31 SEO Experts Reveal 3 Favorite Link Building Tools

By Ashutosh Jha → Last Updated on Sunday, August 28, 2016
Are you thinking to use link building tools for your blogs and websites but confused which you should choose?

There are hundreds of link building tools are available in the market which claims itself No#1, but you can’t try all. That’s why I asked around 50 industry experts about their link building campaigns. Which all tools they use and how these tools helped them to reach the top.



I asked a one-liner question to each expert-
If you could use only 3 SEO tools for your link building campaigns which 3 tools would you choose

I only wanted to know the tools that helped them to reach the top so that a newbie like me and many can take help of those tools. I received a good number of responses. And so here are the responses of 31 Industry experts. I was really surprised to see the response of industry giants replying to a mail of newbie. I thank each one of you for your precocious time. Based on the vote, I categorized the top 5 most used link building tools and here those are-

Favourite Link Building Tools, based upon the votes-

1. Ahrefs – 13 Votes
2. Google Products (Includes Webmaster, Search and Keyword Planner)- 12 Votes
3. BuzzStream- 10 Votes
4. Majestic Seo- 8 Votes
5. BuzzSumo and MOZ tied with -4 Votes

Apart from these top 5 link building tools, good responses have been received for the below also-

So read on the experts’ 3 favorite link building tools-

Note: Responses listed in the order they were received in

Neil Patel - Neil Patel

Ahrefs: I would use Ahrefs to see who links to my competition and which links I should be going after.

BuzzSumo: I would use Buzzsumo to help me determine what content to create that generates the most social traffic. As some of those visitors will end up linking back to your site.

Adobe Illustrator: And I would use Adobe Illustrator to create infographics. Infographics generate more backlinks than blog posts, or at least that is what we have seen at KISSmetrics.

Erik Emanuelli - Erik Emanuelli

Similar Web: Great tool to gather specific insights about any website, as search engines rankings, traffic, audience data, and social stats.

NetPeak Checker: Fantastic software to check different SEO details. Great to get an analysis of the leading SEO parameters of specific pages or websites, plus competition analysis and comparison.

SerpBook Rank Tracker: A powerful rank tracker. Good to check different data for your website campaign, as for example keyword rankings.

Mike Wallagher - Start Blogging Online

Ahrefs: My number one "tool" for doing SEO is obviously Ahrefs. It helps me to dig into competitor backlinks and probably gather some low hanging fruits (links) for my project. This also helps me to determine the level of competition going on for a particular keyword/niche.

Gmail with YesWare: the Second tool in my list is Gmail with a combination of YesWare. This helps me to track my outgoing/received emails for link prospects. This can easily be replaced with a buzzstream, but I'm a bit old-school SEO, so I prefer to Gmail.

Broken Link Finder: And the third tool would be brokenlinkbuilding.com. This is software that scrapes together a list (for a keyword) of pages that are either down or go to 404 error page. This helps me to find tons of broken link building prospects.

Kulwant Nagi - BloggingCage

I use following 3 link building tools-




Sue Anne Dunlevie- Successful Blogging

Inbound Writer: I use Inbound Writer to come up with my keywords and the URL slug for my blog posts. They use predictive analytics, and their service helps me create content that gets 2x-3x the amount of traffic I used to get.

Majestic SEO: It helps me see the backlinks and rankings of both my site and my competitors.

Alexa: I also use Alexa to keep track of my audience demographics and geography as well as my rankings.

Atish Ranjan - Atish Ranjan

I love to perform link building manually but to get help in the campaign I mostly use Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, and Google Webmasters primarily.

These tools help me understand which all sites are linking to me and also how they are linked and this helps me figure out which links are good and which ones are bad. By this, I can disavow the bad links to stay safe. I can also get to know how many dofollow links my site is having and how many nofollow. It helps me decide how much more quality backlinks either dofollow or nofollow are required to rank well.

I just shared the 3 tools above, but I use much more such as WebMeUp, Open Site Explorer.

