In this article, I’ll share some of the best link building software solutions we use at The Blueprints to help you improve your website’s SEO and drive more traffic. These tools can streamline your SEO process by automating tasks like finding link opportunities, tracking progress, and analyzing results.
When building high-quality backlinks, having the RIGHT tools can save you time, effort, and money.
Here’s what you’ll get in this blog:
- A list of top-rated software with their best features
- Tips on how to use these tools effectively
- Insights on how to find the right software solution for your business
Stick around to find the perfect tool for your link building strategy!
Our Top 10 Link Building Software Solution
1. Respona
Respona is one of our trusted all-in-one SEO link building and outreach platforms. We know how frustrating it can be to manage all those outreach emails and find the right people to contact. Well, that’s exactly what this tool tries to fix.
Features We Like Best:
- Contact Finding: It’s like having a personal detective—it automatically finds and verifies the contact information of the key persons you need to contact (no more sending emails to random “info@” addresses!).
- Plug-and-Play Templates: It comes with ready-to-use templates for different situations, whether you want to promote your content through link insertions, connect with relevant blogs, or write guest posts to establish link building.
- Built-in Integration: Its innovative system seamlessly integrates with Google, Ahrefs, Hubspot, and other CRM and marketing tools to streamline your SEO project without switching between different tabs.
Plans and Pricing:
Respona currently offers four plans to fit different budgets and demands:
| Plan | Price | Target Users |
| Starter | $198/month | Ideal for side projects |
| Pro | $495/month | Ideal for in-house teams |
| Unlimited | $799/month | Ideal for agencies |
| Enterprise | Price varies | Ideal for larger teams |
It’s not exactly pocket change, but there’s a 14-day FREE trial to get a feel for their offerings before committing to Respona’s full suite of services.
2. Pitchbox
Pitchbox is a super-powered email outreach tool built specifically for more advanced users and teams. Its standout features really focus on making large-scale outreach campaigns more manageable.
Features We Like Best:
- Team Collaboration: It lets your whole team work together on campaigns. You can delegate tasks to each member to simplify the roles and workflow.
- Search Metric Filter: Thanks to its seamless integration with major SEO providers, including Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic, you can filter and generate important quality metrics like Trust Flow and Domain Authority.
- Simplified Outreach: It enables you to set automated follow-ups at pre-defined intervals so you don’t have to remember to do it yourself. Even better, you can directly respond to your prospects right from the Pitchbox platform.
Plans and Pricing:
Price-wise, it’s definitely on the expensive side. You’re looking at around $165 to approximately $1500 per month, and you must commit to a yearly plan.
| Plan | Price | Target Users |
| Pro | $165/month | Ideal for single-site link builders |
| Advanced | $420/month | Ideal for SEO agencies and publishers |
| Custom | Price varies | Ideal larger link building teams |
Given its price point, it’s probably overkill if you do occasional outreach or work solo. As mentioned earlier, Pitchbox is more suitable for a decent-size in-house link building team or agency.
3. BuzzStream
BuzzStream is more of a relationship management tool for link builders. It is an easy-to-use tool that lets you stay organized and monitor your relationships with bloggers, influencers, journalists, and other key personalities in your niche.
Features We Like Best:
- Buzzmaker: This handy Chrome extension helps you find people, links, and websites on any page you visit.
- Customer Fields: Much like Facebook’s relationship status, the custom fields feature lets you define the stage of your relationship with your prospect (in talks, link accepted, rejected, etc.). Each stage corresponds to a specific phase in the workflow.
- In-depth Reporting: It offers a full suite of SEO reports, from Aging and Funnel Charts to Links By Domain Authority and Outreach Trend Charts. The best part is that you can customize your reporting to visualize the metrics that matter most to you.
Plans and Pricing:
Price-wise, it’s pretty flexible—starting at $24 and going up to $999 monthly. Honestly, that’s more affordable than some other link building tools.
| Plan | Price | Target Users |
| Starter | $24/month | Ideal for simple projects; Up to two users |
| Growth | $124/month | Ideal for complete outreach with team sharing |
| Professional | $299/month | Ideal for extensive customizability; With Advanced analytics, API access, and personalized support |
| Custom | $999/month | Ideal for complete SEO link building solution |
BuzzStream makes me realize that you don’t have to spend a fortune to get started with link building.
4. Hunter.io
Hunter.io is an intuitive software most popular for finding people’s email addresses, and from what I’ve experienced, it does this job incredibly well!
What makes it stand out is how it finds emails—instead of just looking in one place, it searches multiple sources to scrape and verify email addresses. Its extensive resources make its results remarkably accurate.
