Building high-quality backlinks is a daunting task, requiring significant time and effort.
Without the right link building tools, you risk ineffective outreach, missed opportunities, and potential damage to your site’s SEO.
That’s why here is my curated list of the top 10 link building tools of 2023, tested and proven to streamline your link building process, enhance your outreach, and boost your site’s ranking.
Top 3 Link Building Tools
TL;DR: Best Link Building Tools
- SEMRush: Best for discovering comprehensive link building opportunities.
- WoodPecker: Ideal for cold email link building outreach.
- Tomba.io: Affordable tool for finding email addresses.
- Lemwarm: Excellent for email warmup and maintaining high deliverability.
- SE Ranking: Affordable SEO tool for uncovering link building opportunities.
- Hunter.io: Provides high-quality contact information for outreach.
- Help a Reporter Out (HARO): Free platform for securing high-quality backlinks.
- NinjaOutreach: Comprehensive tool for managing outreach campaigns.
- Respona: Automates and streamlines the entire link building process.
- ChatGPT: Ideal for creating personalized outreach messages at scale quickly.
1. SEMRush
Best for finding link building opportunities.
SEMRush I believe doesn’t need a long introduction. It’s simply one of the best SEO tools in the market thanks to their numerous and advanced features.
Currently, SEMRush has over 130+ features/tools within its suite making it simple the most comprehensive SEO and link building tool on the market.
One of their tools is their link building tool that automatically discovers link building prospects based on your competitors and target keywords.
It often provides a list of hundreds or even thousands link building prospects in a matter of minutes once setup and it keeps bringing new prospects all the time.
On top of that, they also provide an outreach tool that helps you to find the email addresses of the prospects, connect your email provider with the tool and send the emails right from the platform and track the prospect deliverability, open rates, and replies. Everything from the platform.
Because of that, I believe it’s one of the best link building tools, especially because they give you everything you need to get started.
It’s not the best, but it does the job.
Pros
Cons
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, SEMRUsh is not a link building tool by itself, but an SEO platform that provides link building features.
SEMRush offers three pricing options, but all of them include the link building feature:
- Pro Plan ($129.95/monthly): This plan is ideal for beginners and small teams. It includes 5 projects, 500 keywords to track, 10,000 results per report, and a suite of SEO, social, and PPC tools. These tools encompass competitor analysis, keyword research, website audit, advertising and social media tools, and more.
- Guru Plan ($249.95/monthly): This plan is designed for agencies and mid-size businesses. It includes all the features of the Pro plan, plus 15 projects, 1,500 keywords to track, 30,000 results per report, and additional features like the Content Marketing Toolkit, historical data, multi-location and device tracking, and Looker Studio integration.
- Business Plan ($499.95/monthly): This plan is best suited for large agencies and enterprises. It includes all the features of the Guru plan, plus 40 projects, 5,000 keywords to track, 50,000 results per report, and advanced features like Share of Voice, extended limits, API access, PLA analytics, and free migration from third-party tools.
2. WoodPecker
Best for cold email link building outreach.
The second on our list of best link building tools is WoodPecker.
WoodPecker is an email marketing outreach platform for sales, marketers, or anybody who needs to do cold email outreach including link building.
WoordPecker’s main focus is on deliverability and protecting your domain and email reputation to ensure your emails land in your prospect inbox and not in a promotion or spam folder.
They help you to create personalized link building outreach campaigns and follow-ups to maximize your link building results.
They also check every email address with their verification feature to protect your email reputation, they enable you to create A/B tests, condition-based campaigns, and a lot more to successfully connect with your prospects.
For me, WoodPecker is one of the best and most intuitive outreach platforms and I had a ton of success with them when reaching out to prospects.
Lastly, their expert team of outreach specialists is always ready to help you with your campaign to ensure you’re getting your money back!
Pros
Cons
Pricing
When it comes to Woodpecker pricing they charge per how many prospects you’re going to contact each month per email slot. This means that all plans provide all the features and you only pay for the usage:
- For up to 1,500 prospects the price is $39.
- For up to 6,000 prospects the price is $44.
- For unlimited prospects, the price is $49.
Additionally, you can add an A/B testing feature for an extra $10, which I highly recommend and for an extra $5 you can add API keys & integration options.
As you can see, Woodpecker is a very affordable email outreach platform for any link builders.
3. Tomba.io
Best affordable email-finding and email verification tool.
The next essential link building tool is Tomba.io.
Tomba.io is an affordable email-finding and verification tool that helps you to find the right email addresses of your prospects so you can get in touch with them.
They provide many useful features such as analyzing single domains for emails and other contact information, LinkedIn prospecting, and bulk analysis to get your email addresses at once for all your prospects.
Tomba.io is for me another essential tool to ensure I can always connect with my prospects and find the most relevant people within the company to get in touch with them.
100% if you are doing link building, you’ll need an email-finding tool and Tomba.io is the go-to tool for me!
Pros
Cons
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, Tomba offers several pricing options to fit your needs.
