Building a strong backlink profile is one of the most important factors in ranking high for competitive search terms. But this takes a lot of effort and strategy. And time. 

Link building software helps you automate and grow the process while focusing on getting valuable backlinks that count. We’ve picked out the best link building tools in 2024 from 100+ options out there, so you can boost your online presence and develop a more authoritative website.

Why Do You Need Link Building Software?

Backlinks boost your SEO strategies. They work like votes of trust from other websites. This tells search engines that your content has value and is reliable. Research by Semrush showed that over 50% of qualified sites without at least one backlink never made it to the first page. When trustworthy sources link to your content, search engines tend to place it higher on SERPs. 

Focus on backlinks from legitimate businesses because these are the ones that provide the most value. Many sites exist exclusively to sell links and are often link farms. 

Building links is one of the best ways to improve your site’s SEO. But it’s getting harder now. In our recent update about link building statistics for 2024, Authority Hacker pointed out that 45.8% of SEOs say link building now takes more time than before.

Link building software enables you to automate and scale the process. These tools make it easy to identify high-quality backlinks, track your progress, and determine how effective your plan is. This program ensures that your SEO efforts are more effective and concentrated, allowing you to establish a stronger, more authoritative online presence.

Best Link Building Software Solutions in 2024

The best link building tools in 2024 from our reviews include: 

  • Semrush
  • ​Ahrefs
  • Hunter
  • Buzzstream
  • Majestic
  • Pitchbox
  • Respona
  • Moz
  • SE Ranking
  • Mailshake
  • Linkody

1. Semrush

Semrush comes loaded with tools to help marketers find and manage backlinks well. 

(Source: Semrush)

Features of Semrush: 

  • Backlink Analytics: It’s powered by the largest and fastest backlink database on the market.
  • Backlink Audit Tool: This tool helps you monitor backlinks, avoid Google penalties, and remove harmful links.
  • Backlink Gap: Lets you track up to 5 competing backlink profiles. It helps you find new link building opportunities.
  • Listing Management: Discover over 150 authoritative directories where you can list your business. 
  • Link Building Tool: Automates your outreach campaigns. With this tool, you can consistently acquire reputable backlinks and manage campaigns efficiently.

I love the link building tool becauses it makes finding and managing link building opportunities so much easier. With this tool, I can gather a list of prospects based on my target keywords and competitors, which saves me a lot of time. 

Pros & Cons of Semrush:

Semrush takes care of everything from keyword research to backlink analysis. It’s very impressive with its thorough competitor insights. When you analyze your competitors, you can find new opportunities to make your own strategy better.

However, Semrush might cost too much for small companies or beginners. You’ll pay $139.95 each month for the Pro plan, and it gets pricier if you need more complex features.

Semrush Pricing:

  • Pro: $139.95/month
  • Guru: $249.95/month
  • Business: $499.95/month

2.  ​Ahrefs

Like Semrush, Ahrefs has been very popular. It ranks among the best link building software. Ahrefs runs on one of the world’s most active crawlers, which gives its backlink data high reliability. Its index contains over 35 trillion backlinks making it a go-to choice for many.

(Source: Ahrefs)

Features of Ahrefs:

●  Free Backlink Checker: Quickly shows the top 100 links pointing to any website or URL.

●  Content Explorer: Helps find thousands of websites for link outreach and guest posting. It’s also great for discovering linkable content ideas.

●  Site Explorer: Lists all backlinks to a site or URL with detailed filtering options for SEO metrics.

●  Ahrefs Alerts: Like Google Alerts but better for SEO. It tracks mentions, backlinks, and more.

The Content Explorer stands out as my favorite Ahrefs feature. It simplifies link building to a great extent. I can find topics in my field of marketing, that attract numerous backlinks. The process involves searching for a broad topic and filtering for pages with at least 400 referring domains. This reveals content that others link to.

Pros & Cons of Ahrefs:

To start with, Ahrefs’ backlink analysis is excellent. It provides in-depth data about the sources of backlinks and their strength. This helps you see which websites are linking to your content, allowing you to find opportunities to enhance your backlink profile.

But, Ahrefs comes with an expensive price tag compared to other tools. Ahrefs often appeals to businesses.

Ahrefs Pricing:

●  Starter: $29/month

●  Lite: $129/month

●  Standard: $249/month

●  Advanced: $449/month

●  Enterprise: $1,499/month

3. Hunter

Hunter is an all-in-one email outreach platform that helps companies find and reach out to the right contacts. This platform makes prospecting and email campaigns simpler.

(Source: Hunter)

Key features of Hunter:

●  Email Finder: Ffastind verified email addresses fast by typing in a name or domain.

