Link Building Software Choices
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Link Building Software Choices
For link-building software choices, there are so many options on the market. Whether you are looking to better understand and contend with competitor sites, identify links to your site, generate leads who can link back to you, or create email outreach campaigns, the internet is rife with software choices that can improve the backlink performance of your website.
We scoured the internet to identify the top link-building software options for all your link-building needs. We discovered eight top-performing platforms uniquely tailored to achieve different link-building goals. These platforms include:
Read on to learn more about backlinks and what these link-building software options have to offer you and your website.
Understanding Backlinks
If you want to improve the SEO on your website, you are probably thinking about writing content for keywords, improving the crawlability of your site, and monitoring your performance on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). One aspect of SEO often neglected by website developers is what happens off their sites in the form of backlinks.
Why Are Backlinks Important?
Because they establish the authority of your website. When search engines like Google rank results, they do so based on three things: discovery, relevance, and authority.
Discovery relates to the ability of the search engine to crawl and index your pages, the technical aspect of your SEO. Relevance is all about keywords and how well your content matches what searchers seek. This is the on-page aspect of your SEO.
Authority is where backlinks come in. Search engines want to know your site is a reputable authority on a given topic. Search engines establish authority by way of backlinks. This is the off-page aspect of your SEO.
If many reputable sites link to yours, the search engine knows you have authority on the topic and will rank you accordingly. If however, the search engine cannot find backlinks to your site, it does not interpret your site as an authority, and you will not rank highly on SERPs.
Why Are Backlinks So Often Neglected?
Because they are one of the most challenging aspects of SEO to achieve. Your technical and on-page SEO is largely within your control. You can determine the structure and content of your site.
Backlinks are outside a business or web developer's control. Authority then is the most difficult aspect of SEO to master because it is not within your control. You cannot make sites link to yours no matter how badly you want them to.
The good news is that some very savvy software engineers have created link-building software. With these products, you can start taking control of your off-page SEO and build your website's authority. If you choose the right link-building software for your website and maximize your use, you will find yourself ranking on SERPs in no time!
The Best Link Building Tools
Let us look at the top link-building software choices. We will consider the features each has to offer, its benefits and drawbacks, and why websites might choose one product over another.
Ahrefs
One of the most popular SEO tools on the market, Ahrefs has a lot to offer for link-building. Ahrefs began as a link-building software and grew its suite of offerings from there. Ahrefs helps you monitor backlinks to your site and referring domains.
Features
Referring domains are the websites from which your website has backlinks. Ahref’s Site Explorer will provide you with a referring domains report so you can quickly and easily see the sites linking to yours.
Referring domains are vital because not all backlinks are created equal. Backlinks from a website with high authority will give your website more authority on the keyword topics for which you write content.
Ahrefs also offers a backlinks report where you can identify all the places on the web linking to your pages, allowing you to monitor your backlinks and build from there.
One great link-building feature of Ahrefs is its Content Explorer. This tool allows you to identify potential sites that can link to yours. With Content Explorer, you can search for websites with content similar to yours and filter out sites with outdated links. From there, you can reach out to those websites to suggest they update their links, including links to your website.
What Do We Love About Ahrefs Link-building Software?
Its crawler is the second most active on the internet, being exceeded in activity only by Google. What’s more, Ahrefs maintains a backlink index with over 3 trillion backlinks across the internet.
How Much Does Ahrefs Cost?
If you own a website, you can access the backlinks report for your website for free using Ahref’s Webmaster tools. However, to explore backlinks on sites you do not own or use Content Explorer you need a paid plan.
Ahrefs plans start at $99 per month for the lite package and go up to $999 per month for access to the full suite of tools. Depending on your business size and SEO goals, you can select the right plan for you.
Hunter.io
Identifying sites that can link to yours is one thing. Getting them to post those links on their sites is another thing altogether. This is where Hunter.io comes in.
Features
So much of link building is about establishing relationships with potential link sources. To do that, you first need to identify with whom to establish a relationship. Hunter.io takes care of this for you.
To use Hunter.io, you plug in the URL of the website you want to link to yours. Hunter.io will then scour the web to find valid, live contact information for that website. The software then provides you with a verified email address and the list of sources from which it pulled the email address.
One of the best things about Hunter.io is its email verifier feature. With this feature, you can be sure the email addresses you receive are valid and current because the software has verified them. You can also plug in any email addresses you find on your own to have Hunter.io verify them for you.
Once you have verified email addresses, you can create a cold marketing email campaign with Hunter.io. This link-building software integrates with Gmail and Outlook, so you can create campaigns and schedule any needed follow-ups right inside your chosen email program.
What Do We Love About Hunter.io Link-building Software?