Features We Like Best:
- Email Verifier: It performs multi-level checks to verify that emails are still active before you use them (so you don’t waste time sending your outreach to dead inboxes).
- Bulk Checking: You can upload a list of websites, and it’ll find emails for all of them. It’s fast and easy!
- Domain Search: It shows you where it found each email, so you can double-check if you want to.
Plans and Pricing:
It’s reasonable price-wise. You can start with a FREE plan, which includes 50 searches per month. This is absolutely perfect for individuals or small businesses that are just getting started with their link-building journey.
| Plan | Price | Target Users |
| Free | $0 | Ideal for side projects |
| Starter | $34/month | Ideal for in-house teams |
| Growth | $104/month | Ideal for agencies |
| Scale | $209/month | Ideal for larger teams |
Hunter.io is a simple tool that does one thing really well: email outreach, and that’s often exactly what you need to get your foot into that big door of opportunity.
5. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the powerhouses of SEO software. This tool is highly regarded for finding link building opportunities, though we all know it does much MORE than that!
Features We Like Best:
- Content Explorer: It works like a search engine to find unlinked mentions of your brand across the web, allowing you to turn them into working backlinks.
- Site Explorer: This tool lets you see which of your competitors’ pages get the most links. It is super helpful for planning and strategizing your SEO content.
- Link Intersect: This feature shows an overview of the link patterns of other sites linking to your competitors but not to you. The tool helps you fill the gap of missed link building opportunities.
Plans and Pricing:
The price starts at $99 and goes up to $999 monthly. I know, it’s not cheap! However, this premium price lets you access their massive website database, which means you get fresh data and SEO insights.
| Plan | Price | Target Users |
| Lite | $129/month | Ideal for small business and hobby projects |
| Standard | $249/month | Ideal for freelance SEOs and marketing professionals |
| Advanced | $449/month | Ideal for in-house marketing teams |
| Enterprise | $1499/month | Ideal for larger agencies and enterprises |
Just keep in mind—Ahrefs might be heavy on the budget if you’re just starting or working on a single small website.
6. Moz Pro
Moz is one of the oldies but goodies in SEO software. While it might not be the absolute top dog in the industry anymore, it still has some useful features, especially Link Explorer, its flagship product under Moz Pro.
Features We Like Best:
- Link Explorer: This tool provides detailed insights into a website’s link profile. It shows you who’s linking to any site or specific page.
- Spam Score Checker: This neat MozBar Chrome extension tool lets you check how “spammy” or sketchy the link is in a scoring range from 0% (low risk) to 100% (high risk).
- Anchor Text Analysis: It lets you examine the relevance and diversity of the anchor texts used in the content, allowing you to improve keyword optimization or detect unnatural linking patterns.
Plans and Pricing:
The price starts at $49 and goes up to $599 monthly.
| Plan | Price | Target Users |
| Starter | $49/month | Ideal for single-site startups and small businesses |
| Standard | $99/month | Ideal for small businesses requiring basic features |
| Medium | $179/month | Ideal for businesses requiring full access to keyword research features with ample limits |
| Large | $299/month | Ideal for larger businesses and agencies requiring full access to features |
Moz Pro is more beginner-friendly than some other tools. Plus, it has a 30-day free trial, which gives you plenty of time to try out its key offerings.
7. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content marketing tool, but it’s pretty clever how people use it for link building, too. Although it primarily focuses on content performance and social sharing, it can also be an excellent platform for discovering growth opportunities that can be valuable for your link building campaign.
I’d like to think of this software as a behind-the-scenes peek at what kind of content people actually want to share and link, giving you more accurate insights on what to create to provide significant relevance and impact to your audience.
Features We Like Best:
- Extensive Media Database: The database has over 700k journalists and influencers, which we have found to provide more than enough options for our outreach projects.
- Trends Discovery: It’s not called BuzzSumo for nothing. This tool lets us stay on top of what’s buzzing, hot, viral, and trending across different media platforms.
- Brand Mention Alerts: This tool tracks and automatically sends alerts whenever people mention your brand or competitors online (even if they don’t link to you). This gives you an advantage in staying ahead of the curve regarding the sentiments of your target audiences.
Plans and Pricing:
The monthly price ranges from $119 to $999, depending on the specific features you need.
| Plan | Price | Target Users |
| Content Creation | $199/month | Ideal for creating content for marketers and agencies |
| PR & Comms | $299/month | Ideal for agencies requiring research, journalist outreach, trend tracking, and coverage monitoring services |
| Suite | $499/month | Ideal for larger agencies and brands |
| Enterprise | $999/month | Ideal for agencies and enterprises requiring full access to services |
BuzzSumo is not your typical link building software, but that might be precisely why it’s worth checking out.
