Top 16 Manual Link-Building Tools for Small Business on a Budget

Can we ease the tedious work of the link building process?

This is a question that must have come to your mind when finding backlink opportunities, connecting with prospects, and managing the whole campaign.

And the answer is a big YES!!!

I am sharing, the 16 best link-building tools to help you create backlinks for your website.

These tools will help you find websites, find emails of the prospects, manage your campaign and keep track of everything.

Without taking any more of your time, let’s get started.

Link Building Tools To Find New Opportunities

Moz

Standard: $99/month

Moz is one of the oldest and most widely accepted tools for building links. Marketers use it for its SEO capabilities and as a broken link-building tool. It is a great alternative to Ahrefs for small businesses who looking for an affordable tool on at budget

From finding link-building opportunities using Link Explorer to tracking the growth of Domain Authority of the website—Moz can be the ultimate website tracking tool.

The tool also helps you keep track of tools, the links your website has gained, and the links that you have lost. That means you can easily identify how your backlink campaign is performing and how impactful it is on your website’s authority.

HARO

Price: Free

HARO or Help A Reporter Out is a free service that connects writers and journalists with expert sources.

Based on your strategy, you can be either one and connect with people to grow your network and eventually build links.

First, you must sign up as a Journalist or Source.

As a Journalist, you can request specific data or information from a group of sources. You put in what you are looking for HARO will send the request as a newsletter and you can connect with people who respond.

If you use them as a source, you can request to share the post or link back to you to get more reach—help you build links organically.

If you sign up as a Source, you can connect with writers who create content on various topics, and give them some information to improve their articles. Doing so will help you and your brand establish authority.

You can also request writers to link back to your site if possible, but it’s up to the writer to do so or not. The best way to approach HARO is as a networking tool you can use later to create links.

HelpB2BWriter

Price: Free

HelpB2BWriter is another free community specifically for the B2B industry. So you have categories like Business, HR, Marketing, SaaS and a network of B2B content creators.

When you put in a request, unlike HARO—the community helps you connect specifically with B2B professionals.

That means it’s a very defined and strategic way to build a network in your industry. Additionally, one can pick the industry while signing up.

That means your request for a source reaches very specific people who know about the industry and are willing to connect.

Google Alert

Price: Free

Google Alert is a service that keeps you updated when a term—that you specified—is used by someone in their content. This term can be your brand name, a keyword, a phrase or anything you would like to be alerted off.

It might be one of the least “viral” link building tools, but if your business has recently gained a lot of PR, you can keep up with the publications that use the brand name and request a link back.

Also, since you can set up an alert for keywords as well, you will be notified when a new article is published and you can connect with the blogger to get a link.

Google Search Operator

Google Search Operators are these simple search queries that you can use to find more link opportunities organically.

Some of the most common ones are:

Using various combinations of these search operators, you can look for backlink opportunities without even using another tool.

📌Learn more about: Why building backlinks is importance for your saas business

Link Building Tools to Manage Prospects

Google Sheet

Price: Free

Google Sheets is a free spreadsheet program that marketers can use to collect all the important data and keep it organized effectively.

For link building, it is the tool where you can collect contact information for outreach just like any spreadsheet.

But one key advantage here is the ability to access and share this data with other members. Because Google sheets are saved on your Google Drive, all you need to do is a person’s email.

Additionally, you can set limited access to view, comment or edit the spreadsheet for every individual.

If you are working in a team—or even alone—Google Sheets is a simple tool to collect the data, sort it and filter it as required.

You can collect information about the bloggers, websites, DA, Guest posting cost, email addresses and more all in one place.

Airtable

Free Plan

Another tool to manage your outreach data in one place. If you are bored with a regular spreadsheet view, Airtable is for you.

At its basic, Airtable allows you to organize data the way you want. You can use it in a Kanban board, calendar, gallery, and more. What it does is break the monotonous way of interacting with data, and give it more dimension.

Lastly, you can create a workflow to follow. For you and your team. Airtable can automatically send emails to your prospects. That means, all that is left is to fill in the data, and Airtable will reach out to prospects on your behalf.

Tools to Track and Test Emails for Link Building

Mailtrack

Free plan

Mailtrack is one of the best email-tracking tools for link building. When doing outreach to connect with bloggers and content managers, it’s important to know if your mail reaches them well.

