Link building is an important part of SEO because the number and quality of backlinks your website has directly impacts your search rankings. Link building also offers multiple other benefits.
However, building high-quality links that boost your site’s domain authority, topical trust flow, and organic traffic takes time and effort. You need the right link building software solutions to audit your site’s backlink profile, identify relevant link building opportunities, and track results.
Some of the best link building tools like Semrush and Ahrefs offer multiple use cases in building links, while others like SalesQL cater to specific link building purposes.
In this list of the best link building tools, we’ll brief you about 12 such tools, explaining their features, use cases, and pricing. Let’s get started.
Top Link Building and Backlink Software Tools Compared
Our list of the top link building software solutions is based on first-hand experience and research. We’ve tried and tested all the tools on this list for different steps in our link building campaign process.
Trusted by companies to drive real growth
- 80% conversion lift (6 months, Saas)
- 0-7K qualified visitors (10 months, HR)
- 0-6.7K qualified visitors (7 months, Ed-tech)
Ready for results like these?
Before we discuss the link building tools in detail, here’s a quick overview of the standout features of each link building tool on our list:
| Link Building Software | Pricing | Standout Features and Use Cases |
|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs | Starts at $99 per month | Finds broken links and unlinked mentions Uncovers link building opportunities |
| BuzzSumo | Starts at $199 per month Offers a 30-day free trial |
Finds trending topics Analyzes content strategies of competitors |
| SEMrush | Starts from $129.95 per month Offers a 7-day free trial |
Provides backlink analytics Audits link profiles Conducts backlink gap analysis |
| Majestic | Starts at $49.99 per month | Offers unique “Flow” metrics for backlink analysis |
| Moz | Starts at $99 per month Offers a 30-day free trial |
Helps assess a website’s authority and assigns a trust score |
| SalesQL | Starts at $39 per month Offers 50 free monthly credits |
Helps find email addresses from LinkedIn profiles |
| Listkit | Starts at $79 per user per month Offers 30-day money-back guarantee |
Finds contact information in bulk Offers advanced filters to find B2B leads |
| ZeroBounce | Starts at $18 per month for 2000 emails Offers 100 free monthly email validation credits |
Verifies email addresses in bulk Offers high accuracy and data security |
| Smartlead.ai | Starts at $39 per month Offers a 14-day free trial |
Enables automated email follow-ups Offers high outreach email deliverability |
| Instantly | Starts at $37 per month Offers first warmup campaign for free |
Supports unlimited accounts and emails Offers high deliverability rates |
| Pitchbox | Starts from $550 per month for 5,000 outreach emails | Integrates prospecting and outreach into a single workflow |
| SEOptimer | Starts at $19 per month | Monitors changes in backlink profile and sends alerts |
Let’s explore what makes each of these link building tools worthy of being featured in our list, in detail.
1. Ahrefs
Use case: Link prospecting and backlink analysis
Ahrefs is our go-to tool for various aspects of link building and SEO. We use it to find new and lost link building opportunities, which is the first step in the process.
This link building tool lets us find websites that link to our competitors’ websites but not to ours. We use this link data for outreach purposes by suggesting better and more comprehensive resource pages to them as a replacement.
We also use Ahrefs for broken link building, as it helps us quickly find broken links on multiple web pages for specific keywords.
Key Features
- Finds unlinked brand mentions
- Identifies relevant broken links pointing to our competitors
- Helps filter websites by domain authority, referring domains, organic traffic, spammy links, and other criteria
- Helps find guest posting opportunities
Pricing
- Lite: Starts at $99 per month
- Standard: Starts at $199 per month
- Advanced: Starts at $399 per month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing, only annual plans
2. BuzzSumo
Use case: Content analysis and competitor backlink analysis
BuzzSumo is a link building software designed for analyzing the content strategies of your competitors and finding link building opportunities.
We use it to discover content pieces that get the most engagement and backlinks. We, then, use the Skyscraper technique to create better content and try to get backlinks by offering our content as a replacement to websites that are linking to our competitors.
Key Features
- Helps find trending and relevant target keywords and topics in a niche
- Lets you analyze your competitors’ top content with the most backlinks
- Monitors competitors’ brand mentions and content
Pricing
- Content Creation: $199 per month
- PR & Comms: $299 per month
- Suite: $499 per month
- Enterprise: $999 per month
3. Semrush
Use case: Backlink analysis and link audit
Semrush helps us conduct a comprehensive website audit, keyword research, and link analysis to vet websites for our link building efforts. After all, it’s important to ensure that we build backlinks only from trusted and reputable sites that rank well on Google Search for our target keywords.
