The Only 9 Link-Building Tools You Need in 2024

What I learned during this time is that you don’t need dozens of link-building tools. You just need a few of the best ones.

These days… I’m convinced that there are only eight of them.

New to link building? Check out our

Beginner’s guide to link building

The industry’s favorite link research tool

Let’s face it: You can build links without Ahrefs, but you probably wouldn’t want to. Ahrefs’ crawler is most active in the SEO industry, and our backlink index contains over 35 trillion backlinks. This makes it arguably the best tool on the planet for backlink research—a crucial everyday task for any link builder worth their salt.

This is probably why SEO professionals consistently vote Ahrefs their top link-building tool of choice, like in Aira’s State of Link Building report:

My favorite feature: Content Explorer

Content Explorer is a searchable database of 15.6 billion pages. It’s fantastic for content research, but it’s also a great source of link prospects.

For example, let’s say that you’re looking for link prospects for a blog post titled “best routers for 2024.” One source of potential link prospects would be people linking to similar posts that haven’t been updated for years. This is because nobody wants to link to an outdated list of routers—half of which probably aren’t even available anymore.

You can easily find posts that fit the bill in Content Explorer:

1. Enter a search term like “best wifi routers”
2. Switch the search mode to “In title”
3. Filter for pages published before 2018
4. Filter for English pages
5. Filter for pages with 10+ referring domains

Now you see similar pages to yours, with backlinks, that haven’t been updated since 2017:

You can easily download those pages’ backlinks from Site Explorer, then reach out and suggest that those sites link to your up-to-date list instead of the outdated one from 2017.

Pricing

Free to see backlinks to the websites you own using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT). If you want to research and view other sites’ backlinks and use Content Explorer, you’ll need a paid plan starting at $108/month.

The world’s largest source of link prospects

Most people don’t think of Google as a link-building tool, but it’s one of the best ways to find link prospects. That’s because it has the largest index of web pages on the planet and arguably the best search algorithm. So if you know how to use it effectively, you can easily find thousands of relevant link prospects for free.

My favorite feature: Search operators

Search operators are commands that help you refine and filter search engine results. Some are unique to Google, but not all of them (as you can use the same or similar ones in Bing or Content Explorer). But even the ones that aren’t totally unique to Google seem especially powerful there because you can combine them to pull exactly what you need from its insanely vast index.

For example, you can combine the intitle:, inurl:, and OR operators to find relevant resource pages to pitch your link:

[keyword] (intitle:resources OR intitle:resource) (inurl:resources OR inurl:resource)

You can also combine intitle:, inurl:, and the - operator to find authorship pages for prolific guest bloggers in your industry and potentially write for those sites yourself:

intitle:"tim soulo” intitle:author inurl:author -ahrefs.com

The only downside of using Google for link prospecting is that there isn’t any way to download the results. You can solve this with a browser add-on like Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar, which has a button to download SERP data.

Pricing

Free.

Powerful email address finder

Hunter.io can find all emails associated with a domain or a specific person’s email address in seconds. For example, here’s how fast it finds my @ahrefs.com email address:

According to our testing, it’s not the most accurate email lookup service, but one feature more than makes up for this when it comes to link prospecting at scale: the Google Sheets add-on.

My favorite feature: Google Sheets add-on

Let’s say that you’ve exported some link prospects from Content Explorer and imported them into Google Sheets. You’ll notice that the export file includes the associated author name (where we can find it).

Using Hunter’s Sheets add-on, you can find matching emails for these prospects with one click:

This won’t find a matching email address for every prospect, but it usually finds one for a decent percentage of them. You can then use these prospects as your initial “hit” list to test the viability of an outreach campaign. If successful, have someone find emails for the rest of the prospects to build more links.

Pricing

Free up to 25 searches per month, then from $49 per month.

Email verification and cleaning service

You should always verify the deliverability of your prospects’ email addresses before sending outreach emails. Fail to do so, and the deliverability of your entire campaign could be negatively affected by bounces. It’s also a waste of time to personalize outreach emails only for them to bounce.

NeverBounce makes email verification super easy. Just upload a list of prospects, and it’ll tell you whether each email is valid, invalid, accept all, or disposable.

It also automatically de-dupes the list, so you’ll only pay for each email verification once.

My favorite feature: Zapier integration

Everything revolves around Google Sheets when I do email outreach, which is why Neverbounce’s Zapier integration is such a godsend. You can quickly set up a multi-step zap so that when you enter an email address into a Google sheet, it pings NeverBounce, verifies the email, and logs the verification status of that email in the very same Google sheet.

Magic, right?

But there’s one downside to this system: the expense. If you opt for Zapier’s $19.99/month plan, it’ll cost you an extra $0.026 each time the zap runs.

Luckily, there’s a solution: create a JSON importer in Google Apps Script to import data from NeverBounce webhooks. That may sound hard, but it’s pretty simple. Ping me on X for instructions on how to do this.

Pricing

From $0.003 per email verification.

Outreach tool and prospect manager

Gmail is great if you’re only planning to send a few outreach emails, but you need a dedicated tool to scale your email outreach. That’s where Buzzstream comes in. It lets you manage, organize, personalize, track, and send emails all in one place. You can also add multiple users to your account and assign tasks between them.

It seamlessly imports Ahrefs CSV exports too:

My favorite feature: Buzzmarker

Buzzmarker is a Chrome extension that helps speed up link prospecting. You can use it to find contact information, add prospects to campaigns, and even compose emails from templates as you browse the web.

