Creating valuable blog content should bring more traffic to your business’s website, especially ones you’ve spent time on. But with Google heavily favoring domain authority (DA) as a ranking factor in recent updates, quality content might not be enough to move the needle.
That’s where link-building campaigns come in. We will need the right link-building software to find relevant, high-authority sites to build backlinks. But, with dozens of free and paid software on the market, which one should you choose? In this article, we’ll be going over:
- What link building is
- How to choose the right link building software
- Ten best link building software to look into in 2024
- Outreach software for link building
What is Link Building
Link building is a campaign that focuses on finding and gaining new backlinks. You could use several strategies to build backlinks, such as niche edits, guest posts, or brand mentions.
To start a link building campaign, find websites with high DA relevant to your niche. Next, you need an email scraper tool to extract contact information from the sites.
Finally, you contact web admins and ask for a backlink. But before you can even send a cold email for backlink building, you must find websites that can strengthen your site’s backlink profile.
A simple Google search, like “industry” + guest post, will show several sites that accept link building. However, these are likely link farms that provide irrelevant, low-quality backlinks.
The most streamlined approach is to use link-building software to find the right websites that could increase your domain authority. Here’s how to choose the right one.
How to Choose the Right Link Building Software
There are free and paid software for backlink discovery. However, the free tools will have limited features. Luckily, most of the best link building software have free trials.
If you’re looking to start your link building journey or want to try out alternatives to your current backlink discovery software, consider the following:
Consider Link Building Goals
The main goal of most backlink campaigns is to build domain authority for your sites. However, they can also help you get more referral traffic to your key landing pages.
If you’re just dipping your toes into SEO and link building, you could use free tools offering just enough features to let you learn the basics.
But if you’re looking to scale in a competitive industry, you’d want backlink discovery tools with robust features such as competitor backlink profile research or auditing.
Friendly and Intuitive User Interface
How quickly can you learn all the features required to run successful campaigns? When looking for a backlink building tool, consider how intuitive it is to learn and understand.
Most backlink-building tools have friendly user interfaces. Others, like Screaming Frog, have some of the most robust features in the market but are challenging to learn.
Consider if you’ll have enough time to learn and do link building yourself or if you have a virtual assistant that can do the work for you.
Fits Within Your Budget
Your budget decides what tools you can go for. Most link building tools charge monthly for their services. These tools should be considered part of your overall SEO or marketing budget.
Most charge around $100/month, give or take. If you’re a small business without the extra budget, you could always start small and use free or free versions of paid tools.
When you’re ready to scale, start looking into tools with better features. But link building software is only part of your overall marketing strategy. Consider other tools as well.
Check Integrations
Integrations to CRMs, sales operation tools, or calendars speed up the link-building process. Imagine all the time you’d save by not constantly switching between apps.
Some link-building software includes API integrations for advanced indexing/scraping for development teams.
You might also want AI integrations to help you write copy for outreach, social media integrations, or web content management system integrations.
Test The Tool Yourself
Before committing to a tool, test it yourself. You’d experience firsthand how intuitive it is to use and learn, the different features, and how it pairs with other tools you use daily.
Almost all backlink building tools will offer free trials or a freemium model. If you’re a big enough company, tools like Semrush will even provide a personalized demo with their team.
Now that we know what to look for, let’s examine some of the best link-building software in 2024.
Best Outreach Software for Link Building
Link-building software helps you find sites you can contact for backlinks. But, you must do it at scale to see significant results in your backlink-building campaigns.
That’s where Instantly comes in. After scraping leads using link-building software, Instantly can automate outreach, ensure high deliverability rates, and even automate follow-ups.
Free Link Building Software
If you want to do a link-building campaign, your best bet is to use free tools first. In this context, “Free” means having limited features; these are not free trials that expire. Here are some of the best ones we’d recommend:
Backlink Gap
Backlink Gap is a free link-building tool that works on a credit system. New users get five searches and 15,000 rows of backlinks. Credits are refreshed every month. You can also delete previous searches to make room for new ones.
Let’s take a look at how it works. For this example, we’ll use a website selling plants. The interface is simple: users enter a domain URL and see the backlink dashboard.
Every site's backlink, referring domains, anchor texts, and even disavow lists can be seen. Most freemium or trial models hide this data behind a paywall, making Backlink Gap one of the best, if not the best, free backlink tools on the market.
You see every anchor text where users can filter out words using a search tool. It has a label on the right of the anchor text to show if that anchor is new, lost, or a no-follow.
Pricing: Backlink Gap’s pricing depends on how many searches you want to do monthly:
- $15.83/mo for 10 searches
- $32.50/mo for 100 searches
- $165.83/mo for 500 searches
Help a B2B Writer
Help a B2B Writer is an entirely free link building tool. There aren’t any paid or premium plans available. You could either register as a source or submit a writer request for guest posts.
It’s an entirely community-driven platform with great moderation. Although this site doesn’t isn’t a “link building software,” it provides users with the opportunity to network.