If it comes to automation of link building which can be done for event blogging, then I would Suggest GSA Search Engine Ranking.

Miguel Salcido - Organic SEO Consultant

Open Site Explorer: I would use Open Site Explorer to review competitor links and assess my site's link profile.

Excel or Google docs: I would use Excel or Google Docs to manage and record new links.

Gmail: And I would use Gmail for my outreach.

It’s pretty simple. :-) But this is still the most efficient way to build links.

Anil Agarwal - Blogger Passion

If I had to use only 3 SEO and link building tools, then here you go:

Moz: I personally use Moz tools as the tools used in Moz are not only made my SEO professionals, but they are easy to use even for SEO beginners. They also give access to Open Site Explorer where you can actually figure out your competitor keywords and the number of backlinks so that you can outperform your competitors in search results.

Google Keyword Planner: No matter how many keyword research tools are available, according to me, nothing beats Keyword Planner by Google. You can quickly figure out the best keyword ideas for your blog posts, and you can also estimate the number of average monthly searches for your desired keywords. It's also free! Here are some of the best alternatives to Google AdWords for PPC.

SEO By Yoast: This is a must have a plugin for every WordPress user. This plugin helps you optimize your blog posts properly for search engines. It will also help you find the right keyword density to increase your search results for any keyword. It's a free plugin btw!
Sebastian Cowie- SC Digital

The 3 main SEO tools I use for my link building campaigns are as follows:

Scrapebox –for data collection, scraping, rank tracking

Ahrefs- for backlink data and competitor research

Buzzstream- for prospecting links

Jessica Knapp - Blogging Basics 101

Ahrefs- This is mostly for digging into competitors’ backlinks to get some low hanging links with direct email outreach. Here's what I usually do:
1) Type in my main keyword in Google.com
2) Scrape together top 10 results and add them to ahrefs backlink search.
3) See where they have got those links from.
4) Email to those webmasters saying that I've put together something similar and it would be nice if they could mention it on their page.

Buzzstream- This is mainly to keep my email outreach targeted and organized. In that way, I can follow-up if someone hasn't answered to my initial email. I can also keep those contacts for future projects so I can email them later again and build a relationship of some sort.

Broken Link Building: This is for finding broken link building opportunities. It'll cost you some money, but you can easily type in your main keyword - for example, "blogging" and broken link building tool will give you some results for pages that are related to blogging but are no longer available (404 error, page down, etc.). Once I've found something, I'll get in touch with people who have linked to the site previously and tell them that the site is down and they could replace it with my OWN site.


My 3 link building tools are as follows:

Buzzstream- for prospecting links


and all the link data providers (in aggregate).

Then it’s good old Excel and Google.com usually for the rest.


Vladimir Gendelman - Company Folders

My 3 link building tools are as follows:

Adobe Creative Suite- Essential tool for creating awesome infographics.

SEMRush- Great tool for keyword research that will also help you think of ideas for content.

Majestic- Helpful for analyzing and auditing backlinks.


Jason Acidre - Xight Interactive

I'd definitely pick these 3 link building tools:

Ahrefs- for backlink data and competitor research


SEOQuake/Mozbar- To Analyze competitors and their links pretty easily

George Stevens - NEB Stone

MajesticSEO – gives a good picture of your backlink profile as well as giving information on anchor text and quality of the backlinks (trust flow, citation flow)

MOZ – similar to MajesticSEO however with some differences - useful to compare metrics and also offers the ability to compare your site with other competitor sites in detail.

Google Webmaster Tools – the inbound links section can give some really good detail into who links to you and from what pages (it’s free as well).

Simon Penson - Zazzle Media

Everything we do is led by content and so while we still use the obvious tools we like to focus on ways to find great content that works. Often we will start with an audit of competitor activity and to do that we would often use the following tools. These help us understand what content gains traction and will earn shares and links:

Buzzsumo, SEMRush and Ahrefs Top Content.

Nirmala Santhakumar - My Magic Fundas

Below are my 3 preferred SEO Tools for Link Building!