Hunter.io takes the guesswork out of email campaign creation, offering you email templates proven to get replies. If you are concerned that templated emails will lack a personal touch, Hunter builds into its templates places for you to personalize and craft your message before sending it.
How Much Does Hunter.io Cost?
Hunter.io offers several features for free, including up to 25 searches and up to 50 email verifications each month. You can also run one email campaign with up to 500 recipients monthly with the no-cost version of Hunter.io.
If you opt for a paid plan, you can access more searches, email verifications, and campaigns. You will also be able to see full results of domain searches and have more customization and tracking options with your email campaigns.
Depending on the size of your business and your outreach needs, you can expect to pay between $49-$399 per month. If you subscribe to a yearly plan, you will save 30% off that cost.
Respona
This link-building software has everything you need to create, schedule, and send email campaigns that will get high-quality backlinks to your site. Respona promises “link building made easy,” and that is just what you will get.
Features
We found Respona’s interface highly intuitive, making it easy for those new to the email marketing game to use. Once you have logged into Respona, you will find expertly refined tools that walk you through Respona’s four key steps to link building.
First, Respona will help you find content for your outreach email campaigns by simply entering a URL from which you want backlinks. Respona integrates with Ahrefs on this step, helping you identify the quality of sites according to their Ahrefs PM scores.
Next, Respona will walk you through creating an email campaign sequence with a high potential for response. You can write and schedule emails inside Respona, using templates and content additions that have proven to increase the potential for response.
In the third step, Respona will identify and confirm email addresses for contacts at your desired websites. Respona promises high-quality contacts who are likely to have control of linking because the software locates contacts based on their seniority and titles.
Finally, Respona allows you to craft and personalize the content of your emails before launching your backlink campaigns. Respona will even identify articles from each contact’s website that you can reference in your emails, showing your outreach targets that you have done your homework.
What Do We Love About Respona Link-building Software?
One thing we love about Respona is its relationship tracking tool. This software uses a Kanban approach to organizing your outreach targets according to where they are in your link-building efforts.
We also love what an all-in-one platform Respona offers. From helping you identify sites for potential backlinks to crafting your email campaigns to managing your contacts over time, Respona does it all for backlink-building outreach efforts.
How Much Does Respona Cost?
Respona offers a 7-day free trial, so you can work with the software before deciding if you want to opt for a paid plan. If you opt into paying for Respona, your monthly cost ranges from $79 to $499, depending on the number of email accounts you want to use and how many contacts you expect to look up each month.
One great thing about Respona’s pricing structure is that you do not have to upgrade to a whole new, pricier plan if you want to increase your access a little. Instead, you can pay a flat fee of $49 for each email account you add, and you can buy credits for more contact look-ups than afforded in a given month.
Linkody
If you are looking for a straightforward tool for understanding and managing links to your website, Linkody may be the right product. This link-building software helps you analyze your site’s performance on backlinks, know how competitors perform, and identify and reject bad links.
Features
When you log into Linkody, you will find a dashboard that is easy to navigate and understand. This dashboard will help you monitor your site’s performance on backlinks by showing you new and lost backlinks and scores on Mozrank, domain authority, and spam. You can view your current data and historical data straight from the dashboard.
Linkody will provide you with a full backlink profile that shows your site’s backlink performance across many metrics. You will also get reports on the anchor text and keywords associated with links to your site.
You can compare your profile and reports with those of competitors to understand how you perform relative to them and gain insight into how to replicate elements of their backlink profiles for your site.
What Do We Love About Linkody Link-building Software?
We love Linkody’s link disavowal tools for handling bad links. Bad links are links from sites with high spam scores or sites known to buy and sell backlinks. Most search engines penalize these sites, diminishing the authority they might otherwise confer upon your site with a backlink.
Linkody will quickly identify all potentially damaging links to your website. Then, you can create a disavowal file that you can upload straight to Google.
If you run websites for clients or customers, you may also want to take advantage of Linkody’s whitelabeling feature. When you generate reports from Linkody, they will be free of all Linkody branding and ready for you to insert your logo and branding elements before submitting them to clients.
How Much Does Linkody Cost?
Starting at just $14.90 per month, Linkody is one of the most affordable link-building software products on the market. At that level, one user can access Linkody’s features for two domains and 500 monitored links.
If you are managing sites for many clients, you can opt up to an agency XL plan which gets you access to Linkody’s features for ten users, 100 domains, and up to 40,000 monitored links for only $153.90 per month.
Moz
With an industry giant like Moz, you know you will get many link-building features that can improve your website’s authority and thus rank on SERPs. Moz offers a product called Link Explorer which will tell you about your site’s backlink performance and how to improve it.