White Spark
White Spark is an excellent tool for building citations and improving local SEO. You can try it for free, but you’d be limited to one campaign and three searches daily.
It works by finding citations that don’t link back to you or present sites where you can submit citations. Just ensure you’re giving the same information if you submit citations.
Pricing:
- Small Business Plan - $33/mo. Billed annually
- Specialist Plan - $41/mo. Billed annually
- Agency Plan - $49/mo. Billed annually
- Enterprise Plan - $124/mo. Billed annually
You'd need to get their basic plan if you want competitor analysis, monitoring, and progress tracking.
HARO
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is another link-building platform similar to Help a B2B Writer. The only difference is that HARO focuses on building networks between bloggers and journalists.
When users register as a source (for link building), Haro sends three daily emails from reporters who need in-depth answers on various topics from Monday through Friday.
After receiving the email, you need to send a pitch to the reporter. If they like your pitch, you can become a source for them, which results in your site getting a backlink from high-DA news sites.
Paid-Link Building Software With Freemium Models/Free Trials
If you’re ready to scale and ramp up campaigns, check out the following paid link-building software with freemium models or free trials.
Respona
Respona offers users a 14-day free trial that includes all features. Users get dozens of ready-to-use email templates and can even run automated email sequences.
Think of it as an all-in-one backlink searching and outreach software. It even has prospecting built in. However, you need a business email to apply for their free trial.
Here’s the issue. Respona is expensive. They offer limited backlink building opportunities. If you want a comprehensive result, you’d still need to integrate it with tools like Semrush.
This tool is built for enterprise-level or massive websites requiring aggressive backlink building. But it’s perfect for automating unlinked mentions, broken link building, or niche edits.
Pricing:
- Pro Plan - $399/mo
- Unlimited Plan - $799/mo
- Enterprise - Custom pricing
The Pro plan lets you connect five accounts for your email campaigns. If you want to connect more, you can use the Unlimited plan, which offers unlimited email accounts.
Semrush
For many SEOs, Semrush is one of the best search engine marketing tools you can get your hands on. It has everything you need to run successful, holistic SEO campaigns.
You get a keyword research tool, a competitor research tool, and several more designed for content optimization, SEO, and outreach.
With its Backlink Gap tool, users can see competitor backlink profiles and reveal the sites linking to them but not you. You’d essentially be reverse engineering where competitors get links.
The tool can also sort and filter domains based on their authority score. As a rule of thumb, we want to link to relevant sites with high DA. Semrush quickly shows us these sites.
Pricing:
- Pro - $129.95/mo
- Guru - $249.95/mo
- Business - $499.95/mo
Ahrefs
When it comes to SEO tools, the debate for the top industry standard tool has always been between Semrush and Ahrefs.
Semrush has many cool features, but Ahrefs is more user-friendly. Users get digestible “at-a-glance” data and get estimates of how many backlinks it takes to rank for a keyword.
One of Ahref's best link-building features, which trumps Semrush, is its “Broken Link” checker. For example, when a blog links to a source that doesn’t exist, Ahref can pick that up.
Then, you can pitch to the web admin of that blog and present yourself as a potential source with up-to-date and more insightful data.
Pricing: Ahrefs has a promo this 2024 that gives two months free if you pay annually for any plan.
- Lite - $99/mo
- Standard - $199/mo
- Advanced - $399/mo
- Enterprise - $999/mo
Moz Link Explorer
Moz’s Link Explorer is another link building tool that helps you reverse engineer where competitors are getting backlinks.
Copy your competitor’s URL, and Link Explorer will show their backlink profile. Then, you can export the list and run blogger outreach campaigns for link building.
Moz’s paid version, Moz Pro, also has an entire suite of tools built for SEO and search engine marketing. It has a DA checker, a keyword research tool, and content optimization features.
Pricing:
- Standard - $79/mo
- Medium - $143/mo
- Large - $239/mo
- Premium - $479/mo
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog’s UI isn’t the flashiest or most visually appealing, but it makes up for it with the insightful data it provides. It can scrape almost every piece of data from a site.
However, learning and understanding this tool takes a lot of time. But there are in-depth guides you can check on their site.
Pricing: $259 per year
Key Takeaways
Link building is essential for building your domain authority and ensuring you can rank for keywords, even in competitive industries.
You’d need the right link building software and outreach tools to build at scale. As a quick refresher, here are the nine free and paid backlink-building tools we recommend:
- Backlink Gap: Best free link-building tool with no paywall behind data
- Help a B2B Writer and Haro: Best for networking and community-driven link-building
- Instantly: The only choice for outreach
- Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz Link Explorer: Best for all-around SEO and backlink discovery
- Respona: Best for enterprise-level link-building, prospecting, and outreach
- Screaming Frog: Best for data scraping and custom data extraction
No matter what tools are used to discover potential backlink leads Instantly is the best outreach software to help you scale link-building campaigns. Try it out today!