●  Email Verifier: Make sure your emails land in the inbox and stop bounces, keeping your sender’s reputation safe.

●  Campaigns: Run cold emailing campaigns with personalized messages, automatic follow-ups, and detailed performance tracking.

I’m a big fan of the Email Finder feature. It helps me find accurate email addresses for professionals, which saves me a ton of time. The tool combines email formats, addresses it finds online, and verification status, so I know I can trust the contact info I get.

What’s more, I like the Google Sheets add-on because it lets me verify emails directly in my sheets.

Pros & Cons of Hunter:

The platform is easy to use, even for beginners. It helps locate confirmed email addresses in no time. The Email Finder tool comes in handy when you need to reach someone but lack their email. Hunter makes sure your messages land in the right inbox lowering the risk of them ending up as spam. 

Yet, it has a drawback: the free plan limits the number of emails you can send. It’s fine for small-scale outreach, but if you plan to send lots of emails, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Hunter Pricing:

  • Free: $0
  • Starter: $49/month
  • Growth: $149/month
  • Business: $499/month

4. Buzzstream

BuzzStream makes your research quicker. It helps you find prospects fast and collect key metrics about websites and social media without needing spreadsheets. This lets you spend more time building great relationships and getting high-quality backlinks.

(Source: BuzzStream)

Features of BuzzStream:

  • Research Opportunities Fast: Browse prospect lists, add contacts, and gather contact info and metrics.
  • Automatic List Building: Automatically builds prospect lists by gathering the most relevant results from web and news searches in seconds.
  • Personalized Outreach: Send personalized, relationship-based outreach messages without dealing with tricky spreadsheets.

What I like about BuzzStream is how it simplifies research and prospecting. You can upload a list of URLs, and BuzzStream does all the heavy lifting gathering contact details, website statistics, and social media metrics. 

Pros & Cons of BuzzStream:

BuzzStream makes it super easy to find new prospects. It’s also simple to personalize your emails using templates.

While BuzzStream offers a ton of features, it can be expensive for smaller teams or individual users.

Buzzstream Pricing:

  • Starter: $24/month
  • Growth: $124/month
  • Professional: $299/month
  • Custom: Starting at $999/month

5. Majestic

Majestic is a powerful link building software that helps you track backlinks and understand your website’s link profile.

(Source: Majestic)

Features of Majestic:

  • Trust Flow: Measures the quality of the links pointing to a website.
  • Citation Flow: Reflects the number of links to a website, regardless of their quality. 
  • Visibility Flow: Helps you find high-quality editorial-style links rather than directory links.
  • Topical Trust Flow: Shows how relevant a website is to specific topics.
  • Flow Metric Scores: Give insights into how different metrics like Trust Flow and Citation Flow balance out on a website.

Pros & Cons of Majestic:

Majestic gives you access to loads of backlink data. This helps you understand how a website performs. The Trust Flow and Citation Flow metrics are great. They show you more than just the number of links a site has. They reveal the value of those links.

You can export data to Excel or Google Sheets. This makes analyzing much easier. The free SEO browser plugin is a nice bonus. It brings the data right to you as you browse.

Majestic can overwhelm beginners. The large amount of data can confuse those without some SEO background.

Majestic Pricing:

  • LITE: $49.99/month
  • PRO: $99.99/month
  • API: $399.99/month

6. Pitchbox

Pitchbox is a link building software that makes outreach and backlink building much easier and more organized. It provides over 20 different options to prospects, including searches based on SERP and connections with top SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz. This helps users to find high-quality prospects quickly and efficiently.  

(Source: Pitchbox)

Features of Pitchbox:

●  Prospecting: Pitchbox offers advanced targeting and popular link prospecting tactics.

●  Outreach & Follow-Up: Automatically follow-ups.

●  AI Tools for Link Building: AI tools like AI Personalization, AI Template Assistant, and AI Reply help craft more personalized emails and responses.

The feature I love most is the Outreach & Follow Up tools. I can personalize my messages. Pitchbox gives you control over time zones and lets you plan your outreach messages at the best time, making sure that your emails reach inboxes when people are most likely to see them.

Pros & Cons of Pitchbox:

Pitchbox offers various ways to find relevant contacts such as SERP-based search or imports. You can also set up automatic follow-ups. This has an impact on my chances to get responses.

Pitchbox also integrates with Ahrefs and Moz, making it simple to monitor link data and SEO metrics. However, Pitchbox’s reports can feel a bit basic.

