Discover exactly how 29 experts use these exact SEO & link building tools every single day to drive their rankings & traffic!

1. matthewwoodward.co.uk http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tips/best-link-building-tools-tips/
29 Experts Reveal The 3 Link Building & SEO Tools They Use
Every Day
The SEO game is a marathon, not a sprint. The tools you’re equipped with are your shoes. In order to win the
race, you have to know how to adapt and optimize your running.
My partner, Codrut Turcanu got 29 experienced bloggers to answer this for us:
Which SEO/link building tools are critical to your businesses success & how do you use them?
What is even more interesting, is the results these people are getting.
For example, one blogger got 180,000 monthly organic search sessions without actively building links, solely
through keyword research.
Here is a break down of the top votes-
The Best SEO/Link Building Tools (as voted by 29 experts!)
1. SEMRush – 8 votes
2. Google Webmaster Tools – 7 votes
3. Majestic SEO – 7 votes
Other mentions:
Screaming Frog SEO Spider – 6 votes
Google Keyword Planner – 5 votes
Ahrefs – 4 votes
Market Samurai – 3 votes
URL Profiler – 3 votes
Here are the answers in detail. Enjoy the post, take notes and implement the info.
Don’t forget to share it with your friends and colleagues.
Andy Crestodina
Orbitmedia.com Twitter
Links happen when great content becomes visible to someone who creates links. Who
creates links? Writers, bloggers, editors, journalists, podcasters and event organizers. In
other words, the trick to link building is to create visibility among creators.
So here are three networking tools that can be used for link building. I recommend these
tools because they focus on research. The first step is to find the content creators…
FollowerWonk
FollowerWonk – Enter your topic name (whatever industry you’re in) along with “blogger” “writer” or “author” This
will produce a list of content producers in your field. They’re sorted by number of followers by default.
You can also see the general social influence of each. If that number is in the signal digits, it’s probably a spam

2. account.
InkyBee
Inkybee.com – This is a paid service, but very powerful. Use it to find blogs and bloggers on any topic. Then track
and manage your outreach within a dashboard.
This tool includes MOZscape data so you can see the domain authority of the bloggers right there in the list. That
saves a step. Also, a new feature helps you find bloggers who already follow you on Twitter. That’s a big shortcut!
Topsy
Topsy.com – You may already have bloggers who like your content. Put your content into Topsy to see who’s
sharing it. If there are influential bloggers who are already enjoying your content, it’s easier to reach out, connect
and collaborate.
Once you’ve found these content creators, you can add them to a spreadsheet. Use Open
Site Explorer to find the domain authority of each of their blogs, and add that as a separate column. You’re ready
to combine social media with SEO.
Time to start networking.
Add them to a Twitter list or Google+ circle so you can watch them more closely. Now start mentioning, sharing,
commenting, chatting and collaborating.
Links will happen after there’s a genuine connection.
James Brockbank
JamesBrockbank Twitter
As an SEO consultant, I both oversee and am involved in a range of campaigns for clients in
a whole host of industries.
As such, having a great toolset to help carry out routine and detailed tasks makes my life far
easier and the campaigns of my clients ultimately more successful!
Here’s my top three must have SEO tools:
Serpfox
Having tried numerous position tracking tools, Serpfox is by far the best I’ve come across and one which I use on
a daily basis.
By setting custom alerts, I receive an email alerting me whenever a search term I’m tracking enters the top ten
positions, leaves the top ten or changes either way by more than ten positions.
That way, I know exactly how core search terms across my clients sites are performing in almost real time.
Of course, having reliable tracking software also makes reporting at the end of the month far easier as well!
SEM Rush
When a new client enquiry comes in, the first thing I do is run their URL through SEM Rush.
Whilst only an approximate level of search traffic is shown, it’s a fantastic indicator as to whether the site may
have experienced a penalty or algorithmic adjustment at any stage in the past.