Features
Moz has powerful web indexing, allowing it to quickly and easily identify all backlinks to your website. With Link Explorer, you can see which domains are linking to your site, the anchor text they use in links, and which links your site has lost in the last 60 days. Moz will also help you troubleshoot problems, like identifying and fixing broken links to your website.
What’s more, Moz helps you outperform your competitors on backlinks, thus increasing the chances that you will outrank them on SERPs. Moz will generate a link profile for you that you can compare to the link profiles of your competitors.
With a product called Link Intersect, you can see which domains are linking to your competitors’ websites but not linking to yours. With this information, you can create an outreach strategy tailored to your website and the unique, authoritative content you have to offer.
What Do We Love About Moz Link-building Software?
One Moz feature we love is link tracking lists. With link tracking lists, you can set link-building goals, track your progress toward those goals, and analyze your backlink performance over time.
Link tracking lists are great if you want to track your progress on links to a specific page on your website; set goals around specific link types or links from specific domains; take notes about lost links or link regaining efforts; or track potential bad links and your efforts to correct or disavow them.
How Much Does Moz Cost?
To access Moz’s full suite of link-building software features, you must purchase a Pro plan, with standard, medium, large, and premium level sizes. These plans start at $79 per month for just the standard package if you pay annually. If you are at a large firm focused on SEO, you can upgrade to the premium plan which caps out at $599 per month if you pay monthly.
Moz’s most popular plan, the medium plan, costs $179 per month and is the plan you will have access to if you sign-up for Moz’s 30-day free trial. We love that all Moz plans include an individualized walk-through with a Moz expert as well as access to 24/7 support online.
NinjaOutreach
This SEO-focused outreach platform provides you with a comprehensive set of tools to manage all of your link-building outreach efforts. NinjaOutreach offers many features we love for link-building outreach and business development generally.
Features
This software’s Business Lead Generation feature allows you to quickly and easily identify promising business leads that will ultimately result in more backlinks to your site. Type your business niche into the search along with keywords for location, and NinjaOutreach will search its database of millions of lead profiles to give you the most promising leads
With Business Lead Generation, you can be sure you are getting highly influential leads with expansive professional and social reach. This is because NinjaOutreach tracks influence through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube, showing you only the profiles for the most influential leads for your specific link-building needs.
What’s more, if you employ advanced search, you can even find specific content generated for keywords by author, URL, or domain. Filter your search by adding tags to it so that you only pull results for your specified tag, whether it is blogger, influencer, executive, company, agency, or journalist.
If you are looking for backlinks from a specific web authority type, like .edu, .org, or .gov, you can specify this in your search, so you only get the business lead results that will build your desired backlinks.
NinjaOutreach’s Pro Link Building Software is where you will see the power of this platform. With this feature, you can access all of the high-quality backlink leads in NinjaOutreach’s database. You can filter these leads by their social engagement (including likes, comments, shares, and followers) and SEO metrics (including total backlinks and domain authority).
Once you have identified your link-building leads, you are ready to use NinjaOutreach’s email campaign management function. This function integrates with your email, so you can quickly and easily go from identifying leads to contacting them.
With Pro Link Building Software, you can schedule an unlimited amount of email outreach campaigns with two automatic follow-ups each. NinjaOutreach offers tons of customizable templates with fields that will automatically populate with content uniquely suited to each lead.
What Do We Love About NinjaOutreach Link-building Software?
One thing we love about NinjaOutreach’s Pro Link Building Software is its onboard CRM tools. You can easily tag contacts, identify a relationship status for each, save and reference your conversation history, and add notes to any campaign or individual.
One additional link-building software feature you may want to use is NinjaOutreach’s Chrome extension. This free extension allows you to prospect potential link-building leads as you surf the web. It crawls the sites you visit for contact information and related-profiles and websites while simultaneously providing you information on social engagement and SEO metrics.
If you download the free extension, you can save Google results directly to your NinjaOutreach account, send emails from your browser from a dropdown message menu, and automatically fill web forms.
How Much Does NinjaOutreach Cost?
NinjaOutreach offers two plans: Flex and Pro. The Flex plan starts at $155 per month if you pay yearly and will get you access to 1,000 contacts, one login, one connected email, and 10,000 emails sent each month.
If you upgrade to the Pro plan, you will be paying as much as $649 per month if you pay monthly. At this level, you get up to 4,000 contacts, three logins, four connected emails, and 15,000 emails sent each month.
Link Prospector
This link-building software can provide you with many top-quality outreach prospects so you can build your backlinks, leading to greater website authority and a higher ranking on SERPs. With Link Prospector, you will get tons of reports that will help you with content development, public relations, and outreach.