Pitchbox Pricing:

  • Pro: $195/month
  • Advanced: $495/month
  • Custom: Pricing on request

7. Respona

Respona simplifies finding relevant backlinks and has an impact on boosting organic traffic. 

(Source: Respona)

Features of Respona:

  • Find Link Building Opportunities: You can search for potential partners across different content types, like blogs or news articles, to find the best sites for backlinks.
  • Automate Email Sequences: You can set up follow-up emails, detect auto-replies, and analyze bounce rates. 
  • Contact Information Discovery: It automatically identifies the best contact and provides verified information.

My favorite feature is its range of outreach templates. They help me get my outreach up and running in minutes. I especially like the content syndication and competitor mention templates, as they let me target relevant opportunities without starting over each time. 

Pros & Cons of Respona:

Respona handles the whole outreach process. The automated email sequences and follow-ups help you stay on top of things without manually tracking every email.

However, if you need very specific outreach tools, Respona might not give you the level of customization you’d expect from a more tailored solution.

Respona Pricing:

  • Starter: $198/month
  • Pro: $495/month
  • Unlimited: $799/month (billed annually)

8.  Moz

Moz Pro is an SEO platform that helps marketers boost visibility and draw qualified traffic to their websites. Moz influences strengthening your link building strategy by offering powerful tools to analyze and keep an eye on your backlink profile.

(Source: Moz)

Features of Moz:

  • Link Explorer: Uncover your link building opportunities and compare your site to competitors to create a stronger backlink strategy.
  • MozBar: This Chrome extension gives you easy access to key SEO metrics for any website, directly from your browser.
  • MozCast: MozCast reports on Google algorithm changes, helping you track how they affect rankings day-to-day.

​​I really like how I can view all my link metrics in one spot, including Domain Authority (DA), inbound links count, and linking domains count. One feature I find helpful is Link Intersect. It allows me to compare my backlink profile with my competitors’ and discover new link building opportunities. I can find who’s linking to them but not to me, which gives me a clear target to reach out to.

The Top Pages & Anchor Text tool also helps me grasp how and when people mention my brand. Reviewing my top pages and anchor text allows me to find opportunities for link reclamation. 

Pros & Cons of Moz:

Yeah, you don’t need to be an SEO expert to use the platform. Its simple layout and user-friendly tools make it easy to access. MozBar tool shows you key metrics like page authority and domain authority right away. 

Although Moz has some great features to offer, its pricier plans can hit the wallet hard for small companies or startups. 

Moz Pricing:

  • Starter: $39/month
  • Standard: $79/month
  • Medium: $143/month
  • Large: $239/month

9. SE Ranking

SE Ranking enables you to build successful SEO strategies. It offers powerful insights into traffic, keywords, and backlinks. AI and machine learning support all these features.

(Source: SE Ranking)

Features of SE Ranking:

  • Backlink Checker: This tool helps explore any website’s backlink profile in depth to examine referring domains linking pages, and anchor texts. It also lets you measure the value of each backlink and spy on what my competitors are doing to get their backlinks.
  • Backlink Monitor: This tool allows you to build up your backlink profile while tracking the status of every backlink connected to your site. It also lets you spot and disavow bad links, and manage new and lost backlinks, the backlink target ratio, and dofollow/nofollow links.

The thing I dig most about SE Ranking is its Backlink Tracking Tool. It makes tracking my key backlinks a breeze. I can add backlinks manually or import them, and then SE Ranking’s crawlers do regular checks to see if anything changes. If something shifts, I get notified right away.  

Plus, the tool helps me manage spammy backlinks by creating a disavow file to send to Google. It’s great for keeping my backlink profile clean and strong. 

Pros & Cons of SE Ranking:

The backlink tracking tool has a strong impact on monitoring backlinks, and it’s great how it sends me alerts about any changes right away. 

SE Ranking Pricing:

  • Essential: $65/month
  • Pro: $119/month
  • Business: $259/month

10. Mailshake

Mailshake is an email outreach software. The tool also helps scale your link building efforts with proven link building templates. 

(Source: Mailshake)

Features of Mailshake:

  • Templates: Templates for different types of content promotion, like broken link building, guest posting, or simple link requests.
  • Personalized outreach: You can send personalized outreach emails at scale, which is perfect for link placement. For PR outreach, I can reach journalists with personalized pitches and automatic follow-ups. 

Pros & Cons of Mailshake:

You can set up email campaigns and social media outreach all in one place. The automated follow-ups are helpful when a recipient doesn’t respond or click on a link.

Also, you can personalize emails at scale. The templates for different campaigns for link building are super useful, and they help you get started quickly.

