Using advanced link building tools has long been a top priority of SEOs and website owners.
However, there are hundreds of link builder tools sold on the internet every day, which makes it difficult for an SEO to decide which ones they should use.
It’s not that all tools are unimportant or useless—it’s just that there are so many of them and very few of them stand out as truly exceptional.
Since there is such an overwhelming quantity of link building software available online, we thought it would be helpful to compile a few of them—including the ones we use at Legiit—that can give you maximum results.
Let’s do this.
What is Link Building (is it an SEO Tool?)

While link building is not an SEO tool per se, it is an important part of SEO strategy. Link building is a marketing strategy that refers to getting links from other websites to your website—and can therefore be classified as an SEO tool.
Why? Google (and all other search engines) uses backlinks as a ranking factor. So, each time you build quality links to your site, you’re building a vote of confidence in your site that vouches for its authoritativeness and help.
So, it’s fair enough to say that one of the ways to know whether the content on a website is valuable or not is by checking its backlink profile.
Let’s say for example if you’re in the marketing niche, and your website has a good profile of links from authoritative sites like Business Week, Business Insider, Wall Street Journal, and the rest, you can be guaranteed good rankings.
You’ll agree with us because if a page gets a lot of high-quality backlinks, it means it's a good page. Therefore, search engines will consider it a popular or helpful page and rank it higher in the SERPs.
What Should You Do To Get Links?
There are two essential ways to develop links to your website: internal and external links.
Just to expand on this, internal links are hyperlinks on one page of your website that direct the reader to a target page of your site and help distribute link equity across your pages.
External links, on the other hand, direct an internet user and Google to a reputable page on a different website—this could be yours or another.
For you to get high quality backlinks, you’ll have to create content that people want to link to. Towards the end of 2022, Google made this easier for SEOs—just create high-quality, engaging, original, or exceptional content people want to share—otherwise referred to as EEAT.
But how do you do this? Think of the following:
- Find out who your audience is.
- Who are you trying to reach with your content?
- What kind of content do they need?
- What information are they looking for and what kind of questions do they ask?
- Which words do they use?
- And, what kind of websites do they visit?
After you’ve created that page with valuable content for your audience, and you know which websites they visit, the next step is to reach out to webmasters and start link building activities.
That’s actually the right strategy that you can use to build external links to your site. But it involves several tactics, some of which we have extensively covered in our latest articles.
Boost Your Website's SEO with Effective External Link Building: A Comprehensive Guide
Some of them include:
- Guest posting
- Broken link building
- HARO link building
- Reverse engineering
- Digital PR
- Creating linkable assets
- Regain missing links
- Unlinked brand mentions
Turns out, for you to build these backlinks, more often than not, you’ll need to use certain link building platforms.
Let’s talk about them in the next section.
Link Building Tool: How to Earn Backlinks from Authority Domains?
Finding link building opportunities manually is a challenge. Still, luckily there are SEO link building tools that can help you identify websites and pages that may be relevant, and therefore offer link building opportunities.
When selecting the best link building tools for you, begin by considering what aspect of link building you need to focus on. While some tools are good at link management, others are excellent at backlink analysis and link building.
Additionally, you'll want to consider how simple the interface is and how steep the learning curve of the tool is. If you’re just starting out, you might do well with tools that are easy to learn, but if you’re experienced more complex tools might be a good start.
Ultimately, the best link builder tool should make it simple and easy to manage links to your website, and find new linking opportunities.
Let’s get to the million-dollar question of the day…
What are 12 Great Link Building Tools That Are Essential?
As you read through this section, you’ll cover 12 best SEO link building software that are trusted by experts in the industry, including the ones we’ve tested and got results.
At the end of the day, we want you to see which of these you can apply to your business and go ahead to do so.
#1 Buzzstream
This is an outreach link builder software that’s majorly used by PR agencies to automate and scale their PR outreach campaigns. The good thing about this tool is that with a simple input of search queries, it’s able to:
- Find prospects and their contact details
- Relevant websites and identify the right people to contact at each website.
- Use the email outreach feature to send personalized emails to each prospect.
- Set up automated follow-up emails to increase the chances of getting a response.
- Detailed reporting to help you review team performance, understand which emails and subject lines are performing the best, and see campaign progress.
This tool allows you to access a free 14-day trial that allows you to see if the software is the right fit for your needs. Plans include:
- Starter ($24 per month)
- Growth ($124 per month)
- Professional ($299 per month)
- Custom (starts at $999 per month)
#2 Link Hunter
This is one of the easiest and best SEO link tools built for entrepreneurs and marketers—especially those starting out.
It’s able to handle prospecting for link opportunities, outreach, and follow-ups. Some of the key features include:
- It helps you find the email address of any prospect using its Chrome extension. All you need to do is enter their name and website domain.
- It checks for the validity of the email address which reduces the email bounce rate.
- It handles cold email outreach with automated follow-ups, personalization, custom sending schedules, and more.
It can help you build backlinks to your website in the following 3 ways.
- Promoting your content to relevant websites
- Guest post on authoritative blogs
Hunter offers a free limited plan and the following paid plans:
- Starter ($49 per month)
- Growth ($149 per month)
- Business ($499 per month)
#3 Semrush Backlink Gap and Link Building Tool

