Best SEO Link Building Tools
In this post, our SEO experts offer a detailed look at the top free link building tools for SEO as mentioned in our article, “White Hat Link Building for SEO“. We’ll also explore how you can use them as part of your SEO strategy.
If your website isn’t attracting many leads or customers are struggling to find you online, it might be time to focus on strengthening your backlink profile. These free link building tools help monitor backlink profiles, identify link-building opportunities, and manage potentially harmful links.
“Whenever I explain link building to a complete newbie, I always use the same metaphor. It’s very hard to make friends if you’re not an interesting (and generous) person. The same applies to your website: If there’s nothing interesting or useful about it, then why would anyone care to link to it?”
Quote from Ahref CMO Tim Soulo on Why Backlinks Are Important
Why You Need Link Building Tools as a Business Owner
As a business owner, you need link building tools for a few simple but very important reasons.
Save Time
Manually searching for link building opportunities can be incredibly time-consuming. SEO link building tools help you find where you can get links from quickly, saving you a ton of time.
See What Competitors Are Doing Online
Understanding where your competitors’ links are coming from can provide insights into their strategy and help you identify new opportunities for your own website.
Use the Right Links
Not all backlinks are good for your website. SEO link building tools help you choose valuable links that improve your site’s reputation.
Keep Track of Your Backlink Profile
As your business and backlink profile grows, keeping track of all your links becomes more challenging. Link building tools can help you monitor your existing backlinks, check their status, and even identify links that might be harmful to your site’s SEO.
Create a Better SEO Strategy
By showing you what’s working and what’s not, these tools help you make smarter decisions about how to get your website noticed by more customers.
Simply put, tools for backlink building streamline the process of white-hat SEO link building for your business. They make it easier and more effective to draw in more customers online.
Best Free Link Building Tools
Grow your website’s visibility and a way to get more leads with these free tools that help you build backlinks for your website. Learn how to spot the best backlinks and protect your site from bad ones, helping you move up in search engine rankings.
Semrush Free Link Checker
The Semrush link building tool is an invaluable digital solution for business owners venturing into SEO. It’s part of Semrush, a suite of tools designed to improve online visibility and discover marketing insights. The Free Link Checker allows you to check the backlinks of any website and helps you understand the strength and quality of your own link profile.
Get A Backlink Analysis
Semrush provides insights into the websites that link back to your website. You can see where your backlinks are coming from, the authority of those linking domains, and the types of backlinks (e.g., text, image, form) you have.
Compare With Competitors
One of the features of Semrush is its ability to compare your backlink profile with that of your competitors. This comparison can help you identify gaps in your link-building strategy and uncover new opportunities for acquiring high-quality backlinks.
Identify Toxic Links
The tool also helps identify potentially harmful backlinks that could negatively impact your SEO. Knowing which links may be toxic allows you to take action, such as using Google’s Disavow Tool (keep reading to learn about this SEO solution), to protect your site’s ranking.
Monitor Link Building Progress
As you start to build links for your website, the Semrush Free Link Checker can monitor your progress. It updates you on new backlinks as they are acquired, enabling you to see the direct results of your link-building efforts.
For business owners new to SEO, Semrush link building tools offer a great starting point. They provide a clear picture of how your site is linked across the web and offer insights into improving your SEO strategy through better link building.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a simple tool for monitoring your online presence and uncovering new backlink opportunities. It’s a free service provided by Google that sends emails to you when it finds new results—such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs—that match your search term(s). With Google Alerts, you can:
Monitor Keywords
You start by setting up alerts for specific keywords related to your business, products, or industry. This can include your brand name, competitors’ names, industry buzzwords, or specific phrases that are relevant to your content.
Receive Keyword Alerts
Whenever Google indexes new content that matches your alert criteria, you’ll receive an email notification. This content could be a blog post, a news article, or a webpage mentioning one of your keywords.
Identify Opportunities for Your Backlink Profile
By using Google’s link building tools to monitor alerts, you can identify where your business is mentioned online. If a site mentions your business but doesn’t link to your website, you can reach out and kindly ask them to add a link. This is a proactive way to build backlinks for SEO.
Follow Competitors
Setting up alerts for your competitors’ names or products can also provide insights into where they are getting mentioned or linked. You can then explore these platforms for potential backlink opportunities for your own business.
Find Industry Trends
Link building tools like these can help you stay updated with industry trends and news. This knowledge can help you create timely and relevant content that others are more likely to link to. Google Alerts can be a vital tool in keeping you informed about what’s happening in your sector.
By leveraging Google Alerts, you’re essentially setting up a system that keeps you informed about potential backlinks. It also helps you manage your online reputation. It’s a low-effort, high-reward link building tool that every business owner should consider integrating into their SEO and marketing strategy.
Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker
Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker offers a glimpse into the capabilities of Ahrefs’ full suite. Perfect for those starting SEO strategies. With this link building tool, you can see the top 100 backlinks to any website or page. It will help you understand where your competitors are getting their links from. This insight can guide your link-building efforts, showing you where to focus your energy.
Identify Backlink Opportunities
By analyzing your top backlinks, you can identify high-quality sites that are already linking to you and potentially foster those relationships further. You can also look for similar sites that might be interested in linking to your content.
Perform a Competitor Analysis
Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker allows you to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles as well. Understanding where your competitors are getting their links from can unveil new opportunities for you to pursue similar or better backlink sources.
Strategize Content Creation
Seeing which pages on your site attract the most backlinks can guide your content creation strategy. You can create more content that aligns with what has been successful in earning backlinks in the past.
Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker is a standout tool for business owners new to SEO. It provides a clear, concise view of a website’s backlink profile for free.
Disavow Tool by Google
The Google Disavow Tool indirectly supports your link building efforts by allowing you to distance your site from harmful backlinks that could negatively impact your SEO. If you’ve identified damaging backlinks, this tool allows you to tell search engines to ignore these links.
It’s important to note that Google advises caution with this tool. Google suggests contacting the website owners hosting the problematic links to ask for removal before resorting to the disavowal option.
Here’s how Google’s disavow tool can be beneficial:
Improve Your Link Profile
By disavowing spammy or low-quality links, you can clean up your backlink profile. A healthy link profile is a factor in how search engines evaluate and rank your site. The cleaner your profile, the more credible your site appears to search engines.
Prevent Google Penalties
Google penalizes sites that appear to be engaging in manipulative link schemes. If you’ve been the victim of negative SEO or have some questionable backlinks from the past, this is a great option. Use the Disavow Tool to help prevent potential penalties by telling Google to ignore these links in its evaluation of your site.
Focus on Quality Over Quantity
The current SEO landscape values the quality of backlinks over their quantity. By disavowing harmful links, you’re signalling to Google that you prioritize the integrity and quality of your site’s link environment. This emphasis on quality can aid in attracting more reputable backlinks in the future.
Recover from Google Penalties Faster
If your site has been penalized due to a poor backlink profile, using the Disavow Tool is a step toward recovery. After disavowing the harmful links, you can focus on building new quality backlinks that improve your site’s reputation and rankings.
In summary, the Google Disavow Tool is an indirect essential resource to help mitigate the negative impact of unwanted backlinks on your site’s search performance. However, it should only be used if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, fake, or low-quality links harming your site’s SERP performance.
Check My Links
For those who want to clean up broken links, Check My Links is a browser extension that scans web pages for broken links. This is one of those essential link building tools that is perfect for finding opportunities to replace broken links with your own content. It’s a strategy that can quickly boost your backlink profile.
Here’s how Check My Links works and can be utilized for stronger backlink building:
Broken Link Building Strategy
“Check My Links” is a great tool for implementing a link building strategy designed to remove and replace bad broken links for others. This involves finding broken links on websites within your niche and creating content that could replace the broken link. You can then reach out to the website owner to suggest replacing the broken link with a link to your newly created content relevant content.
Improve Your Site’s SEO
By using the extension to find and fix broken links on your own site, you can improve user experience and site performance—factors that are important for SEO.
Build Online Relationships
When you inform other webmasters about broken links on their sites (and perhaps offer your own content as a replacement), you’re providing value and building relationships. This can lead to more natural backlink opportunities in the future.
How to Use “Check My Links”
Once installed, the extension allows you to easily check any web page for broken links by simply clicking its icon in your browser. It quickly scans the page’s links and highlights which ones are working and which ones are broken.
Conclusion
These free link building tools offer a variety of features to assist in different aspects of the link building process. From monitoring your own backlink profile with Semrush Free Link Checker to identifying broken link opportunities with Check My Links, these SEO link building tools each has its unique strengths. We suggest experimenting with these tools and discover which ones best fit your SEO needs.
Need Link Building Help?
Are you looking to take your website’s SEO game to the next level? Have questions about any of these link building tools for SEO? From checking your website over to creating website content, the team at 1st on the List is here to help.
Please call us toll free at 1-888-262-6687.
SEO Link Building Tools FAQ
What are the best tools for link building?
The best tools for link building often include Semrush, Ahrefs, Google link building tools, and Moz’s Link Explorer. The free (and paid) versions of these tools can help identify link opportunities, analyze competitors’ backlinks, track your backlink profile, and discover content that attracts links.
What are the best automated link building tools?
As automated link building can be risky, it’s generally not recommended due to potential penalties from search engines. However, some tools offer features to automate parts of the link building process without violating guidelines. Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs provide features to help automate the discovery of link opportunities and outreach templates, but they still require manual oversight to ensure quality and relevance.
What’s an affordable tool for backlink building?
For those on a budget, Google Alerts, the free versions of Ahrefs’ Backlink Checker and Semrush’s Link Checker can provide valuable insights into backlinks and opportunities for building links. These tools are great for beginners or small businesses looking to start with link building without a significant investment.
Are there AI link building tools?
AI and machine learning are increasingly being used in SEO tools to enhance link acquisition strategies. These technologies can help identify backlink opportunities, predict the value of potential links, and optimize outreach strategies. However, the use of AI in link building is more about enhancing human efforts rather than replacing them, as personalized and strategic outreach is necessary.
Is there an internal link building tool?
Yes, several SEO tools and plugins offer internal link building features. For example, the paid tool Yoast SEO provides suggestions for internal linking within your WordPress editor, helping you strengthen your site structure and spread link equity throughout your site. Similarly, paid and free tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can analyze your website and suggest opportunities for internal linking based on content relevance and keyword optimization.
Let Our SEO Agency Help You Find the Best SEO Link Building Tools
Ready to get more website leads and leap ahead of the competition with SEO? At 1st on the List, we understand the power of a unique SEO strategy. Don’t let spammy backlinks drag you down. Let our experts guide you through the process. Contact one of our team members now to discover how we can help you achieve your business’s goals and drive more leads to your website.
Prefer to chat over the phone? Let’s chat! Call us toll-free at 1-888-262-6687.