Features
Link prospector will help you promote your content across the web, landing you lots of links on blogs, directories, links pages, news articles, and reviews. Link Prospector builds reports chock full of useful information and promising leads.
To use Link Prospector, start by creating and naming a campaign. Then, you will see a button to find prospects according to the most relevant report type for your backlinking needs. Reports types include:
- Content promoters
- Guest posts
- Resource linkers
- Audience input
- Accessible journalists
- Content development focused writers
- Expert interviews
- Commenting
- Forums
- Professional organizations
- Donations
- Giveaways
After you have selected your report type, Link Prospector will have you enter research phrases, which are like the keywords you want to target with your outreach efforts. Link Prospector will show you all the identified backlink opportunities for your report type and research phrases.
You can download opportunity reports directly from Link Prospector as a CSV file, so you can sort and arrange your identified opportunities any way you would like.
While Link Prospector will give you reports of many potential sites that can link to yours, you will not get the email identification and verification tools some other link-building software offers. So, you may need to pair this tool with another to create and manage email campaigns likely to result in high-quality backlinks.
What Do We Love About Link Prospector Link-building Software?
One thing we love about Link Prospector is that you do not have to opt into a yearly or monthly plan to use it. You can pay as you go by purchasing credits from their site. If you are paying as you go, credits will cost you $5 each; most reports cost one credit.
How Much Does Link Prospector Cost?
If you are certain you will be using several reports each month, you can opt for one of Link Prospector’s three plans. At the consultant level, you’ll pay $47 per month and get 20 credits. If you hit your credit limit, you can purchase additional credits for $2.35 each.
If you opt for the Agency level, which is Link Prosector’s most popular level, you will get 75 credits per month for $127 and can purchase additional credits for $1.69 each. At the highest, Enterprise level, you will pay $497 per month and get access to 500 credits, with each additional credit costing only $.99.
Majestic
Majestic is an all-in-one SEO platform with lots of features for link building. If you are looking to monitor the performance of your website and generate linkable content as you work to build backlinks to your site, Majestic may be the right product for you.
Features
Majestic’s hallmark feature is its Site Explorer. This powerful tool allows users to view metrics and all incoming links for just about every page on the internet. You will get summary metrics and advanced tools to learn about a website’s performance now and over time.
As it relates to backlinks, Site Explorer can identify all links to a site and tell you which are new links and which links were recently lost. You can also view the context of backlinks, showing you how links on the referring page are distributed, how dense they are, which links appear near yours, and the sites to which those links direct.
Majestic will provide you with all anchor text used in backlinks to your site and broken links that take internet users to 404 error pages. You will get the topical trust flow of all links to your site, which helps search engines know how to index your site.
Additionally, Majestic will map all your links into a link graph, showing you how sites discovered through fresh index links all link to each other.
Majestic uses Trust and Strength metrics, which allow you to identify the best web pages and domains for your link-building efforts. Then, you can use Majestic’s keyword tools, including the Keyword Checker and Keyword Generator to help you create content.
With Keyword Checker, you can search Majestic’s massive index to see how many times a word appears and get its search volume. Keyword Generator on the other hand, will allow you to create keyword lists from Majestic’s massive database with unique keyword insights to drive your linkable content.
What Do We Love About Majestic Link-building Software?
One feature we love with Majestic is the platform’s Bulk Backlink Checker.
With this tool, you can analyze all backlinks and referring domain counts for many websites simultaneously. If you are manually pasting URLs into Majestic’s Bulk Backlink Checker, you can check up to 400 pages at once. If you upload a URL file, you can check up to 1,000,000 URLs simultaneously with a single upload.
How Much Does Majestic Cost?
Majestic offers three plans with different access levels depending on your site monitoring and backlink building needs. The Lite plan starts at $41.67 per month if you pay annually and will give one user access to 1 million analysis units and a limited array of tools.
Upgrade to the Pro plan at $83.33 per month if you pay annually and you will get all website tools for one user with 20 million analysis units per month. If you opt for Majestic’s highest plan, the API, you will pay up to $399.99 and get a full API for 5 users at up to 100 million analysis units per month.
Conclusion
There are so many link-building software options, sometimes it can be hard to know where to start. If you are wondering how to choose the right link-building software, consider your needs and goals.
Perhaps you need to understand your website’s overall performance, including its performance on backlinks. In that case, you will likely want a high-powered, comprehensive SEO tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or Majestic.
If on the other hand, you’re looking for something more limited in scope, like a simple email outreach management tool to build relationships that will result in more links to your website, you might opt for a scaled-back software like Respona, Hunter.io, or Ninja Outreach.
Whatever your link-building software needs, the tools we have explored offer many unique and promising benefits for getting the kinds of backlinks to your site that will have you outranking all of your competitors on SERPs.
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