Let’s face it; building high-quality backlinks in 2023 is not easy. For starters, it’s now harder than ever to get replies from website owners when doing outreach for links. Besides, some of the best link building tools available today are expensive and beyond the reach of the average online business.

But don’t let that discourage you from working towards improving your site’s off-page SEO. Remember, there are still plenty of benefits of ranking higher on Google.

In this post, we show you the top 10  best free link building tools you can use in 2023. Some are completely free, while others offer a free account that you can upgrade when you’re ready for more advanced features. Finally, some tools offer a free trial that ends after a given period or after exhausting the allocated resources.

Why Link Building Still Matters for SEO

Link building remains a cornerstone for SEO because high-quality backlinks signal confidence, trust, authority, and relevance to search engines.

When done right, it can lead to:

• Better rankings: According to Moz, pages with more links tend to rank better in SERPs. This means you can boost your search positions with quality links.
• Increased web traffic: Higher search rankings and contextual links on different sites can lead to increased organic traffic to your site.
• Solid brand visibility: Link building reinforces your brand visibility and authority in your niche. The more people see your brand, the more they’re likely to pick it.
• Improved domain authority: High-quality backlinks lead to a higher domain authority, enhancing your authority, credibility, and rankings.
• Faster indexing: Quality backlinks signal to search engines that your content is credible and worth crawling, leading to faster indexing and ranking.

Together, these link-building benefits can lead to increased sales, revenue, and opportunities, underscoring the importance of quality backlinks in digital marketing.

How to Choose the Right Link Building Tool

You’ll need multiple tools for backlink profile analysis, outreach automation, and content and PR to run a successful link-building campaign. 

But not just any tools; here’s how to find the right ones:

• Define your needs and goals: Set clear objectives, such as fixing broken links, finding new prospects, and building high DA backlinks.
• Review features: Prioritize the ones crucial to achieving your goals, including backlink audits, competitor analysis, and outreach management.
• Assess integrations: Consider whether the tool supports integrations with your existing SEO stack to simplify backlink and outreach management.
• Ease of use: Link building shouldn’t be complex; select a tool your team can use easily, without complex integrations or a steep learning curve.

Even for free tools, you still need to evaluate their capabilities to ensure the right match. 

But they lack critical functionality, so consider using a combination of tools to create a comprehensive link-building workflow.

What Are Some Free Link Building Tools?

If you’d like to grow your backlink profile (and ultimately organic traffic) for cheap this year, our guide is all you need. Let’s dive in!

Google Alerts

Google receives around 63,000 search queries every second. The potential these numbers provide is phenomenal.

Luckily, you can now harness this power by collecting market trends on your company using Google Alerts. This free content monitoring service sends you notifications each time your brand’s name (or any other keyword you’re tracking) is mentioned on the web.

The customization options with Google Alerts are almost endless. For example, you can set it up to track any keyword relevant to your brand or even your competitors. The process of setting this up takes only a few seconds and you can create as many alerts as you want.

For link building purposes, Google Alerts makes it easier to discover hot new topics or trends in your niche that you could write on and attract backlinks. You can also identify websites that mention your brand unlinked for potential backlinking opportunities.

Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO is best known for helping SEOs analyse backlinks for quality and quantity. It tells you which backlinks are worth pursuing and those to leave out based on metrics such as Trust Flow, Citation Flow and Link Context.

A Trust Flow score essentially indicates the quality of backlinks. The higher the score, the higher the quality of that backlink.

A Citation Flow typically scores the number of backlinks pointing to a page without giving any weight to the quality of the links.

Finally, Link Context is a recently added feature that allows you to see the backlink's position in the text, images on the page, link density score, and other links within the page.

Majestic SEO offers a free version that you can use for basic domain lookups for aspects such as trust and citation flow and backlink profile. A 7-day money back guarantee is also available to new customers who would like to try the tool’s Lite and Pro plans risk-free.

Ahrefs Broken Link Checker

As the name infers, this tool scours your site and picks out broken outbound and inbound links. It’s particularly packed with several useful features to help you instantly locate broken outbound links on your pages that could be harming your SEO.

Similarly, Ahrefs Broken Link Checker shows broken inbound links so you can replace or redirect them elsewhere for improved navigation and crawlability of your site.

