If you are looking for a list of essential link-building tools, this guide will be helpful.

Link building is a simple process involves the following steps:

1. Choose a target page (e.g., homepage, blog post, service page, etc.);
2. Find relevant ‘prospects’ (i.e., people with some motivation to link to what you have);
3. Vet the prospects;
4. Find their contact details;
5. Reach out with a well‐crafted outreach email;
6. Follow-up, track, and manage your campaign efficiently (it’s easy for things to get messy!)

Link building tools exist to make life easier in every step of this process.

1. Link prospecting tools

Link prospecting tools help you to find link‐building opportunities and “linkable asset” ideas.

1. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
2. Google + Scrapebox
3. Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
4. Google Alerts / Ahrefs Alerts
5. HARO / Muck Rack

2. Link ‘vetting’ and processing tools

You now need to vet them and prioritize them carefully. This will help you to decide how much effort you’re willing to put into getting a link from each site. But that can be damn time‐consuming, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of prospects. What’s the solution? Use tools to pull some SEO metrics for the initial vetting stage, then perform manual checks on the websites and web pages that pass your initial qualification.

Here are four “link-vetting” tools to help with this.

1. Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis Tool
2. URL Profiler
3. Screaming Frog
4. Scrapebox Whois Scraper

3. Link Outreach tools

Got your prospects ‘vetted’ and ready to go? It’s time to start outreach. Or is it?

Here are three tools to help with that.

1. Buzzstream
2. Mailshake
3. Pitchbox

Final thoughts

Link building tools make life easier. It’s as simple as that. You can absolutely build links without any fancy pants tools, but taking advantage of tools is more recommended. If not using link building tools means that it takes you twice as long as your competitors to build the same amount of links, well, you’ll never beat them. They’ll always be one step ahead.

Here’s another crucial point: You NEED to stay organized.

While it’s not technically a link‐building tool, I highly recommend using a project management system to keep track of things. Trello, Google Sheets, whatever works for you—just stay organized.

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