8. Majestic
Majestic is a backlink-focused link building software. While it looks old-school, this backlink checker tool has unique metrics that other SEO platforms lack.
It is not a pretentious software solution. Instead of trying to do everything, it focuses on backlink analysis, a core requisite for link building. So, IMO, it still shines in its own light!
Features We Like Best:
- Trust Flow: This proprietary feature shows you how “trustworthy” a site’s links are (out of 100). It bases its rating on the quality of backlinks linking to your site.
- Citation Flow: Unlike Trust Flow, this tool gauges the “quantity” of backlinks. It tells you how many links a site has, and the more quality backlinks there are, the greater the credibility and authority of the website. So, Citation Flow and Trust Flow are perfect partners.
- Topical Trust Flow: On the other hand, this tool focuses on the “relevance” of the backlinks for a specific topic or niche. This determines how the site ranks in various categories, making it easier to assess for link building opportunities.
Plans and Pricing:
The price is pretty neat—it starts at $49 monthly and goes up to $399. That’s way cheaper than some other SEO tools!
| Plan | Price | Target Users |
| Lite | $49.99/month | Ideal for smaller groups; Allows 1 user only |
| Pro | $99.99/month | Ideal for agencies, SEO consultants, and domain traders; Allows 1 user only |
| API | $399.99/month | Ideal for larger agencies, in-house teams, and businesses; Allows up to 5 users |
Just remember that Majestic’s interface isn’t the fanciest, but hey, it gets the job done!
9. Mailshake
Mailshake is an email outreach tool that helps you send personalized emails to large numbers of recipients without making them appear as “spam”.
What makes it different? I’d say it’s how simple it is to use—you can just upload your contacts from a spreadsheet and get started. Plus, it works for link building and sales outreach, which is handy if you do both.
Features We Like Best:
- Pre-built Templates: It offers ready-to-use optimized templates for different types of outreach (like broken links, guest posts, and PR). Writing email content from scratch is unnecessary, saving time and streamlining your efforts, especially for bulk projects.
- Lead Catcher: It presents a simple workflow that allows you to set criteria and automatically spot promising responses from your prospects. What I like most about this tool is that you can tag the leads as won, lost, or ignored. That way, it’s easier for your team to sort out and plan the next best move to turn a potential into an actual one.
- Trigger-based Follow-ups: You can set up custom sequences and triggers for your follow-up emails based on how people interact with your messages. This automated feature lets you ensure every lead is replied to accordingly, increasing your response rates.
Plans and Pricing:
Plan rates are reasonably priced from $29 to $99. Even better, you can catch them discounted on special days.
| Plan | Price | Target Users |
| Starter | $29/month | Ideal for managing 1 email address only |
| Email Outreach | $49/month | Ideal for managing up to 2 email addresses |
| Sales Engagement | $99/month | Ideal for managing up to 10 email addresses |
Mailshake is not the most upscale tool out there, but it gets the job done without being complicated!
10. Semrush
Last but definitely NOT our least favorite, Semrush is a comprehensive SEO tool specializing in finding and managing backlinks.
I love how they combine link building with other SEO tools. Instead of jumping between different platforms, you can do everything in one place. That’s a plus point, especially if you want to invest in single but solid software.
Features We Like Best:
- Extensive Offering: With over 55 tools and reports for link building, content marketing, advertising, market research, and more, it can easily be the go-to software for beginners and advanced users.
- Robust Keyword Research: This feature offers 6 solid tools, including keyword overview, organic research, keyword magic tool, keyword gap, strategy builder, and traffic insight. You have everything you need to identify the most effective and relevant keywords to make your content naturally attract backlinks and traffic.
- Sensor: This feature monitors daily fluctuations in search engine results, helping you identify significant changes that might potentially affect your rankings. By detecting this volatility, you can proactively adjust your link building strategies to align with your existing search engine algorithms, allowing you to stay ahead of the game or, better yet, turn a crisis into an opportunity.
Plans and Pricing:
Price-wise, it runs from about $139.95 to $499.95 per month.
| Plan | Price | Target Users |
| Pro | $139.95/month | Ideal for beginners and small teams |
| Guru | $249.95/month | Ideal for agencies and mid-sized businesses |
| Business | $499.95/month | Ideal for larger teams, agencies, and enterprises |
While Semrush is not the cheapest option, you’re getting a lot of tools for your money. Think of it as a Swiss Army knife for SEO!