Finally, use this tool to identify your competitors’ most linked to pages that are broken. Create something similar and ask those linking to those dead pages to consider your fresh resource instead.

Ahrefs Broken Link Checker is available for free.

Hunter.io

Hunter.io is an excellent tool that helps you capture email addresses of owners of websites that you’d like to target for backlinks. In addition, it allows you to verify returned email addresses using its email verifier feature.

Hunter.io allows 25 free email searches and 50 email verifications per month. If this isn’t enough for you, check out the tool’s pricing plans that allow for a higher number of searches.

Snov.io

Snov.io is another useful freemium tool that allows you to find and verify email addresses of websites that offer backlinking opportunities. What’s more, you can use its emailing platform to contact site owners and also track opens and replies.

Currently, Snov.io offers a forever free plan with 50 free email verification checks and 100 recipients per month.

SEMRush

SEMrush is a powerful SEO tool that offers 50+ features to help you analyze backlinks, find keywords, audit technical SEO aspects, and track daily SERP positions.

The Backlink Analytics tool provides useful information such as backlink geo-location, quality and authority score. You can use data collected to guide your link building campaigns and improve search engine rankings.

Another important tool is the Backlink Audit which helps you weed out backlinks that may harm your search engine rankings by removing or disavowing them.

SEMRush offers three main plans which you can try for free for 7 days. Thereafter, your account will be demoted to a free account with limited functionality. For example, you can generate only 10 analytics reports per day, create and manage just one project and track a maximum of 10 keywords using the free account.

Link Whisper

Link Whisper is a simple tool that offers intelligent suggestions for internal link building. Unlike anything we’ve seen in the market yet, it just doesn’t give suggestions but also considers the relevance of the links.

But that’s not all! Link Whisper also identifies broken links and recommends what to do with them. It also generates reports showing you which pages have little to no internal links pointing to them as well as how many links are coming from each article.

You can use Link Whisper for free or upgrade to its paid version to enjoy more advanced features that include automated internal link placement and anchor text selection. We love it so much we use it ourselves!

Check My Links

Check My Links is a free Chrome browser extension that scans website pages for broken links. If you’re running a broken link building campaign, this tool can truly be super useful.

To unearth backlinking opportunities using Check My Links, install the extension in your Google Chrome browser. Thereafter, comb through websites where you’d link to solicit links from to see if they have any broken outbound links.

You can then notify owners about it and offer a solution in the form of another alternative resource available on your website. Because you will be helping them improve their site’s user experience and SEO, most webmasters will rarely hesitate to reward you with a link back to your website.

Mozbar

Mozbar is another free Chrome extension with multiple functions. The tool provides you with insights about a webpage, which you can use to determine its quality.

Using Mozbar is very easy. Click on the extension to view the Domain Authority, Page Authority and Spam score of the website you've visited. Mozbar instantly returns these metrics so you can know whether it’s worth going ahead with the link acquisition process or not.

Disavow.it

Disavow.it is a free tool that allows website owners to denounce association with any backlinks that may harm their search engine ranking. This usually occurs when your site gets backlinks from domains or pages that employ questionable SEO practices.

With Disavow.it, you will easily compile all potentially harmful backlinks, which it then submits to Google asking it to disregard them.

Surprisingly, this tool is completely free to use!

How to Identify High-Quality Backlink Opportunities

When building backlinks, aim for quality over quantity, as a few authoritative links are more valuable than many low-quality ones.

This is how you can build high-quality backlinks:

• Analyze competitor backlinks: You can use tools like Semrush and Majestic SEO to see who links to your competitors, then target high-quality sites in their profile.
• Monitor unlinked brand mentions: Google Alerts can help identify unlinked brand mentions and request a link to your site.
• Engage in expert roundups: Participate in expert roundups in your niche to showcase your expertise and reinforce your backlink profile.
• Run an outreach campaign: Identify bloggers, publishers, and publications in your industry, then pitch them tailored content collaboration ideas.

Additionally, analyze your backlink profile to identify authoritative sites with broken links, and reach out to the site managers to recreate or fix them.

How ProfitEngine helps:

Perfecting this process requires experience and expertise. If you’re looking for professional expertise, our team at ProfitEngine can help you find high-quality backlink opportunities.