The pricing plans are not limited to features, but only to the number of monthly searches and verifications you can perform.
The pricing starts at $39 and goes all the way to $389 depending on how many email findings and verifications you need.
From my experience, for light to medium link building activity, you may need at least the Growth plan, but the Starter can be sufficient at first.
If you’re a link building agency, then obviously you need a Pro or Enterprise plan.
4. Lemwarm
Best for email warmup and deliverability tools.
Now, nothing matters if your emails do not land in the inbox but in the promotion or spam folder.
It doesn’t matter if you do your link building research very well, find all the right email addresses and people, and create perfect personalized email outreach sequences if your emails end up in the promotion or spam folders.
So, that’s where Lemwarm comes in!
This tool is essential to warm up your email and domain, keep your deliverability score high, and keep your emails away from promotional or spam folders, by doing it automatically, you just activate it and let it run.
No manual interference is needed from you.
If you’re serious about link building and want to get in touch with the people and get replies from them, you need to make sure your emails land in their inboxed and Lemwarm helps you do just that!
That’s why Lemwarn is one of my essential link building tools that I recommend you to get!
Pros
Cons
Pricing
When it comes to pricing of Lemwarm they offer two plans:
- Essential Plan for $29/mo: This plan provides you with the essential content email, DNS check, and deliverability score.
- Smart Plan for $49/mo: This plan includes all features in the Essential plan, plus Smart cluster, Smart content emails, and Smart schedule.
However, the $29 is not really as effective and if you decide to choose Lemwarm, then you should go for the $49/mo plan as that will give the high deliverability results you need.
5. SE Ranking
A very affordable SEO tool that is perfect for discovering link building opportunities.
Another all-in-one SEO tool on this list of link building tools is SE Ranking.
SE Ranking provides affordable SEO solutions that come with tons of great features to improve your website visibility within search engines.
I especially like their Competitor Research tool that helps me to discover a ton of close competitors related to my niche and then get in touch with them regarding a link building opportunity.
Arguably, this is one of my favorite ways to start with link building as it is easy to start with, I can select who I want to contact and it gives me a sense of how to industry works when I do link building for my client.
Additionally, you can run a website audit tool for any website to find broken backlinks which is another great way.
Pros
Cons
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, SE Ranking offers three pricing plans:
- Essential Plan: Starts at $39 per month and offers access to most of the features with just a limited quota.
- Pro Plan: Starts at $89 per month and offers access to most of the features but a much large quota.
- Business Plan: Starts at $189.00 per month and offers access to all features with a very large quota.
As I said, SE Ranking is not an actual link building tool but gives access to a wealth of information at an affordable price that can help you discover a ton of link building opportunities.
6. Hunter.io
Best for the highest quality of email addresses for outreach.
Another excellent link building tool on this list is Hunter.io.
Hunter.io helps you to find the best quality and accurate email addresses for your blogger outreach.
They also provide excellent features to find any email addresses in bulk and verify them to ensure you do not hurt your deliverability score.
Additionally, Hunter also offers Campaigns features from which you can start your link building campaign outreach, giving you everything you need to get you started.
Pros
Cons
Pricing
When it comes to Hunter.io pricing, they offer four pricing options:
- Free Plan: $0 per month, includes limited features and verifications.
- Starter Plan: $49 per month, includes 500 monthly verifications, and gives access to most of the features.
- Growth Plan: $149 per month includes 5,000 monthly searches, 10,000 monthly verifications, and access to almost all features.
- Business Plan: $499 per month, includes ten times the number of searches and verifications as the Growth plan and allows for 20 connected accounts with access to all features.
As I said, Hunter is not the cheapest option, but they provide quality data that helps link builders access vital email addresses.
7. Help a Reporter Out
Best for free high-quality backlinks.
The next on our list of link building tools is Help a Reporter Out or HARO.
HARO is a platform where you can receive queries from journalists related to all kinds of industries.
And your only goal is to reply to them. And if the journalist selects you, they give you a backlink from their website.
What’s good about this is that HARO has a threshold for journalists that can submit their queries to the platform.
As said on their website:
“…the site must have a Similarweb ranking of 1 million or less…”
This basically filters all the trash and you can be sure that the journalist comes from reputable and high-quality websites and backlink from them can do wonders for your ranking.
Pros
Cons
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, HARO is completely free to use. However, they do offer upgrades to improve your chances of getting featured.
I personally recommend the Advanced plan as it gives you a head start, you can create your profile and get alerts for important keywords.
These features increase your chances of getting backlinks and if you’re consistent with HARO I highly recommend it.
8. NinjaOutreach
Best tools for outreach campaigns.
My next recommended link building tool is NinjaOutreach.
NinjaOutreach is the ultimate outreach tool that helps you to connect with anybody across social media, websites, and emails to create a true omnichannel outreach.
This tool provides excellent capabilities to find prospects, personalized your outreach and follow-up, reach out to prospects, and ultimately create effective link building and outreach campaigns.
