15 Best Free Link Building Tools (+ Chrome Extensions) for SEO

Whether you are a business owner, a digital marketer, or an SEO expert, one aspect of marketing that you cannot ignore is link building. Building backlinks is an integral part of your SEO journey, without which it can be tough to achieve top SERPs ranking. The other side of the story is that most link-building tools on the market are expensive, and so is the link-building process itself.

But there are many free link-building tools online that anyone can use to make their work easier. In this post, you’ll learn a few of these tools. With these tools, you can literally take your SEO strategy to the next level, while also saving money, time and drastically cutting down the stress. In addition to these, we’ll also throw in some chrome extensions that can make your link-building efforts even easier.

10 Free Link Building Tools in 2022

When it comes to link building, it’s important to choose the right tools for your business needs or situation. Whether you go through link prospecting, guest posting, or content marketing, these tools can help you generate high-quality links on your site.

1. Google Search (+ Search Operators)

Starting our list is Google search. Google is a great search tool, but in this case, it works best with some search operators. Search operators (also known as search parameters) are characters or strings of characters used to narrow the focus of the search on a search engine like Google.

For instance, if we need to find pages with the keyword “rental car dealers”, to help us get the right results faster, we need to include specific commands in the search query as shown below.

inurl:"rental car dealers" inurl:"rental car dealers."

This query will return the result of pages containing the keyword “rental car dealers'' in their page's URL. Essentially, these tools save you time and help you focus on the pages from which you can build high-quality links. Examples of common search operators are Intitle, Inurl, Allintext, Allinanchor, Allintitle, Cache, and several others.

2. SEMrush Backlink Gap Tool

With SEMrush Backlink Gap Tool, you can run a link-building analysis to compare your site with competitors and discover where you are lagging. The tool allows you to bring in competitor insights to identify opportunities based on sites linking to your competitors.

The tool helps you see opportunities for improving your link-building campaign by looking at competitors’ link profiles.

3. Hunter.io

Hunter is an intuitive email search tool with which you can search out the email addresses of website owners and managers during link prospecting. If you are struggling to find the email address of prospects whom you think would absolutely love to link back to your content, one tool you can rely on is Hunter.

Aside from uncovering their email addresses, it also tells you about their company, their position in that company, and their connections on LinkedIn.

4. Google Alerts

Another smart tool you want to add to your link-building arsenal is Google Alerts. This tool enables you to get notifications on every news, event, and articles that are related to your selected keywords.

Setting up Google Alerts allows you to get automated updates on anything on the web related to your keyword, thereby making it easier for you to reach out and source for quality links to your site.

5. SEMrush Link Building Tool

With SEMrush Link Building Tool, you can easily launch and manage an outreach campaign. The design of this tool enables you to acquire high-quality backlinks to your site and use customizable email templates as you reach out to prospects.

While SEMrush Link Building Tool allows you to seek out fresh link-building opportunities, it also provides you with insights into the progress you’re making with your link-building campaign.

6. Scrapebox

To get the most out of Scrapebox, you need to use it alongside specific Google Search Operators. Scrapebox is a tool that can help harvest results from the SERPs within seconds. At some point, it was even used for automated commenting on blog posts.

As the name implies, Scrapebox scrapes the results from SERPs and exports them out for you, saving you valuable time that you can invest into reaching out to prospects and getting them to link back to your content.

7. Google Search Console

Google Search Console gives you a basic overview of the number of links in your content. It functions as an analytical tool, letting you know whether or not you need to double up on your link-building efforts.

Aside from this, Google Search Console is better known for helping digital marketing professionals manage their website’s presence on Google and other widely-used search engines.

8. Ahrefs Free Broken Link Checker

To find any broken link on your website, this is the tool you want to engage. You need to first drop a domain in the tool and hit enter. After this, it will show the list of all pages on your site with broken links.

Ahrefs Free Broken Link Checker uses a crawler that can uncover both broken internal backlinks and external backlinks, along with details about the URL parameters and pages found in each link anchor text.

9. Majestic

Majestic is another link analysis tool that helps you analyze the health of your site, by checking your Domain, Trust Flow and Citation Flow. Majestic comes in very handy to help you with information on links, linking root domains associated with a given domain, anchors within domains, and trust flow from external sites. This analysis shows you each domain’s overall authority and link power.

10. Seobility

Seobility works similarly to the SEMrush Backlinking Gap tool in that it analyzes your website links and compares the results with your competitors’ website backlinks. This way, you can tell which link has issues. To make it easy for you, Seobility will help you generate a report of the analyses, making it easy to make the necessary adjustments.

5 Best Chrome Extensions for Link Building

11. Mozbar

MozBar is a free Chrome extension that enables you to carry out analysis on-page SEO for your webpages, including backlink research. You can also view metrics like page authority (PA), domain authority (DA) right from the search results.

12. Check My Links Extension

With this unique tool, you can identify all broken links that you might have missed when fixing broken links. The “Check My Links'' extension crawls through your web page and automatically displays the results.

13. Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar

Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar extension works for Chrome and Firefox browsers. It instantly checks your on-page SEO and provides you with detailed results, including broken links and issues with redirects (using the redirect tracer tool).

14. NoFollow

Here is another simple and useful extension that helps in monitoring the spread of Nofollow links throughout your site. NoFollow extension supports NOFOLLOW, UGC, and SPONSORED attribute values and search engine-specific robot meta tags.

15. Buzzstream Buzzmarker

The BuzzMarker Chrome extension lets you use BuzzStream’s features anywhere on the internet. With its Google Alerts integration, Buzzstream Buzzmarker automatically saves all alerts to your list.

Conclusion

Clearly, link building is a key SEO strategy. If you’re not actively building links back to your web pages, chances are you may never rank high, or it would take you longer to rank high. With these free tools, link-building becomes much easier than it used to be. In case you need help or are not sure where to start yet, feel free to reach out to us at Mission.

At Mission, we use our profound market insights and expert guidance to help you improve your marketing results and business productivity. We are experts at assisting businesses to implement the best growth strategies successfully. As leading partners in the PEO, HR, payroll, and benefits outsourcing marketplace, we also provide result-oriented services for small and medium-sized organizations and government contractors.