Also, if they have opened the email or clicked on a particular link. All this data helps in crafting a much better email and that is exactly where Mailtrack comes in handy.

Additionally, you can track each and every activity using its depth analytics which is available right in the Gmail window itself.

Compared to many other bulk email sending and scheduling tools, Mailtrack stands out to be the most reliable one.

Email Tracker by Snov.io

Price: Free

Email Tracker by Snov is a simple chrome extension. You add it to your browser, allow the permission and that’s it.

Once you send the email, it will automatically start tracking and showing data on the email itself.

If you are sending about 15-20 emails a day, tracking is easy with the Snov mail tracker. Number of opens and clicks—all are available near the mail itself.

All these features make Snov an uncomplicated tool to track emails and a must-try when creating emails.

Mail-tester.com

Price: Free

Mail-tester.com is a website that comes in handy in checking the spam score of your email.

When you go to the website, it gives you an email to which you have to send a mail. Write in your mail copy, add the subject line and send a test mail to this email address that is provided.

Once the email is sent, go back to the website and click on analyze. You will have a detailed breakdown of if the mail will land in spam score and how to avoid it.

When creating the first few mail copies, a mail tester can come in handy to ensure that all your emails land in the inbox of your prospects.

Tools to Find Contact Details of Prospects

Skrapp.io

Starter Plan: $49/month

Skrapp.io is an email scraping tool for LinkedIn. Today, when LinkedIn is a social network for professionals of all fields, and it’s easy to find prospects using the platform.

With Skrapp.io, you can find the email address of the prospects just through their LinkedIn profile.

Install Skrapp.io Chrome extension. Now open the profile and click on the Skrapp.io extension. That’s it. You’ll find a professional email of the prospect using the extension.

This helps in connecting with content editors, managers and bloggers for backlinks without a need to run multiple email formations.

Snov.io

Free plan

Snov.io is another popular email scraping tool. But while Skrapp is limited to LinkedIn, Snov.io allows finding email directly via the website or the blog.

Install the Chrome extension and open the website you want to find emails for. Click on Snov income and it will show a list of potential prospects.

If you would like to see more company employees, click on the full company and you can filter the list by name and job title.

Using Snov.io you can easily create a database of bloggers to connect with, as well as set up email campaigns to send and track emails for backlinks.

Hunter.io

Starter Plan: $49/month

Hunter is a popular email finder and verifying tool. While the above tools will help you find emails of your prospects, Hunter.io is a tool that you can use to further verify the emails.

Hunter has been around for a long time and is very popular among many marketers. You can compose your email, send them and track each one of them in Hunter itself.

Another alternative that you can use after a daily limit is VerifyEmailAddress.org. A highly reliable tool but with lots of ads and poor user experience

Tools to Create Outreach Email Copy

ChatGPT

Plan: Free

ChatGPT – Free Email Outreach Copywriter

ChatGPT has emerged as one of the most popular AI tools that can be used for various purposes, including content creation.

If you are struggling to create an email copy, you can simply write a prompt describing what you are looking for and ChatGPT create one for you.

As a link building tool, you can write a prompt to – write an email copy to connect with the blogger or editor of the website abc and ask for a backlink on page https://example.com, with the preferred anchor text example.

Writing a prompt like this and adding in your further requirements will help ChatGPT create an email copy that can surely be used for email outreach for backlinks.

Copy.ai

Freemium plan

Copy.ai is another popular ai tool that you can use to create an email copy for backlinks.

With Copy.ai, you’ll get templates to get started with. Choose the email template for backlinks by adding your details.

Now run the AI, and it will create an engaging email copy. You can use this copy to connect with bloggers and generate backlinks for your business website.

Tools to Send Outreach Emails

Gmail

Price: Free

Gmail is a service by Google that you can use to send emails. It’s free, clean and works easily with all the link building tools shared in this list.

Because of its ease, Gmail is undoubtedly the best email-sending service. You can manage all your emails and organize them using labels.

When running outreach campaigns, these labels can come in handy, as all the emails with common labels are arranged in one folder.

That means you can collect all the conversations with your network in one folder while keeping other prospects in another Gmail label.

Conclusion

Be it a broken link building tool or a tool to help you manage all your backlink campaigns. It’s up to you how efficiently you use them.

Above, there are 16 best link building tools in the market which helps to run your SEO outreach campaign more effectively.