In our experience, Semrush provides some of the most comprehensive information about a site’s backlink profile. Check it out.
Key Features
- Helps conduct detailed backlink audits
- Offers comprehensive link analysis and anchor text analysis
- Enables bulk backlink analysis
- Has a backlink gap analysis tool
- Helps find link building opportunities and prospects
Pricing
- Pro: $129.95 per month
- Guru: $249.95 per month
- Business: $499.95 per month
4. Majestic
Use case: Detailed backlink data
While Semrush provides standard metrics and reports for link analysis, Majestic is known for providing alternative data and analysis. It has created unique metrics to analyze the quality of backlinks, such as topical trust flow and citation flow.
If we want to conduct a more extensive audit of a website’s backlink profile, we use this link building tool along with Semrush.
Key Features
- Conducts detailed backlink profile analysis
- Offers unique data and metrics for analyzing backlinks
- Helps vet prospects for building high-quality backlinks
Pricing
- Lite: $49.99 per month
- Pro: $99.99 per month
- API: $399.99 per month
5. Moz
Use case: Website authority and quality check
Moz is the most reliable tool for checking the domain authority of any website. It assigns domain and page authority scores and provides historical trend data for the same.
We use it for quickly checking the authority of potential guest posting sites and link builders.
Key Features
- Helps assess a website’s authority
- Assigns various authority scores to potential link prospects
- Provides historical trend data for the site’s authority
Pricing
- Standard: $99 per month
- Medium: $179 per month
- Large: $299 per month
- Premium: $599 per month
6. SalesQL
Use case: Finding emails from LinkedIn profiles
After identifying the websites we want to build contextual links from, the next step is to find the right person’s contact information for your link building outreach efforts.
We use SalesQL to find email addresses of websites’ contact points through their LinkedIn profiles. This email finder delivers 80% accurate contact details based on our experience, elevating the chances of success of our outreach campaign.
SalesQL is a crucial part of our link building strategy and process.
Key Features
- Finds email addresses from the LinkedIn profiles of prospects
- Exports contact details to a dashboard to build email lists
- Offers easy options to transfer or download email lists
Pricing
- Free: 50 credits per month
- Starter: $39 per month
- Advanced: $79 per month
- Pro: $119 per month
7. ListKit
Use case: Finding bulk emails of our potential link builders
ListKit is a contact database that we sometimes use to find email addresses and phone numbers of specific leads. Instead of finding contact information for one contact at a time, this helps extract contact data in bulk.
We use specific filters to find a list of prospects who match our criteria and buy their contact information for a nominal price to facilitate our link building campaigns.
Key Features
- Has advanced search filters to find B2B leads
- Offers accurate contact information for leads
- Allows you to export contact data in bulk
Pricing
- Professional: $79 per user per month
- Scale: $179 per user per month
8. ZeroBounce
Use case: Reverifying contact data for our link building outreach campaigns
When running outreach campaigns, it’s important to reach the right people and not spam anyone by mistake. That’s why we like to double-check contact data with this link building tool and maintain an accurate email list before we start our link building outreach.
ZeroBounce is a great email validation tool that helps us remove fake or invalid email addresses from our lists to maintain clean lists for building links through relevant requests.
Key Features
- Offers 100 free email verifications per month
- Verifies emails with almost 99% accuracy
- Boasts complete data security during email validation
- Performs bulk email validation quickly
Pricing
- Email validation tool’s pricing starts at $18 per month for 2,000 emails
9. Smartlead
Use case: Automated link building outreach and lead nurturing
We’ve tried several premium link building tools over the years, but Smartlead remains one of our favorite outreach tools. Once we are done selecting and vetting the websites that can be potential link partners, we conduct cold email outreach using this tool.
It allows us to manage unlimited mailboxes from one unified inbox and lets us send unlimited warmup emails. We can tag leads and segment them into various categories based on their responses or lack thereof.
Key Features
- Boasts high email deliverability and spam prevention
- Enables automated email follow-ups and replies
- Has a unified inbox to manage multiple mailboxes
Pricing
- Basic: $39 per month
- Popular: $79 per month
- Pro: $94 per month
- Custom: Price on request
10. Instantly.ai
Use case: Automated email outreach for link building
Instantly.ai is another email outreach tool that we’ve tried and loved using for our link building campaign. We used it to send automated warmup emails to prospects and got great response rates.
It also provides detailed email analytics and suggests when to send follow-ups. We especially like that it’s easy to set up and makes email outreach a breeze.