This is a two-in-one link building tool that allows you to analyze which websites are linking to your competitors and identify link building gaps.
The idea here is, that if you can know which websites are linking to your competitors, then it is easy to target them with your campaigns—with a higher chance of securing backlinks.
If you want to scale your link building efforts, the Semrush Link Building Tool can help you big time. You can use it to identify prospects based on your target keywords and competing websites as discussed above, then email outreach, monitor reports, and generate reports.
There comes a hassle though, when it comes to pricing because although these integrations are in the same tool, you have to pay for them separately.
Here is what the Backlink Gap will cost you:
- Limited free plan
- Pro ($129.95 per month)
- Guru ($249.95 per month)
- Business ($499.95 per month)
Here is what the link building tool will also cost you:
- Limited free plan for one project
- Pro ($129.95 per month)
- Guru ($249.95 per month)
- Business ($499.95 per month)
#4. Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
This is not a link building tool per se, but a powerful tactic that has evolved to be the best SEO link building tools. Traditionally, this platform allows you to connect with journalists and reporters who are looking for sources to cite in their reports.
Think of major news outlets like The New York Times, Fox News, and The Washington Post.
What you need to do here is sign up for HARO (different plans), depending on your area of expertise in which you’re blogging or have a business, and then every day you’ll receive HARO emails with requests from journalists.
Then you proceed to share your expert opinion, facts, and other insights. The big idea here is that, if you’re really good at what you do, and prove to be valuable, then these journalists can cite you.
This offers you an exclusive opportunity to build links from sites that otherwise wouldn’t naturally link to you for free.
HARO offers their Basic plan for free. Paid plans include:
- Standard ($19 per month)
- Advanced ($49 per month)
- Premium ($149 per month)
#5. BrightLocal
The competition among local businesses to feature on Google Maps and SERPs is at a record high. That’s why building citations is increasingly important as a link building strategy.
BrightLocal is a good tool to use when submitting, building, monitoring, and managing citations. It helps you to figure out how your business is ranking based on the local competition.
The pricing for this tool ranges from $29-$79 per month, depending on package size.
#6. BuzzSumo

This tool has a number of features that make it stand out for link building. They include:
- Uncover and track domains that link to your competitors.
- Export domains to a spreadsheet to use in your own link building outreach campaigns.
- Set up alerts to notify you as soon as a website links to one of your competitors.
- Track your own backlinks and get alerted when you get a new backlink.
- Identify “searchable” authors/influencers within your niche whom you can reach out to.
The pricing for this tool includes:
- Basic ($119 per month)
- Content Creation ($249 per month)
- PR & Comms ($249 per month)
- Suite ($499 per month)
- Enterprise ($999 per month)
#7. Pitchbox
This is a good link building tool with multiple ways to find prospects, reach out, and provide detailed reports.
This tool allows you to:
- Leverage built-in templates that are effective for link building strategies such as broken link building and resource page outreach.
- Import your own prospects by importing a .CSV file and create campaigns based on existing relationships.
- Set up email outreach sequences for link building and automate follow-ups.
Pitchbox offers two plans:
- Professional ($550 per month)
- Enterprise ($1,500 per month)
#8. Raven Tools
This is another two-in-one tool that is commonly used for website auditing, link building, and reporting.
The backlink explorer on one hand is used to analyze any domain’s link profile—to identify your competitors’ backlink profiles and potential link building opportunities.
On the other hand, the Link Manager allows you to find, store, and organize link building opportunities.
Additionally, it allows you to track new and lost links, categorize your backlinks for easier reporting, and export all the data.
Raven Tools offers the following plans:
- Small Biz ($49 per month)
- Start ($109 per month)
- Grow ($199 per month)
- Thrive ($299 per month)
- Lead ($479 per month)
#9. Respona
This is a powerful link building outreach platform with a built-in search engine that allows you to find backlink opportunities based on keywords.
It allows you to:
- Input competitor articles and generate a list of URLs linking to them.
- Input competitor domains and generate a list of blogs that recently reviewed them.
- Input topics and generate a list of websites accepting guest posts.
…among others.
Additionally, this tool has a number of templates that you can use to set up an outreach campaign and follow-up.
Respona offers:
- 14-day trial
- Starter ($99 per month)
- Unlimited ($399 per month)
10. Google

Google is not a link building tool per se, but it has a collection of the world’s largest index of websites — making it a free and indispensable tool for link building.
It allows you to leverage various advanced Google search filters to discover opportunities.
Here are the most useful operators for link building:
- “inurl:” – only returns results with specific words/phrases in the URL.
- “intext:” – specifies keywords or phrases mentioned in the content.
- “intitle:” – same as intext, but only applies to the results’ titles.
#11. Linkody
The good thing about this software is that it allows you to track your link building campaigns—so that you can know whether you’re losing or gaining backlinks.
On top of that, this tool also can analyze your backlink profile and then compare it with your competitors’—painting a clear image of your performance.
You also have access to a dashboard that shows you all the backlinks pointing to your website, along with the anchor text, dofollow/nofollow status, and other important details for your link building like harmful backlinks and disavowing files.
This tool offers the following packages:
- A free 30-day trial
- Webmaster ($14.90 per month)
- Advanced ($24.90 per month)
- Pro ($49.90 per month)
- Agency ($99.90 per month)
- Agency XL ($153.90 per month)
#12. Link Whisper
Last but not least, this linking tool helps you build internal links for your site.
It basically leverages AI to offer automatic link suggestions when you publish your content based on keywords and generates an internal linking report for your site as well.
What Tools Do You Use for Link Building? Final Thoughts
Alright. Up to that point, we’ve covered everything you need to know about the best SEO link building tools.
The choice is yours—which tool do you like? Here are a few tips that can help you get started:
- What budget are you working with?
- How many people will need to use the tool?
- How many links do you want to analyze?
- How important is reporting in your link building campaigns?
Ultimately, the choice is yours, always strive for what will work for you and is sustainable for the long term.