They also provide excellent templates for every link building campaign you may run such as sponsored posts, interviews, podcast link building, guest posts, resource link building, and much more.
Pros
Cons
Pricing
As I said this tool is the ultimate outreach platform, but it comes with the price.
They do not display the pricing on the website, but you can expect the price to be around $1,500 and more.
9. Respona
Best for automated link building.
Next on this list of best link building tools is Respona.
Responsa is an excellent link building tool built to automate and streamline your entire process from finding outreach opportunities, creating email sequences, and finding the right contacts to personalizing your outreach messages.
It’s made to automate your entire link building process with everything you need, including proven templates for any kind of link building outreach you may require.
It’s a very easy-to-use tool that many website and business owners found to be the perfect way to build backlinks in-house without spending too much time on link building, yet getting great results!
Pros
Cons
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, Respona offers two simple plans, both that offer all features and only limit the number of emails and credits to find and validate email addresses.
- Starter Plan starts at $99/mo and gives you one email account and 5,000 credits. Which is roughly 800 prospects you can reach out to every month.
- Unlimited Plan starts at $399/mo and gives you unlimited email accounts and 600,000 credits per year, which works out to around 100,000 prospects per year.
10. ChatGPT
Best for creating personalized outreach messages at scale fast.
ChatGPT helps you to write anything and follow your instructions to ensure that it has your charm and personality, just without any grammar mistakes, and it’s done in a few seconds.
If you’re writing anything, you need to use ChatGPT to make it faster, professional, on point, and get extra few ideas.
Creating personalized outreach emails becomes much easier when you can just dumb your prospects' data into the tool and let it analyze the data.
After that, it can help you craft personalized messages that sound human but is relevant, and accurate like it was analyzed by AI.
With ChatGPT, you get best of the both worlds.
Pros
Cons
Pricing
ChatGPT so far has only one pricing plan which is for $20 a month. You can use the free plan, but for me, it’s rubbish compared to their latest model and I strongly recommend getting the premium plan.
You can use it for almost anything you need, so it’s well worthy!
Why do You Need Link Building Tools?
Link building plays a key factor that search engines consider when ranking websites. But why exactly do you need link building tools?
Link building is very hard, extremely time-consuming, but essential to do well in search!
And link building tools are designed to simplify and streamline the process of acquiring high-quality backlinks.
They help you identify potential link opportunities, track your link building efforts, and analyze the quality of your backlinks.
This is crucial because the quality, quantity, and relevance of the backlinks to your site significantly impact your site's SEO performance.
Link building tools offer many benefits such as:
- Efficiency: These tools automate many of the tasks involved in link building, saving you valuable time and effort.
- Insights: They provide valuable data and insights about your backlinks and those of your competitors, helping you develop effective link building strategies.
- Outreach: Many link building tools include features for finding contact information and sending outreach emails, making it easier to connect with potential link partners.
- Tracking and Reporting: Link building tools help you track your progress and generate reports, making it easier to measure your success and identify areas for improvement.
With that being said, link building tools are not just a nice-to-have but a must-have for anyone serious about SEO. They simplify the process, save you time, and provide valuable insights that can help you improve your website's search engine ranking.
Final Advice
Most likely, you will need a stack of link building tools to do effective link building campaigns.
Therefore, here is my stack of link building tools:
All these tools ensure that I get the best contact information, my deliverability is high, I can create personalized link building outreach at scale, and I get the best possible results.
However, because of that I also implemented other marketing strategies to get use of these tools and get better ROI.
We do cold email outreach, SEO, partnership, affiliate marketing, Google Ads, and influencer marketing, and for all these digital marketing strategies I am using the above-mentioned tools.
Therefore the investment is well worth it!
So, don’t think of these tools only as link building tools, but as marketing tools that will help you achieve better marketing results and bigger revenue for your business!
Frequently Asked Questions About Link Building Tools
Here, let’s answer some of the commonly asked questions about link building tools:
For an effective link building strategy, I recommend using a combination of tools such as SEMRush for finding opportunities, SE Ranking for competitor analysis, WoodPecker for email outreach, Lemwarm for email warmup, Tomba for email finding, and ChatGPT for crafting personalized outreach messages.
Respona is considered one of the best SEO platforms for link building. It provides comprehensive automation for the entire link building process, with great templates making it a highly effective tool for SEO professionals.
Related Articles:
- Link Building for SaaS Companies
- 8 Best B2B SEO Tools in 2023: Boost Your Digital Marketing Results
- Link Building Mistakes to Avoid in 2023
- SEO Strategy: How to Start with SEO [2023]
Also, check out our SEO hub page to find all our SEO Resources.
Disclaimer
This article was created by Eduard Dziak and may contain affiliate links. The following were used to optimize the article for the best user and search engine experience include:
- SE Ranking for keyword research and on-page SEO optimization
- Surfer SEO for SEO-friendly content creation for users and search engines.
- Jasper AI for grammar correction and information enhancement.
The article is based on the author’s own experience and knowledge, drawn from both their own work and that of their clients, to provide the latest, proven methods.