3. SEM Rush provides me with an instant overview as to the current and historical performance of a site both in
terms of ranking positions as well as link, PPC campaigns and a whole host more.
This is, as far as I’m concerned, the best overall SEO tool out there and when it comes to audits, is invaluable!
Majestic
As far as link research tools go, you can’t beat Majestic. I
In comparison to other similar tools, the depth it goes to is sufficient enough to carry out a detailed link audit either
as a routine measure or in the event of a manual penalty or Penguin adjustment.
Being able to see a nifty little overview of anchor text breakdown helps with a very quick analysis of a sites link
profile whilst being able to pull off detailed reports makes the process of marking links for removal requests that
little bit more bearable!
All in all, having tried a number of link research tools over the years, it’s Majestic I go back to time and time again.
Erik Emanuelli
NoPassiveIncome Twitter
The first tool I like to mention is MyBlogU.
It’s a relatively new platform I use to be promoted online, creating new connections and
backlinks, by sharing my knowledge in the topics I feel to be expert.
You can choose among brainstorm, media and interview. I normally use the latest category,
the core features of the site, both for creating interviews for my blogs or finding relevant
projects to participate.
I think it’s one of the most effective ways to create natural backlinks and new connections within blogosphere.
SearchMetrics has huge potentialities. I use it to gather data for each website I analyze, with information about
SEO visibility, backlinks and much more.
The graphs feature is an effective way to discover any Google algorithm issue, by noticing a sudden drop of
visibility.
On the other side, a fast increase of visibility gives you indication of a possible malicious link building. Check also
the keywords rankings, to identify the most suitable websites to target.
Lastly, the social ranking feature gives you insights on whether a website is doing or not a good social media
marketing job.
MajesticSEO comes in handy to determine backlinks quality of a website, and analyze anchor texts or rankings. I
use it to identify the tops pages linking to my blogs and to find out my website’s top pages.
Graphs gives you insights about referring domains and trust or citation flow. Alternately, use it to make research of
a phrase you want to rank well on Google, then export and filter the results, in order to find the links and duplicate
your competitors building campaign.
I like also the “neighbourhood checker”, as it helps you identify the domains with most backlinks hosted on any IP,
in order to let you understand co-hosted sites which may be dangerous.
Lastly, with the historical traffic analysis you have at your disposal up to 2 years of ranking history.
Jamie Knop

4. SeoWeather.com Twitter
BuzzStream
I’ve been using BuzzStream for a couple of years now and for good reason. If you’re doing
outreach and not using it then you’re in for a treat.
Essentially it enables to easily manage your relationships with websites you’re outreaching
to, whether that be bloggers, businesses or journalists.
It lets you import a bunch of websites for prospecting and gathers lots of data for you so you can decide if the
website is a good fit for your campaign.
For example the Domain Authority of a website and how many followers they have on Twitter (yes it scrapes a
websites social profiles!).
Once you’ve prospected some websites it then allows you to easily contact them directly through BuzzStream.
You just hook your email up in the settings and you’re ready to outreach. This is where things start to get even
better.
If there is an email address listed on the website BuzzStream will get it for you, and if not it’ll show you the contact
page URL.
Then you are able to setup templates to speed up outreach and you’ll even get statistics on what your response
rate is like so you can optimise and improve your email copy.
Once you’ve got a link BuzzStream will then monitor it for you and if there are any changes, such as a link being
taken down you will be notified. Pretty neat!
There are so many tasks you can utilise BuzzStream for such as PR, blogger relations, unnatural link analysis and
link monitoring, you’d be daft not to give it ago.
Screaming Frog
When it comes to technical audits Screaming Frog is my go to piece of software. It will crawl an entire website and
scrape all the important data you need.
Some of the common tasks it helps me carry out are,
– Fixing page errors such as 404s
– Making sure redirects have been correctly implemented
– Checking on-page items such as Meta information, headers and content length
– Making sure canonical tags have been implemented correctly
– Generating sitemaps
– Viewing pages that have been set to noindex
These are just a few of the things that Screaming Frog will help you with. It can be used for a whole bunch of other
things, even link building.
For example, you can scrape a website you want a link from, find all the broken links, email the website owner
letting them know and suggest your link as a replacement.
URL Profiler
Fairly new to the SEO market is URL Profiler. It does what it says on the tin, helps you profile URL’s. It can gather

