What I learned during this time is that you donât need dozens of link-building tools. You just need a few of the best ones.
And in 2021, Iâm convinced that there are only eight of them.
Here are those eight link-building tools:
The industryâs favorite link research tool
Letâs face it: You can build links without Ahrefs, but you probably wouldnât want to. Ahrefsâ crawler is the second most active after Googleâs, and our backlink index contains over 3 trillion live backlinks. This makes it arguably the best tool on the planet for backlink researchâa crucial everyday task for any link builder worth their salt.
This is probably why SEO professionals consistently vote Ahrefs their link-building tool of choice, like in Airaâs 2021 State of Link Building report:

My favorite unique feature: Content Explorer
Content Explorer is a searchable database of over 9 billion pages. Itâs fantastic for content research, but itâs also a great source of link prospects.
For example, letâs say that youâre looking for link prospects for a blog post entitled âbest routers for 2021.â One source of potential link prospects will be people linking to similar posts that havenât been updated for yearsâas nobody wants to link to an outdated list of routers, half of which probably arenât even available anymore.
You can easily find posts that fit the bill in Content Explorer:
- Enter a search term like âbest wifi routersâ
- Switch the search mode to âIn titleâ
- Filter for pages published before 2018
- Filter for English pages
- Filter for pages with 10+ referring domains
Now you see similar pages to yours, with backlinks, that havenât been updated since 2017:

You can easily download those pagesâ backlinks from Site Explorer, then reach out and suggest that those sites link to your up-to-date list instead of the outdated one from 2017.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 websitesâ backlinks and use Content Explorer, youâll need a paid plan starting at $82/month.
The worldâs largest source of link prospects
Most people donât think of Google as a link-building tool, but itâs one of the best ways to find link prospects. Thatâs 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 unique 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 arenât 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 souloâ intitle:author inurl:author -ahrefs.com

The only downside of using Google for link prospecting is that there isnât any way to download the results. You can solve this with a Chrome add-on like Ahrefsâ 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 personâs email address in seconds. For example, hereâs how fast it finds my @ahrefs.com email address:

According to our testing, itâs 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 unique feature: Google Sheets add-on
Letâs say that youâve exported some link prospects from Content Explorer and imported them into Google Sheets. Youâll notice that the export file includes the associated author name (where we can find it).

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

This wonât 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 âhitâ 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 prospectsâ email addresses before sending outreach emails. Fail to do so, and the deliverability of your entire campaign could be negatively affected by bounces. Itâs 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 itâll tell you whether each email is âvalid,â âinvalid,â âaccept all,â or âdisposable.â

It also automatically de-dupes the list, so youâll only pay for each email verification once.
My favorite unique feature: Zapier integration
Everything revolves around Google Sheets when I do email outreach, which is why NeverBounceâs 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 thereâs one downside to this system: the expense. If you opt for Zapierâs $49/month plan, itâll cost you just shy of an extra $0.025 each time the zap runs. This makes it at least 10x more expensive than doing it manually.
Luckily, thereâs a solution: create a JSON importer in Google Apps Script to import data from NeverBounce webhooks. That may sound hard, but itâs pretty simple. Ping me on Twitter if you want instructions for doing this.
Pricing
From $0.003 per email verification.
Outreach tool and prospect manager
Gmail is great if youâre only planning to send a few outreach emails, but you need a dedicated tool to scale your email outreach. Thatâs 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 unique 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.
Hereâs an example to understand how this can be useful in practice: Letâs say that you were browsing the web and came across a resource page or other relevant prospect. Hit the Buzzmarker, and youâll 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. HARO (Help A Reporter Out) solves this problem by connecting journalists with industry experts via daily emails.
Hereâs how it works in a nutshell:
- Journalists submit the source requests to HARO.
- HARO sends three emails per day to its 800,000+ users with these source requests.
- HARO users pitch the relevant requests to gain media coverage (and usually backlinks).
For example, hereâs a recent request from Realtor.com (DR 91) seeking âgreat IKEA hacks from interior designersâ for a roundup:

If you submit a tip and it gets chosen for inclusion, youâll usually get a mention and backlink from the website.
Itâs worth checking the external link policy on the website in question before submitting a tip, as not all sites link to sources. You can do this by checking a few of their recent posts for external links.
My favorite unique feature: Keyword alerts
HARO divides its requests into a few categories so you can subscribe only to the ones that make sense for you. The only problem is that these categories are kind of broad:

For example, requests in the âBusiness and Financeâ category cover various topics from Bitcoin to credit cards to SEO.
HARO solves this problem with its paid plans, all of which allow you to filter for opportunities by keyword:

But the reality is that you can achieve something similar for free using Gmail filters.
Hereâs how to set that up:

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 âgo.â

My favorite unique feature: Contact scraping
Earlier, I explained that Content Explorer pulls authorsâ names where it can, which is super helpful for link prospecting when combined with Hunter and NeverBounce. But if youâre pulling link prospects from elsewhere, you wonât have this information.
This is where URL Profiler comes in handy. If you tick the âreadabilityâ checkbox, it attempts to pull author names from the list of URLs:

Itâs far from perfect, but itâs 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 Ahrefsâ 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 and Firefox. Itâs technically part of Ahrefs, but Iâm mentioning it separately here as it has some completely free features that are super useful for link prospecting.
My favorite unique feature: Internal and dead link highlighter
Neither of these features is independently unique. Many SEO browser extensions do both things, but Iâve yet to come across another that highlights dead and internal links at the same time.
This combination is particularly useful when prospecting for resource page opportunities because the ideal link opportunity has two attributes:
- It links to external URLs. Thereâs no point pitching resource pages that only link to internal resources.
- It has broken links. This gives you an extra value proposition in your outreach email.
For example, letâs say that we have this resource page on our list of potential link prospects. Using Ahrefsâ SEO Toolbar, we can highlight internal and dead links in just a few clicks:

Now we can see that the page links to many external resources (as most links arenât highlighted) and at least one dead link. This makes it quick and easy to spot good prospects and create relevant, personalized outreach emails like this one:

Pricing
Free, although it shows additional data for Ahrefs customers.
Final thoughts
Link-building tools make life easier. So although itâs possible to build links without them, I wouldnât recommend it because speed and efficiency matter. The longer it takes you to build links, the longer itâll 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 âAt Scaleâ [Video]
- Link Building Case Study: How We Built Backlinks With a âStatsâ 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.