LongTailPro - I love this tool. I've integrated with my Moz free account to analyze the competitors and their links effortlessly. Not only to look the links, we can see their PD, DA, PR, Moz rank, juice passing external links, etc. with this awesome tool.

Google Webmaster Tools - Regular use of this valuable tool helps me to understand better about my links and keywords to focus.

Open Site Explorer - I use this vibrant tool to get insights about the links that points to a particular page.

Chris Gilchrist- Hit Reach

If I’ll have only three tools for link building, I would prefer to use the below three-

URL Profiler – For backlink audit

Ahrefs- To keep track of my link profile and make sure things look organic and healthy.

Buzzstream- for contact management, task management, and finding contact information

Kostas Chiotis - Iris Signals

MozBar: One of the tools I use on a regular basis is the convenient extension MozBar, which is both free and quite intuitive to use. Checking the Domain Authority of sites is a must for anyone who is working in the SEO industry so it's something I cannot work without.

SEOquake: SEOquake is another neat (and completely free) extension for Chrome and Firefox, which I use to view any site’s statistics while browsing. You can modify the different metrics to be displayed, such as Google and Bing indexed pages, external and internal links, keyword density, social media stats, and Alexa rank, etc. It saves me a ton of time for checking each of these individually.

Open Link Profiler: Perhaps the one I find the easiest and most straightforward to use is Open Link Profiler. For a free tool, it’s amazing how much you can get out of it. I use it mostly to scout specific backlinks leading to a site as it has some very handy filters and a number of options for tracking backlinks in real time (it’s updated daily) and the results go back for the past six months. I’ve used quite a few backlink profile checkers, but this one seems to work best for me.

Jane Sheeba- Best Hosting & Design

As to Link building and SEO tools, I use




Larry Frank- FlowingTechBlog

Buzzstream: BuzzStream is one of those tools I use for link building campaigns; it is hands down the best enterprise-class outreach management tool out there for me. It gives you an easy top down view and trusts me, it is incredibly intuitive.

Majestic SEO: It's one of those tools I used in the early days of blogging; I was introduced to this tool by a friend. Majestic SEO is a software package, which is focused on providing information for link building, reputation management, competitive link analysis and website traffic analysis. In all this, competitive link analysis and for A standard link audit has been what I use this tool for. Believe me to the tool is a very nice one regarding backlink exploration and building a reputable link building strategy.


Link Prospector: This is yet another tool I've given a try, but not frequent with it, the little time I had with this tool is enough to testify. Link Prospector is a link building research tool that is designed to find and return lists of potential partner sites. Built for speed, the tool can return a huge amount of data link builders can sift through to find link building opportunities. One reason why I like this tool is the fact that it has a clean and simple interface and has the ability to export what it finds.

Nisha Pandey - SeoTechyWorld

I am using lots of SEO tools but, the following 3 are very important and needy for me. I can't miss these 3 tools for my SEO and link building campaigns-




Ikechi- Awaziwikechi

I would use the below three link building tools-


Google free Keyword Planner and


Mi Muba- BeAMoneyBlogger

If I will have to use only three link building tool, then I will use the below link building tools- Buzzstream



Sujoy Dhar – WideInfo

I will be using the below three link building tools-



Hire an SEO worker for maintenance and manual kinds of stuff:)

Debra Mastaler- Alliance Link

I use the below link building tools-

Talkwalker- For social media analytics.

Buzzstream- I use BuzzStream for contact management, task management, and finding contact information

Screaming Frog – For Site audits, detailed backlink analysis, and redirect mapping

Apart from above three, I also use Majestic SEO.

Jitendra Vaswani - BloggersIdeas

The best three link building tool that I would recommend are-




Bill Hunt - Back Azimuth

I will use the following three link building tools-

Majestic SEO: I am using Majestic SEO for backlink checking.

Link Research Tools: I use Link Research Tools for link building.

Link Detox: I use Link Detox for Link Audit and Link Risk Management.