But, if you need a marketing tool with automation across multiple channels beyond email and social media, you may want to look into other options. Mailshake lacks some features to manage complicated campaigns. 

Mailshake Pricing: 

  • Starter: Free
  • Email Outreach: $49/month
  • Sales Engagement: $99/month 

11. Linkody

Linkody shows you how your link building efforts are going, letting you see when you gain or lose links. Also, you can monitor your competitors’ backlink strategies and compare your link profile to theirs.

(Source: Linkody)

Features of Linkody: 

●  Disavow Tool: Easily find harmful backlinks and disavow them to protect your SEO.

●  Instant Link Location: Visually find where a link is located on the source page.

●  Google Index Status: See if your backlinks are indexed by Google, helping you monitor their value.

●  Landing Pages Monitoring: It tracks your landing pages for 404 errors. 

●  Backlink Analysis: Provides in-depth reports about your backlink profile and anchor keywords.

●  Backlink Monitoring: Monitor your backlinks 24/7 and receive instant alerts for any changes.

One thing I appreciate is how Linkody makes it simple to identify bad links. When a link is harmful, I can disavow it, which helps prevent negative effects on SEO.

 Pros & Cons of Linkody:

Linkody simplifies backlink monitoring. It tracks backlinks around the clock and sends email alerts. keeping you in the loop without constant checking.

The disavow tool saves a lot of time. When you come across toxic links, you can disavow them in just a few clicks avoiding any SEO damage. Its Google Analytics integration provides a better understanding of how your backlinks are performing.

Linkody’s backlink monitoring tool is strong, but it falls short when it comes to automation. I still need to create reports and handle certain aspects of the process manually.

Linkody Pricing:

  • Webmaster: $1490/month 
  • Advanced: $2490/month 
  • Pro: $4990/month
  • Agency: $9990/month
  • Agency XL: $15390/month  
The link building software has many benefits. When choosing a tool, consider your own goals, budget, and degree of skill. Link building is a long-term effort. It takes an average of 3 months to see the impact of a backlink on search ranking. 

12.  Bonus: ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a very powerful tool today. Can it help with link building? You bet! 

(Source: ChatGPT)

Let me tell you how it works.

  • Creating guest posts or blogs to build links: ChatGPT helps you write blog posts, meta descriptions, and FAQs. An Authority Hacker’s survey found that 85.1% of people who use AI use it to write blogs or articles.
  • Finding link building opportunities: ChatGPT gives you specific tactics for your field. When you ask for strategies that fit your niche, you get advice that matches what you need.
  • Creating email templates: This makes outreach simpler. You just need to adjust the message to give it a personal touch, and then you’re set to send it off.

ChatGPT is a useful tool to speed up link building tasks, but add your own flair. It’s important not to depend on AI-generated content. 

Many people believe AI-generated content is equal to or better than human writing. 

Conclusion

Link building is a key part of any good SEO strategy, and using the right tools can speed up the process. The link building software we’ve pointed out has many features, from making outreach easier to checking backlink quality helping you save time and zero in on what counts – boosting your site’s authority.

If you’re working in this field, check out the options, pick one that matches your aims, and start building a more competitive online presence right away.

Expert opinion

“For a while, I was convinced that links would continue to be less important over time. However, with the rise of generative Al content, I now believe the opposite. When anyone can easily create basic content, links become an important differentiator to help determine what content is actually good and popular.”

Patrick Stox, Ahrefs


Frequently Asked Questions

Link building involves getting hyperlinks from other websites. The main goal is to boost SEO and improve rankings of search engine results pages (SERPs). The link building software identifies potential opportunities for building backlinks to your domain and provides a simple interface for organizing and executing outreach campaigns to secure those links.

Focus on these steps: create and share an engaging infographic, increase your social signals, contact LinkedIn contributors for publication mentions, write guest blogs, and write testimonials for products or services you’ve used. By following these steps, you will be on schedule to generate 100 or more backlinks within the next 30 days.

Link building is still relevant in 2024 and an important part of SEO strategy. While several factors influence search rankings, a strong backlink profile has a major impact on a website’s ability to rank for competitive keywords. Links can boost a website’s domain authority, referral traffic, and overall digital reputation. 

Link building helps expose your content and brand to more audience and it also boosts your SEO strategy. Link building is an important part of SEO strategy and many tools are available to help with this process, such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Hunter, Buzzstream, Moz, etc. 

Getting good backlinks takes hard work, smart strategy, and effort. Almost half of SEO experts say it now takes more time to build links than before ( Authority Hacker). Link building is like constructing a house;  you need to plan, use the right tools, and start with a strong base to achieve results that last.