Key Features
- 600+ cold email templates and 50+ Docs and SOPs
- Automated warmup emails with high deliverability
- Inbox rotation for multiple sending accounts
Pricing
- Growth: $37 per month
- Hypergrowth: $97 per month
- Light Speed: $358 per month
11. Pitchbox
Use case: Prospect search and outreach
Pitchbox is an all-in-one link building outreach tool that helps us identify backlink opportunities, find contacts, and reach out to them. We’ve used it for both prospecting and outreach, and we love the fact that it combines both into an integrated workflow.
Unlike generic outreach tools, Pitchbox is designed for link building, which makes it more specialized. It integrates with Majestic, Semrush, Ahrefs, and other SEO tools, which allows us to see SEO metrics right from the Pitchbox dashboard.
Key Features
- Allows advanced targeting and link prospecting
- Enables smart outreach and follow-ups to build links
- Has predesigned outreach templates to scale outreach efforts for your link building campaigns
- Lets you create skill-based workflows for your team
- Provides detailed insights and reports, including white-label reports of all the links you build for a site
Pricing
- Professional: Starts from $550 per month for 5,000 outreach emails
- Enterprise: Starts from $1,500 per month with custom plans
12. SEOptimer
Use case: Analyze acquired links pointing to your website (or your client’s site)
SEOptimer backlink monitoring tool helps us with the last step of our link building process — analyzing the quality of the acquired backlinks.
We use it to regularly analyze the health of our link profile and the quality of recently acquired backlinks.We regularly filter out any low-quality links pointing to our site using this link building tool. It also helps us track the changes in our link profile, such as new links and lost links.
However, please note that this feature is not available separately, so you need to buy one of SEOptimer’s paid plans to access all link building features, along with other tools like keyword research and website crawls.
Key Features
- Tracks new and lost backlinks for your or your competitors’ websites
- Allows you to set up alerts for changes to your link profile
- Provides detailed backlink data to analyze the quality of backlinks
- Offers both domain-level and link-level metrics
Pricing
- DIY SEO: $19 per month
- White Label: $29 per month
- White Label & Embedding: $59 per month
Trusted by companies to drive real growth
- 80% conversion lift (6 months, Saas)
- 0-7K qualified visitors (10 months, HR)
- 0-6.7K qualified visitors (7 months, Ed-tech)
Ready for results like these?
Choosing the Right Link Building Software for Your SEO Goals
There you have it — our top picks of link building software solutions you can use to build links for your website. Make sure you consider the use cases, features, and pricing of each of these link building tools to choose a mix of tools that deliver the best results at minimal cost.
Have you used or are using any of these link building tools? Tell us your favorites in the comments below.
If you’re struggling to build high-quality backlinks for your website, outsource your link building projectto our experts. Check out our client results and reviews here and then hire us to watch your referring domains, traffic, and website authority soar!
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Do I need multiple link building tools, or can one tool handle everything?
Most websites benefit from using more than one tool, because link building involves different stages, research, prospecting, outreach, and monitoring. All-in-one platforms cover a lot, but specialists often perform better at specific tasks. The right mix depends on your goals, team size, and budget.
Which link building software is best for beginners?
If you’re just getting started, tools with clear dashboards and guided workflows are usually easier to work with than data-heavy platforms. Beginners often do better with software that focuses on one or two core tasks, rather than trying to master everything at once.
Are automated link building tools safe to use?
Automation is safe when it’s used for outreach, follow-ups, and data handling, not for generating links automatically. Tools that help manage emails or validate contacts are widely used. Fully automated link creation, however, can lead to low-quality links and potential penalties.
How do I choose the right link building software for my website?
Start by identifying what you need most finding opportunities, evaluating backlink quality, or running outreach campaigns. Once that’s clear, compare tools based on use cases, data accuracy, and pricing, rather than feature count alone.
Can small businesses compete using link building software?
Yes. Link building software can actually level the playing field for small businesses by helping them find relevant opportunities faster and run more focused outreach campaigns. The key is consistency and targeting quality websites, not scale alone.
How long does it take to see results from link building tools?
Link building results are not immediate. Most websites start seeing impact after several weeks or months, depending on link quality, competition, and how often new links are earned. The tools help speed up the process, but they don’t replace strategy or execution.
What should I track to know if my link building efforts are working?
Beyond the number of links, it’s important to track referring domains, link quality, organic traffic trends, and keyword movement. Monitoring these signals together gives a clearer picture of whether your link building strategy is paying off.