Harris Schachter- OptimizePri

My three favorite link building tools are:

Ahrefs for link data and competitive analysis,

Buzzsumo for content ideas and research and

finally a good email platform like MailChimp for building contact lists and doing outreach.

Ann Smarty- ViralContentBuzz

Here are my link building tools I use all the time -

Majestic SEO - for competitor backlink research (for inspiration)

Myblogu- to get featured in niche blogs (free!)

SeoChat- to catch potentially dangerous tools (free!)

Bob Jones - Visible

My current three tools for our link building campaigns are-




Sophie Lizard - Be A Freelance Blogger

Sophie’s ideas of link building are quite different from others, and she uses the natural methods for link building. According to her, if I could have only 3 things to help with link building I'd want:

1) Great content
2) Email
3) Friends
You write the great content, send an email to your friends, and they share your link with their audience -- or they invite you to guest post on their blog or feature in their next expert round-up, whatever. It's all link building. :)


Jimmy Rodriguez - 3dcart

My 3 favorite link building tools are as follows-

1. Ahrefs: This is my main tool for links and keyword tracking. The ability to check the top content on ecommerce websites is really valuable to select the right articles when requesting backlinks.

2. Keywords Everywhere: I use their Chrome extension to quickly find keyword ideas based on volume for blog posts, one of the best keyword research tools that is available for free.

3. NinjaOutreach: My favorite tool for researching link opportunities, finding the right influencers and articles matching keywords I'm targeting. It helps keep the email outreach organized, scheduling follow-ups and managing contacts.


Christopher Jan Benitez - Splashpress Media

If I get only three tools for link building, I will definitely use the below three-

Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer - These tools help me in prospecting for links to my websites. Both are also great tools for backlink analysis and poaching links from your competitors.

Buzzstream- Using BuzzStream I do SEO by connecting to influencers and experts within the industry. I then leverage my relationship with them by collaborating on a blog post and getting a backlink on their site.

Buzzsumo - This helps me find the most viral content for my target keyword and lets me create a better content out of the results using Brian Dean's Skyscraper Technique.


John Marquez - Nighwatch - Community Manager

Nightwatch: You’ll get a thorough overview of your SEO efforts with Nightwatch since you can discover, analyze, and monitor your backlinks closely. The tool makes it easy to find details about your backlinks such as their domain, quality, and follow or no-follow type.

Buzzstream: This is a great tool for organizing your outreach emails. With it, you can automate a lot of the outreach process: researching prospects, finding email addresses, sending follow-up emails, and tracking reply rates.

Ahrefs: It’s useful for prospecting links from your competitor’s backlink profile. This helps you uncover valuable link building opportunities that you can add to your own site.


Over to You


Huge Thanks to all of you for your time and being so kind for the response.

Please share this, if you found this useful.

Here are the top results once again, just for the review-

1. Ahrefs – 13 Votes
2. Google Products (Includes Webmaster, Search and Keyword Planner)- 12 Votes
3. BuzzStream- 10 Votes
4. Majestic Seo- 8 Votes
5. BuzzSumo and MOZ tied with -4 Votes
Keep visiting us, for such kind of case study and Experts Round Ups. I will love to know your response too on this in the comment. If you are looking for more such tools, you are recommended to check this article.

If you could use only 3 SEO tools for your link building campaigns which 3 tools would you choose?
Ashutosh Jha

Ashutosh Jha is a professional blogger, Blog and IT Consultant. He writes about Blogging, SEO, Making Money, Internet Marketing and Web Design.
If you liked the post, You can follow him on the below social media.

Website: TricksRoad

58 comments to ''31 SEO Experts Reveal 3 Favorite Link Building Tools"

ADD COMMENT
  1. Oh what an amazing post Ashutosh. I loved the way you did this. Would be helpful for me. Bookmarking it. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Rohan !! You always top bro :)

      Hope this will help you.

      Delete
  2. Nice to know which all tools are being used by expert. Glad to see myself along with these experts. Thanks for sharing Ashutosh.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for including me in this great post, Ashutosh!

