
Senior Content marketer at Smartlinks.ai and Smarttask.io. Passionate about B2B SaaS and Artificial Intelligence. I’ve been in the content space for over 6 years and have first-hand experience in how On-Page and Off-Page SEO affect a site's traffic. These articles enable me to share my learnings and help you achieve better search results.
Table of Contents
- Full-Stack Link-Building Tools
- 1. Smartlinks
- Ideal For
- 2. Pitchbox
- Ideal For
- 3. SEMrush
- Ideal For
- Link Prospecting, Analysis, and Tracking Tools
- 4. Ahrefs
- Ideal For
- 5. Linkody
- Ideal For
- 6. Majestic
- Ideal For
- 7. SE Ranking
- Ideal For
- Outreach Tools
- 8. Respona
- Ideal For
- 9. Hunter.io
- Ideal For
- 10. Buzzstream
- Ideal For
- 11. HARO
- Ideal For
- 12. Postaga
- Ideal For
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- 1. What is a link-building tool?
- 2. What criteria should you consider when selecting a link-building tool?
.png?table=block&id=0b25dcee-ceac-48ed-9259-bdd2522aa541&cache=v2)
Full-Stack Link-Building Tools
1. Smartlinks
- Zero-outreach link insertions
- Zero-outreach guest posting
- A point-based system for tracking transactions
- Access to Smartlinks Slack community
- Obtains backlinks from relevant sites without outreach
- Connects you directly to publishers for guest posting(and inserting links in outgoing posts from other sites)
- Fantastic support for users on the Slack community
- The point-based system ensures transparency in all transactions
- You need a positive Karma point balance to send backlink requests
- You can only build links to sites already in the ecosystem
Ideal For
2. Pitchbox
- Link Prospecting: Pitchbox helps you find publishers in your niche and analyze their domains using Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, SEMRush, and LinkResearchTools.
- Outreach and Follow-ups: With Pitchbox, you can personalize outreach emails, schedule follow-ups, and manage everything from one inbox.
- In-depth Reports and Analytics: You can use this tool to monitor outreach campaigns, generate white-label reports, and analyze your team's performance.
- Full-stack prospecting for link builders
- Customizable outreach and follow-ups
- ROI-driven reports and analytics
- SEO email client (with Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, Majestic, and LinkResearchTools integrations)
- CRM for link builders
- Has a rich database and multiple campaigns to select from like Blogger Outreach, Roundups, Guest Posting, Broken Backlinks, etc.
- The ‘Pipeline’ feature provides an overview of each backlink opportunity
- You can assign tasks to your team members
- The shared inbox lacks some simple features, such as marking emails as unread
- The price is a major barrier for most link builders
Ideal For
- Professional ($495/month)
- Enterprise ($1350/month)
3. SEMrush
- Compile a list of relevant link prospects
- Contact site owners from your Gmail account
- Customize in-built email templates for your link-building strategy
- Track lost and broken links and contact link partners to fix them
- Backlink analytics
- Backlink audit tool
- Backlink gap analysis
- Bulk analysis tool
- Outreach tool
- In-depth site audit reports with clear suggestions
- An outreach tool for converting prospects into backlinks
- Content tools for on-page optimization
- Although it’s more affordable than Ahrefs, its pricing is still high
- Categorization of “warnings,” “errors,” and “issues” in site audits can be a bit confusing
- Overwhelming user experience due to a cluttered UI
Ideal For
- Pro ($129.95/month)
- Guru ($249.95/month)
- Business ($499.95/month)
Link Prospecting, Analysis, and Tracking Tools
4. Ahrefs
- Reverse engineer backlinks on a competitor's site
- Find resource pages (listicles) to be featured on
- Reclaim and regain backlinks removed by other websites
- Site audit
- Site explorer
- Content explorer
- Keyword explorer
- Rank tracker
- Most SEOs already subscribe to Ahrefs, which makes the link-building features an added benefit.
- Ahrefs’s backlink data is pretty accurate — their backlink index has over 3 trillion live backlinks.
- They have one of the most exhaustive self-serve knowledge bases online
- Ahrefs only helps with link analysis and prospecting
- It has a steep learning curve, especially if you’re new to SEO
- It can be pretty expensive for small websites
Ideal For
- Lite ($99/month)
- Standard ($199/month)
- Advanced ($399/month)
- Enterprise ($999/month)
5. Linkody
- 24/7 link monitoring
- Link Visualizer to locate links on a page
- Disavow tool
- Backlink analysis
- PDF Whitelabel reports (to share with your clients)
- Multi-user support
- Has intuitive reporting capabilities
- Comes with Google Analytics and Ahrefs integrations
- Financially feasible for small websites (base subscription starts at $14.90/month)
- It doesn’t have a steep learning curve
- It’s more of a link analysis and monitoring platform – doesn’t help with outreach
- The UI looks a bit dated
Ideal For
- Webmaster ($14.90/month)
- Advanced ($24.90/month)
- Pro ($49.90/month)
- Agency ($99.90/month)
- Agency XL ($153.90/month)
6. Majestic
- Trust flow (represents the quality of links that point to a website)
- Citation flow (represents the number of links that point to a website)
- Topical trust flow (reflects the topic relevancy of a web page)
- Bulk backlink checker
- Site explorer
- Keyword generator
- Flow metrics (trust, citation, topical trust)
- Link Context (to discover and audit backlinks)
- Majestic Campaigns (to track your favorite websites)
- Can double up as a keyword research tool
- Majestic’s crawler is among the best on the internet, making the data they provide quite reliable
- Proprietary metrics like trust and citation flow help you understand a website’s backlink data on a deeper level
- Sometimes, Majestic is slow to load.