We offer tailored link-building strategies to identify and contact prospects who are genuinely interested in your content. We also personalize outreach templates to maximize response rates and utilize a mix of guest posts, niche edits, and tiered links to find high-quality links.

Get in touch with us and learn how we can simplify your link prospecting for quality backlinks.

How to Spy on Competitor Links

One effective way to build high-quality backlinks is to spy on your competitors’ profiles. To do this, you’ll need a specialized link-building tool like Semrush or Majestic SEO.

The process of spying on your competitors is largely similar across these tools, but we’ll use Majestic SEO to walk through the steps:

1. Visit Majestic SEO’s (or your preferred tool) homepage.
2. Locate the search bar on the page.
3. Type in your competitor’s home page URL and tap Enter.
4. On Majestic SEO, scroll down to the “Top Links” section.
5. Click “Check out more Link Context” to view all backlinks.

Note that some free tools only display a limited number of backlinks; you may need to upgrade to a paid version to access all links.

Then browse the links, identify sites you want to link to your website, and reach out to them to collaborate on content or for expert roundups. Focus on sites related to your niche that have strong domain authority and stellar reputation.

How to Automate Link Prospecting and Save Time

Link prospecting is time-intensive, especially when done manually through Google searches and spreadsheets. 

But you can automate this process and save time with free tools by:

• Setting clear goals: Before launching your campaign, define what you want, such as building high DA backlinks. Also, identify metrics to track, like domain rating, backlink volume, and referral traffic.
• Define criteria: Set parameters for ideal link prospects, such as topic, domain authority, niche, and organic traffic. This helps you find sites that are highly relevant to your niche.
• Automate search: Use free link-building tools like Semrush, Majestic SEO, and Google Alerts, and input your criteria to find highly relevant prospects.
• Automate follow-ups: Use Hunter.io to find emails, and use tools like RankYak and Rely.io to automate follow-ups based on triggers such as clicks, opens, and non-responders.

While automation saves time for you, it still requires human intervention to build lasting relationships with prospects and ensure a personalized outreach.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are common questions that marketers ask when seeking new backlink opportunities:

What Is the Most Accurate Free Backlink Checker?

While there is no single “most” accurate free backlink checker, using a mix of tools, like Ahrefs Broken Link Checker, Semrush, and Google Alerts, has proven effective for marketers.

For example, you can use Google Alerts to get notified when new web content mentions your brand, Semrush for backlink analysis, and Ahrefs for identifying broken links. Free link-building tools for SEO are limited, but using multiple tools provides broader capabilities.

Can I Use Free Tools for Scalable Link Building?

Yes, you can use free tools for scalable link building, but it requires combining several tools for comprehensive functionality.

But first, ensure you have linkable assets, such as reports, infographics, case studies, free tools, and comprehensive articles. Then, use Google Alerts to find unlinked mentions. Hunter.io to search for emails for your pipeline, and Majestic SEO for monitoring new backlinks.

How Do I Track the Success of My Link Building Campaign?

To track your campaign’s success, monitor your backlinks, organic traffic, and keyword rankings. A growth in these elements means your campaign is paying off.

You can use Google Analytics to monitor your traffic, and Semrush or Majestic SEO for backlink profiles. Before any campaign, always create baseline data for performance comparison with post-campaign results.

Are Free Tools Enough for Long-Term Link Building Success?

No, free tools are not enough for long-term, scalable link-building success for your business.

While free tools can secure some quality backlinks, they can’t sustain campaigns that require robust data, automation, and efficiency. Simply upgrade your free plans on Semrush, Majestic SEO, and Hunter.io for better functionality.

Conclusion

Running a link-building campaign shouldn’t be a costly initiative for your business. You can still earn quality links using the best free link-building tools like Google Alerts, Majestic SEO, Hunter.io, and Ahrefs Broken Link Checker.

While free tools have basic functionality, combining several tools offers broader capabilities to power your campaigns.

But if you feel it’s a burden, let our experts at ProfitEngine manage your campaigns. Our bespoke link-building plans enable you to earn quality links from our established networks. We can also connect you with top-tier journalists for media placements through HARO link-building.

Get our high-ranking LinkEngine strategy blueprint today and start earning quality backlinks.