    I really like Sophie's answer - good old fashion blogger outreach at its best.

    Sue

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks a lot Sue for the comment and Support. And yes I too liked Sophie's idea :)

      Delete
  4. Hi Ashu,
    I really missed it, though you asked!
    This is indeed a wonderful list, you presented it well.
    I use SEO by yoast, Alexa and Google.
    A major ones mentioned here are indeed new to me,
    I need to give a try.
    I am bookmarking it.
    Thanks for sharing this information.
    Indeed this is a great collection
    ~Phil


    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Phil for visiting and comment !!

      Hope these experts' list will help all a lot :)

      Delete
  5. Thanks for including me in this list Ashutosh! Great list of seo tools you gathered here :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Kostas for your valuable time and Support !!

      Delete
  6. Hi Ashutosh,

    You've done a great job by consolidating the amazing link building tools at one place. I'd say that it is a good opportunity for the bloggers to learn some unknown blogging tools and I've learned a lot here.

    Good to check the exciting reactions of these experts and their preferred tools to build links. Thanks for adding mine too. Keep your good work.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Hi Ashutosh,

    Informative article.......!!!

    I appreciate your great efforts with quality analysis of SEO tools referred by popular bloggers in blogging industry.

    This info is very helpful for bloggers specifically for newbies who seeking to build their blog's backlinks.

    Thanks for sharing this valuable info with us.

    I found this post on kingged.com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Gangadhar for your nice words and Yes i hope this will be a great help for the bloggers.

      Delete
  8. Hey Ashu :)

    Lol, I'll be lying if i told you I understood much! I am content using Yoast right now but will bookmark your post and come back once I upgrade my SEO knowledge :D Thanks so much for the hard work that you put in getting all these experts in the same place :)

    -Nik

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Nik for the comment and bookmarking !!

      Hope this will help you in the journey :)

      Delete
  9. That great Ashutosh, good study conducted... and thanks for the useful information... like it..
    Best Viinod
    www.arkadstv.com

    ReplyDelete
  10. Good to know the tools used by pro bloggers.Thanks for sharing useful info.

    ReplyDelete
  11. What a great list of tips from experts here, Ashutosh .
    It's good to read so many link building tool alternatives.

    Thanks for including me,
    really appreciated!

    ReplyDelete
  12. Thanks for this wonderful compilation Ashutosh - helps us see what tools others are using :) Indeed quite a big list (and variety) of tools.

    Thanks for taking the effort - and thanks for including me :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Jane for your help in completing this and thanks for taking your time.

      Delete
  13. Hi Bro,

    I have not single world to describe, but if I leave this page without dropping comment then it will be a insult of your hard work,
    You are one of the fastest growing blogger I have ever seen. all the tool are very helpful for us but now I'm using free tools for link building same like Sophie

    Thanks for sharing this article, sorry for late, keep rocking :)
    Looking forward to see more interesting article from you,

    Mahadev

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mahadev Bro- Thanks for your nice words :) Hope this will help you all.

      Delete
  14. Hey Ashutosh
    You did a great job by sharing this wonderful expert roundup and solved a long-standing problem of newbie and struggling bloggers to pick the best link building tool.
    Many people hesitate to invest just fearing they may be getting lesser rate of return on buying a wrong tool. But here in this post you put the quantified opinion of all these experts to buy the best tool.
    Thanks for sharing and also thanks for including me in the list.
    Have a nice rest of the week.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Hello Ashutosh,

    Thanks for including my opinion with these top notch bloggers. Newbies will get lot of help with this wonderful post. You have chosen some great and good no. of bloggers. I don't know most of them. I would try to visit them soon.

    I also use ahref and buzzsmo. They are fantastic and I would also recommend this to others.

    Thanks for the amazing post. Keep it up. ENjoy your day!

    ReplyDelete
  16. Thanks for putting this together. There are quite a few broken links e.g. Neil Patel and Erik Emanuelli.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Joe for pointing. We had a technical issue and so these error came in URL. Now all have been corrected.