5. tons of information on thousands of URL’s you input into the software.
Such data that can help you qualify the quality of website such as Majestic metrics, Moz metrics and Ahrefs
metrics.
It can scrape the social accounts from a website and email addresses to help you in your outreach efforts.
You can even utilise it when carrying out on page audits to make sure none of the content is duplicated and
checking Page Speeds.
Marcus Miller
Bowlerhat.co.uk Twitter
I am not a big tools guy. There is always another new tool coming out and I often find they are
simply recycling old ideas. That said there are a few essentials that we use in our day to day
at Bowler Hat so let me give you an overview.
Google
Yep, Google. Old School, right? Ultimately, you want to know what pages Google thinks are important – then ask
Google. Fortunately, Google gives us a range of search operators to query the index and find pages that may be of
interest to us or our clients.
Want to find local charities that link out to sponsors? Then ask Google.
There are a series of operators that tend to be useful but the following tend to be key:
inurl:
intitle:
site:
So, if we are looking for charities in Birmingham that list their sponsors we could try:
charities in birmingham inurl:sponsors
charities in birmingham intitle:sponsors
Maybe we find specific charities and we want to filter by a specific site – no problem, we can chain operators
together:
site:www.example.com inurl:sponsors
We can also take advantage of the ‘~’ operator to find related words and the minus (-) operator to remove or filter
the results.
site:www.example.com inurl:sponsors -“we don’t want this text”
There are almost too many options to cover here but if you want links and you want to find the sites and pages that
are likely the most valuable then there is a good chance Google itself is the only tool you need to identify more
than enough opportunities to keep even the most fevered SEO team busy. Plenty of more ideas here:
https://support.Google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is like the SEO’s Swiss Army Knife. We do a lot of Technical SEO Audits and have used this tool

6. for years and I am still finding new things it can do or show us.
Example – found a site that you really, really, really want a link from? Well simply crawl that site and get list of the
external links and review 404’s and build a strategy out of that.
Want to know what anchor text your competitors are using for internal anchor text?
Want to see a sites most important (linked pages). Screaming frog can do all of this and so much more. I tend to
enjoy having a problem to solve and seeing how we can use Screaming Frog to solve it.
Webmaster Tools & Google Analytics
I am a big fan of Webmaster tools and Google’s tools in general. If you can get any diagnostic information direct
from Google then you are a fool not to use it.
Recently the page speed and fetch & render tools have added to an ever increasing tool set that can be used and
understood by everyone to some extent.
Google Analytics again provides so much data to improve your performance in organic search, paid search and
any online advertising that most businesses never need anything more complicated.
Honourable Mentions
There are a few tools I like. I am a fan of Bright Local and WhiteSpark for the Local SEO Toolsets.
I like some of the Moz.com pro tools and especially the site crawler.
Maybe a slightly boring list but I don’t have a super secret SEO tool. After 15 years in the business I am yet to find
such a tool so either I really suck at looking (which would be bad given my field) or these tools don’t actually exist.
The best SEO tools out there are the consultants that are in the trenches each day fighting the good fight for their
clients!
Gabriella Sannino
Level343.com
Twitter
One thing that’s apparent, if you’re paying attention to the changes occurring in SEO: it’s
more than analytics, technical and content strategies – it’s about human behavior, too.
How are people making those connections? The easiest and most time consuming way is
earning links. That is important for SEO. Actually it’s two-fold process.
The first and most important reason is the connections you make outside your digital footprint that reinforce and
add value to your readers.
The second reason of course, is that search engines use those signals. Yes, search engines view links as part of
the authority given to your web presence and will continue to do so, while updating algorithms that combat crappy
links.
I’m sure you’ve seen those comments people make. “Google is ranking company xyz better than ours, yet our
content is better.” I get it, really I do. But at the end of the day, allowing Google to dictate your day-to-day
operations is like being a hostage with no clarity for your future.
Let me be clear, ranking should not become your Holy Grail. Contradiction much you say?
Sure, but at the end of the day ask yourself who’s buying from you?

