Link Building Tools for Small Businesses: Budget-Friendly Options

A link building tool is a software application that helps you build links to your website. These tools help you find new opportunities, analyze competitor backlinks, and manage your outreach efforts.

HARO is a platform that connects journalists with sources. By signing up as a source, you can receive daily requests from reporters covering various topics.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a popular SEO crawler that can be used to find broken links and analyze website architecture. It also supports the creation of XML sitemaps. The software can crawl a whole site or select specific URLs by filtering for images, JavaScript and other elements. It can also be integrated with Google tools to provide additional functionality.

The software can also identify missing meta descriptions and help you correct them. This can improve user experience, which ultimately improves search engine rankings. It can also scan for broken links and highlight pages without a title tag.

Another feature is the ability to find orphan pages, which are pages that don’t have any links from other pages on your site. These can be problematic, as they prevent users from finding the content they want. This is especially important for local searches, where a page’s location influences the search results. Screaming Frog also identifies duplicate content and can help you remove it from your website.

Majestic

Majestic offers a wealth of features designed to elevate digital marketers’ link-building efforts. One of its most powerful tools is the Site Explorer, which allows users to conduct a deep dive into their or their competitors’ backlink profiles. This is essential for gauging the quality and quantity of a website’s links, a crucial factor in search engine rankings.

The tool’s unique metrics, such as Trust Flow and Citation Flow, provide valuable insights into a website’s link profile. In addition, Majestic’s Backlink History feature provides a visual representation of a website’s link growth over time.

Majestic also offers a free browser plugin and API access to its data, making it easy to incorporate into your workflow. Its Bucket List function allows users to record interesting links and websites, which can then be shortlisted for future analysis or link prospecting. This feature also allows users to keep track of their progress, ensuring that they’re not losing ground to the competition.

HARO

HARO, or Help a Reporter Out, is an online service that connects journalists and subject matter experts. Journalists submit queries for stories they are writing and receive responses from qualified sources, which they may incorporate into their articles. Then, the journalist shares the source’s website in their article, creating a backlink that helps boost search engine rankings.

In addition, being featured as a source in a well-known publication builds credibility and increases brand awareness. It also helps establish your business as a thought leader in your industry and can attract qualified leads.

To make the most of HARO, be sure to regularly monitor the digests and respond to those that align with your niche and expertise. You can browse the requests by category or set up alerts for specific keywords to find relevant opportunities. Ideally, you should be able to find 3 or more queries per day that are relevant to your business. Responding to the most relevant queries will give you the best chance of securing media coverage and earning high-quality links.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool that helps businesses analyze and track their backlink profiles, keywords, and competitors. It also helps them identify and evaluate potential link-building opportunities. Its features include Content Explorer, SERP History, and Keywords Explorer.

Another helpful feature is SERP analysis, which shows the rankings of a website in Google over time and compares them to the competition. This can help you determine how to improve your own search rankings. The tool also gives you the traffic potential for each keyword, which is a more accurate measure of search volume than the traditional’search ranking’ metric.

Another useful feature is the ability to set up ‘projects’, which allow you to monitor the performance of competing websites and adjust their SEO strategies. This includes monitoring keyword rankings, backlink growth, and site audits. Ahrefs offers a generous ‘domain verification’ system and allows you to work on multiple projects simultaneously. Its ‘traffic potential’ metric is particularly valuable, and it’s something that key competitors do not offer.