      Delete
  17. All details are together in one form for future reference, Thanks Ashutosh Jha.

    ReplyDelete
  18. This post has some important tools for checking backlinks and sharing the most famous bloggers ideas its really helpful for new bloggers in this list have my fav. bloggers i always follow them thanks for the post

    ReplyDelete
  19. Thanks.Good collection. It'll help me out and new bloggers.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Hello Jha, Thanks for your guideline . Just amazing. Read the whole article and got a lot's of important points

    Cheers

    ReplyDelete
  21. Ashutosh, This is a great article coming from different experts. I really appreciate your work on 31 people just to put this list up! I definitely agree with Ahrefs and of course Google Products. It's nice that you put up each of the voters links. It will greatly help your readers have a wide expanse of choices to experiment on. We actually have articles in our site about SEM, SEO and related stuff too. You might want to check them out and see perhaps one day we'll be in one of your posts haha cheers mate! Great job!

    ReplyDelete
  22. Very nice I like a lot of these topics, it was part of my area.

    ReplyDelete
  23. What’s your present effective link building tool? Can you please share with us?

    ReplyDelete
  24. Hey Ashu bro,
    Great round up indeed :)
    This post contains ultimate collection of SEO Tools.
    Keep it up

    ReplyDelete
  25. ahrefs is my favorite tool. I like it because it is frequently updated compared to other tools.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Too Helpful. Thank you so much for the infromation. I see that you are writing some great posts. Keep it up. Good work :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. All Big Plyers are there :) lovely post all tools find together and Owner Details aswell

      Delete
    2. All Big Plyers are there :) lovely post all tools find together and Owner Details aswell

      Delete
  27. Hi,

    This is my second visit to your blog.I am looking a update for this post. Nice work.
    Keep updating your audience.

    Naveen

    ReplyDelete
  28. Openlinkprofiler is also a good to get backlink report of your comeptitor as it gives you report of upto 1000 backlinks for free.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Great Post. Such insights work amazingly well. I have tried all three: Ahrefs, BuzzSumo and SMERush, and I can confidently say they are the best tools available in the market. Sharing it with my followers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you Bhupendra and glad that you liked it.

      Delete
  30. Excellent post. I am looking for such kind of info for long time. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  31. Hi Ashutosh,
    This is really a nice share. Getting to know about link building tools and that too by pro bloggers is a win win deal.
    Thanks for sharing this list.

    ReplyDelete
  32. Nice list of link building tools, but I heard that building links manually is actually better than building links using automated tools, of course I agree that building links using automated tools is hassle free and not time consuming but don't you think it may harm the sites to get links from unwanted sites and completely unrelated sites?

    Anyhow the list is informative and I think I should give it a try. Keep posting great stuff.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. @Raj

      Thanks for stopping by. I agree to you that manual link building is best but these tools don't provide the automated links.

      These tools will help you to analyze the links of your competitors' and based on it you can make links by analyzing.

      So basically these are SEO tools helping in complete SEO project. Hope that clarified.

      -Ashutosh

      Delete
  33. Nice Information , I have to say that for the last few of hours i have been hooked by the impressive articles on this website. Keep up the wonderful work.

    ReplyDelete
  34. nice article and ways to build links... i think building links are must and for new bloggers to rank high these links serve as backing... thanks once again as i really loved the way you have expressed and written the tools for building up the links!

    ReplyDelete

  35. Thanks for this wonderful articles… It will be a great tutorial for those who have just started blogging. You have mentioned all aspects..

    ReplyDelete
  36. The given information is so useful that i have bookmarked this page. What else i can say, the tips which i have found here are awesome.

    ReplyDelete
  37. Hi
    Good work
    Nice article
    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  38. I am regular reader, how are you everybody? This article posted at this site
    is really nice.

    ReplyDelete
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    I've loaded your blog in 3 different web browsers and I must say this blog loads a lot
    faster then most. Can you recommend a good web hosting provider at a
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    ReplyDelete

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