- The UI/UX looks pretty dated
- The price is a bit steep for what’s on offer
Ideal For
- Lite ($49.99/month)
- Pro ($99.99/month)
- Full API ($399.99/month)
7. SE Ranking
- See a complete list of links and referring domains(with key metrics)
- Analyze anchor text to gauge a link profile’s health
- View the most linked pages on a site to build a strategy around them
- Keyword rank tracker
- On-page SEO checker
- Website Audit
- Competitor analysis tool
- Backlink checker
- Local marketing tool
- Backlink tracking tool
- Easy to use
- Affordable
- Provides specific and actionable advice in site audits
- Runs regular scans on your links to monitor changes
- The backlink checker may be outdated sometimes
- It doesn’t have outreach tools
Ideal For
- Essential ($55/month)
- Pro ($109/month)
- Business ($239/month)
Outreach Tools
8. Respona
- Find outreach opportunities for your site(using Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz integrations)
- Create and customize email drip sequences
- Identify the right contact for each opportunity
- Personalize your pitches using AI
- Relationship management
- Campaign analytics
- In-built email outreach templates
- AI-powered personalization for outreach emails
- Integrations with Hunter.io, Ahrefs, RocketReach, and Semrush
- Easy-to-use dashboard with all metrics in one place
- The shared inbox enables teams to collaborate on opportunities
- Respona’s in-built templates summarise articles and fetch podcast snippets to help personalize your pitches
- There aren’t enough credits in the starter plan
- Real-time email verification can be slow, especially when working on large campaigns
- The "Get Contacts" feature fails to retrieve email addresses for some opportunities
Ideal For
- Starter ($197/month)
- Unlimited ($399/month)
9. Hunter.io
- Domain Search: Uses company name or website to track the best person for an opportunity.
- Email Finder: Finds the email address of a backlink prospect. All you need to do is enter their full name and the domain they’re associated with.
- Email Verifier: Validates email addresses to prevent email bounces.
- Domain Search (and Bulk Domain Search)
- Email Finder (and Bulk Email Finder)
- Email Verifier (and Bulk Email verifier)
- Campaigns (for cold email outreach at scale)
- Native CRM integrations
- Automates the most tedious aspects of outreach
- Can find and verify contact details in bulk
- Can be used for free (with certain limitations, of course)
- Doesn’t retrieve email addresses for every site
- Returns incorrect or outdated email addresses sometimes
- Isn’t intuitive enough for new users
Ideal For
- Starter ($49/month)
- Growth ($149/month)
- Business ($499/month)
10. Buzzstream
- Prospect research
- In-built templates for outreach
- Relationship management
- Campaign analytics
- Easy to navigate UI
- Provides detailed analytics on outreach efforts, including open and click-through rates
- Integrations with popular CRMs
- Merging contacts from different projects can be difficult
- Like most outreach tools, prospecting may not always be accurate
- It can lag during heavy use
Ideal For
- Starter ($24/month)
- Growth ($124/month)
- Professional ($299/month)
- Custom ($999/month)
11. HARO
- Respond to relevant requests on time
- Craft a compelling response highlighting your expertise
- Respond to at least 5-10 queries each day
- Response tracking (HARO tracks all your pitches)
- Personalized alerts (for new queries)
- Email-based customer support
- Access to high-quality backlinks
- Pitching to requests is pretty straightforward
- HARO offers plenty of opportunities in the free plan
- The UI looks a bit dated
- HARO link-building doesn’t work for every niche
- Even when it works, HARO link-building isn’t quick
Ideal For
- Standard ($19/month)
- Advanced ($49/month)
- Premium ($149/month)
12. Postaga
- Finding backlink opportunities based on your campaign type
- Analyzing content for key info to include in your emails
- Finding your POC’s(point of contact) contact information
- Combining key details about your POC and your content to create personalized emails
- Support for 12 campaign types including Skyscraper Technique, guest posting, link reclamations, and resource page link-building.
- Automatic email personalization
- AI-based outreach assistant
- Automatic sequence creation and follow-ups
- Automates link-building outreach
- Extremely easy to use
- You can launch a campaign in minutes with its setup wizard
- You can only add one account to the Pro tier
- Slightly more expensive than tools like Hunter.io
Ideal For
- Pro ($99/month)
- Agency ($299/month)
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What is a link-building tool?
2. What criteria should you consider when selecting a link-building tool?
- Features: An ideal link-building tool should cover all your needs, whether it’s prospecting, outreach, or follow-ups. That said, if you only want to optimize some of these processes, you’re better off with a specialized tool.
- Pricing: Factor in your budget, needs, and business scale when choosing a link-building tool. Remember, you don’t HAVE to use a paid tool at first. You can choose a free tool(or take a trial), and then upgrade accordingly.
- Ease of use: Link-building tools can be complex, so choose one that’s easy to navigate and use. If possible, take a trial to get a sense of the UI. Also, prioritize tools that come with comprehensive user guides and tutorials.
- Customer support: Customer support can make or break your experience with a tool, so make sure you look into it carefully. Also, ensure you have access to a help center to assist you with the initial setup and DIY troubleshooting.
Written by

Senior Content marketer at Smartlinks.ai and Smarttask.io. Passionate about B2B SaaS and Artificial Intelligence. I’ve been in the content space for over 6 years and have first-hand experience in how On-Page and Off-Page SEO affect a site's traffic. These articles enable me to share my learnings and help you achieve better search results.