has a YouTube channel with 109 videos and an unspecified number of subscribers. While there are current videos, there don’t seem to be any demo videos. Their videos tend to be short and to explain some aspect of social media, but not how to use their tool.

SocialFlow pricing is available only upon request.  

SocialOomph is another social media management tool. From the demonstration video I watched (the link is below), this tool appears to have been built by engineers with very little input from marketing people. I say this because it looks to be incredibly easy to use, and from a marketing perspective, their website copy is terrible.

From their website, you would think this is standard social media management tool but based on the demo video I watched (link below), it is REALLY easy to queue up social media updates and to specify that you want some to repeat after a specified number of hours.

The user interface is not fancy, but it seems to be much easier to use than competitive products (with the possible exception of MeetEdgar).

I have not personally used this tool. 

Socialoomph does not seem to have a YouTube channel, but they seem to have plenty of fans. A search of “socialoomph” on YouTube provided several demonstration videos done by others. I stopped counting at 35, but there were plenty more.

I like one titled How To Use SocialOomph For Marketing. 

They have a limited version available for free, and three paid pricing tiers.  

After watching two demonstration videos created by people who use the tool. It looks like fairly standard social media management software, with some features of Hootsuite (an easy view of all your social media “inboxes”) and some features of Buffer (an easy way to schedule social media updates).

Some things I like: 

I have not personally used this tool.  

SproutSocial has a YouTube channel with 4,600+ subscribers, but the videos are mostly marketing, and very few are “How To” and “Demonstration” videos. Having said that, I found a good demo video titled How To Use Social Sprout.  

SproutSocial has three pricing tiers. 

Streak is a very interesting software product that creates a CRM system within Gmail. As regards monitoring your outreach, you can easily see which emails were opened and which ones were looked at multiple times. You can build a CRM pipeline, similar to a sales pipeline to help manage your link building outreach.  

Streak maintains a YouTube channel in which they've posted various videos, including demonstration or "getting started" videos.  

Streak has four pricing levels, the cheapest of which is free. This free level allows for up to 500 contacts and 50 mail merges per month. For all their pricing levels and limitations, see their pricing page via the link at the start of this paragraph.  

Seriously? Twitter for link building? Yes. This is real. People use twitter. You can engage people via twitter much more easily than you can via email.

Per Rand Fiskin, co-founder and prior CEO of Moz, there are 8 ways: 

Play the video linked to in the section below for details.  

Check out this Moz Whiteboard Friday specifically about building links with twitter.  

Free  

WhoLinks2Me is a rather poor web page that claims to be able to identify the links to a site but does a very poor job of it. The page runs one ad, which advertises backlinks from DA70+ sites for only $5 a month.

For my site, it reported a number of backlinks, with no specifics. Per Google Search Console, the number is way off. 

Click the link in the section heading and enter your URL. Prepare to be underwhelmed.  

Free