Here’s an example to understand how this can be useful in practice: Let’s say that you were browsing the web and came across a resource page or other relevant prospect. Hit the Buzzmarker, and you’ll see any contact details it found for the website. You can even add the prospect to an outreach campaign in one click:

You also have the option to compose and send an email using templates from your Buzzstream account right in the browser window:

Pricing

From $24/month.

Connects journalists with sources

Journalists often need insights, advice, or opinions from industry experts for their articles. Cision’s HARO (Help A Reporter Out) solves this problem by connecting journalists with industry experts via daily emails.

Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

1. Journalists submit source requests to HARO.
2. HARO emails thousands of users with these source requests.
3. HARO users pitch the relevant requests to gain media coverage (and usually backlinks).

For example, here’s a request from Go Banking Rates (DR 82) seeking travel experts to answer the most affordable airlines for boomers:

If you submit a tip and it gets chosen for inclusion, you’ll usually get a mention and backlink from the website.

My favorite feature: Email alerts for saved searches

HARO lets you save searches for pitches, and you can even search by keyword:

That’s great, but most of us aren’t going to be refreshing our HARO feed every few minutes.

If you have $19.99 to spare for a paid plan, you can get email alerts when new pitches match saved searches. This makes it easier to be first to pitch, which may increase your chances of a placement.

Pricing

Free with paid plans from $19 per month.

Bulk SEO metric and data puller

URL Profiler is a powerful tool that allows you to pull a wide array of metrics and data associated with URLs. Just paste in your URLs, tick the boxes for the data you want to pull, and hit “go.”

My favorite feature: Contact scraping

Earlier, I explained that Content Explorer pulls authors’ names where it can, which is super helpful for link prospecting when combined with Hunter and NeverBounce. But if you’re pulling link prospects from elsewhere, you won’t have this information.

This is where URL Profiler comes in handy. If you tick the “readability” checkbox, it attempts to pull author names from the list of URLs:

It’s far from perfect, but it’s brilliant for enriching link prospects pulled from Site Explorer or Google with author names.

URL Profiler is also one of our application partners, so you can use the data allowances included in your subscription to pull Ahrefs’ metrics for thousands of URLs at once. This is useful for when you have found your initial list of link prospects with Google or another tool that lacks SEO metrics and data.

Pricing

Free for 14 days, then from $19.95 per month.

Handy SEO assistant for your browser

The SEO Toolbar is a browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. It’s technically part of Ahrefs, but I’m mentioning it separately here as it has some completely free features that are super useful for link prospecting.

My favorite feature: Dead external link highlighter

Yes, there are other browser add-ons that do this, but why bother with them? 😉

Highlighting dead links on a page is useful for finding an extra value proposition for your outreach emails.

For example, let’s say that we have this resource page on our list of potential link prospects. Using Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar, we can easy highlight dead external links:

This makes it quick and easy to spot good prospects and create relevant, personalized outreach emails like this one (see the “PS”):

Pricing

Free, although it shows additional data for Ahrefs customers.

ChatGPT is… the tool we’ve all heard of (and used) but wouldn’t necessarily consider a link-building tool.

But here’s the thing: it’s incredible at making things—things that you can use as linkbait.

For example, I used it to create an income tax calculator in minutes:

You can use AI to make interactive content.

I don’t know how to code, so I asked ChatGPT to make me an income tax calculator. pic.twitter.com/pmiKn9semd

— Joshua Hardwick (@JoshuaCHardwick) February 23, 2023

Look how many links the top-ranking pages for this keyword have:

If you could create a better calculator with ChatGPT, you could easily hit the thousands of websites linking to these inferior calculators with a skyscraper pitch.

My fellow SEO Danny Richman also managed to use ChatGPT to create a useful tool:

My favorite feature: Coding scripts for APIs

Many of the link-building tools I’ve featured above have their own APIs.

For example, you can use the Hunter.io API to find email addresses, or the Ahrefs API to find link prospects. But, if you’re anything like me, you probably have no idea how to actually code something to make use of these APIs.

This is where ChatGPT shines once again…

Here’s it writing Google Apps Script to pull email addresses from Hunter’s API in seconds:

Here’s the prompt used:

Using Hunter.io’s “Email Finder” API, write a function called findEmail in Google Appscripts to return a person’s email address. If no email exists, then return “THEY DON’T WANT TO BE CONTACTED.” I will provide the first name, last name, and domain name. BTW, my API key is [MUTED]. Go!

Now, all we have to do to pull someone’s email is enter =findEmail(cell with firstName, cell with lastName, cell with domain).

This is just one example of how ChatGPT can help with link building. You could easily go further and have it write a script to connect Ahrefs, Hunter, Neverbounce, and Buzzstream to automate nearly the entire link-building process.

Final thoughts

Link-building tools make life easier. So although it’s possible to build links without them, I wouldn’t recommend it because speed and efficiency matter. The longer it takes you to build links, the longer it’ll take to rank.

If you want to learn more about scaling your link-building efforts, these resources should help:

• Copy My Link Building System: How to Get Backlinks “At Scale” [Video]
• Link Building Case Study: How We Built Backlinks With a ‘Stats’ Page (And Ranked #1)
• How to Start a Link Building Campaign Fast (and Systematize Everything)

Give me a shout on Twitter if you have any questions.