Comparative Analysis of Link Building Software
To give you a quick overview, here’s a comparison table based on our top 10 picks for the best Link Building software:
| Software | Key Features | Pricing | Ideal Users |
| Ahrefs | Backlink analysis, competitor research, rank tracking, site audit | Starts at $99/month | SEO agencies, enterprises |
| Semrush | Backlink analytics, keyword research, content optimization, competitor insights | Starts at $129.95/month | Small businesses, SEO agencies |
| BuzzStream | Email outreach, campaign tracking, CRM for link-building projects | Starts at $24/month | Small in-house teams, SEO agencies |
| Pitchbox | Outreach automation, blogger discovery, campaign management | Pricing on request (higher-end) | Enterprises, large SEO agencies |
| Hunter.io | Email address finder, email verification, outreach capabilities | Free plan; paid starts at $49/month | Small businesses, startups |
| Majestic | Backlink database, trust and citation flow metrics, site comparison | Starts at $49.99/month | Small businesses, in-house SEO teams |
| BuzzSumo | Content discovery, influencer identification, backlink analysis | Starts at $119/month | Content marketers, SEO agencies |
| Mailshake | Cold email outreach, automation, and integration with CRM tools | Starts at $59/month | Small businesses and sales and outreach teams |
| Respona | PR outreach, backlink outreach, and AI-powered personalization | Starts at $99/month | Digital PR teams, SEO agencies |
Factors to Consider When Choosing Link Building Software
Picking the right link building tool is all about matching it to your needs and its practicality to your business.
Here’s what you need to think about:
- User-friendliness: The tool should be simple to use, with intuitive navigation and clear instructions. Tools like BuzzStream and Hunter.io are great examples.
- Features and Functionalities: Check if the tool offers what you need, such as outreach automation, backlink analysis, or competitor insights. For instance, Ahrefs is known for its detailed backlink data, while Respona excels at outreach.
- Integration Capabilities: Check if the software integrates with platforms like Google Analytics and other CRM, marketing, and SEO tools for seamless workflows. For instance, Pitchbox integrates well with Moz and Majestic, and Respona supports Ahrefs and Hubspot, boosting your overall strategy.
- Pricing and Value: Budget matters, whether you’re a small team or an agency. Tools like BuzzStream offer affordable options for small teams, while Pitchbox suits larger setups.
- Ideal Customers: Different tools serve different groups:
- Small businesses: Affordable and easy tools like Hunter.io.
- SEO agencies: Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush for scalability.
- Enterprises: Advanced options like Pitchbox for handling large campaigns.
By considering these factors, you’ll choose software that’s efficient and fits your goals.
Practical Tips for Maximizing the Potential of Link Building Software
Here’s how you can make the most out of link building software and common mistakes to avoid.
Tips for Success
- Set clear goals: Know your objectives, whether targeting a niche audience, increasing domain authority, or improving local SEO.
- Leverage automation wisely: Use these tools to streamline your outreach, making it faster, easier, and more efficient. But don’t forget to constantly personalize your messages for better engagement. Build trust and genuineness, not another AI bot behind a cookie-cutter email.
- Track and analyze progress: Review analytics from tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs regularly to measure your campaign’s performance and refine your strategy.
- Explore features fully: Take advantage of free trials to understand a tool’s full potential before committing to a subscription.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Over-relying on software: These tools assist your strategy but don’t replace manual research or genuine relationship-building efforts.
- Skipping personalization: Automated, generic emails can harm your reputation. So, as previously mentioned, ALWAYS tailor your outreach to the recipient.
- Not updating your strategy: Understand that SEO is a fast-paced environment. Using outdated practices or sticking to a single method can limit your success and growth potential. Stay flexible, keep up with the trends, and adapt to what’s new and relevant in the business.
- Ignoring data insights: The metrics don’t lie. They give you a clear picture of how well your strategies are working or your position against your competitors. Failing to review metrics means missing opportunities to optimize your approach.
By constantly searching for what works and avoiding common pitfalls, the best link building tools can be a valuable asset for your SEO efforts.
Final Thoughts:
Link building tools can exponentially help your website grow, BUT you need to pick the right one for your needs. We’ve searched and tested different options, from expensive tools like Pitchbox that work great for big teams to budget-friendly ones like Hunter.io that are perfect for beginners.
Remember, the most expensive tool isn’t always the BEST choice. Consider what you need, how many people will use it, and what your budget can afford. Be practical and take advantage of the free trials before you commit.
Don’t forget that these tools should help you work better, NOT replace genuine connections and link building skills.