7. I’m pretty sure you’ll agree it’s not Google.
Maybe you should add earning links as your top must do in 2015. It’s an organic process and yes, its time
consuming but when done organically it’s like a facelift, it becomes ageless.
At least for the next 3-5 years LOL. Which when you consider how long a strong organic link lasts, the odds are for
you, and not against you.
Below are my top three organic link-building tools. Each one offers a variety of options that will not only help with
your organic efforts, but that will point you in the direction of “where” you should look first.
Link Prospector from Whitespark
Google Webmaster Tools
Majestic SEO
Remember there are millions of people online daily, therefore, when trying to capture local business you have to
guide your efforts locally.
For example start a resource list for local organic produce shops if you are a restaurant.
Start a local review about great bike trails if you’re a bike shop.
Basically, get creative and make sure you pour a lot of time and relevant research in order to produce an excellent
linkable piece.
Matt Wolfe
MattWolfe.net
Twitter
SEO is an interesting topic for me because I personally don’t put a ton of focus in to it.
What I’ve learned is that, the more I stop trying to create something that the search engines
want and the more I just start creating something of great value for the audience, the better I
actually tend to do in the search engines.
Saying that, there are a few tools that I do use that help give me a bit of a “leg up”…
My number one SEO tool has to be the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast. Since everything I create is created
with WordPress, this plugin bakes SEO best practices right in to every blog post that I create.
It handles the page and post titles, it takes care of sitemaps, it helps me analyze the optimization of a post before I
hit publish, and much more.
It’s the main tool in my SEO arsenal.
The second tool, that I recently discovered, that is really quite cool is called the Blog Post Headline Analyzer from
Co-Schedule.
It’s a simple tool where you type in the title of your blog post and it will analyze it for things like length, how
powerful or emotionally driven the words in the title are, and much more.
I run the title of every blog post I write through this tool first now and then analyze and tweak until I have a highly
optimized post title.
Finally, I use BuzzSumo a lot now to find great topics to post about.
This tool helps you analyze other posts from around the internet to find what’s receiving the most social

8. engagement. If you find a hot topic that everyone’s talking about, you can jump on that bandwagon and make your
version of that topic or post better.
Search engines weigh bounce rate heavily in to their algorithms.
Creating amazing, shareable, content that keeps people on your page and wanting to browse deeper in to your
site will help improve ranking.
As you can see, I’m not big on “link building” or have a ton of SEO tools. I’m big on creating content that people
really really want… I then invite others to share that content and expect that my content will grow in the rankings
organically.
When I’m going for super fast rankings, I’ll use some web 2.0 properties to create mini-posts on my topic and point
them back to my main post. For this, I’ll use sites like Tumblr, LiveJournal, and WordPress.com…
These mini-posts will tease the idea of my bigger post and use anchor text to point back to them. It’s probably not
the most effective SEO strategy on earth but it’s shown results for me and it’s the little bit of link building that I’m
willing to go out and do.
Patrick Coombe
PatrickCoombe Twitter
Bet you thought I was going to say Scrapebox or Screaming Frog, didn’t you?
Lately I’d have to say the #1 SEO tool in my arsenal is Schema markup. Schema is a great
way for you to set your brand apart from the competition in the SERPs.
In case you weren’t aware, Google Knowledge Graph uses schema markup to display those
nifty little boxes in the SERPs. If you have your wits about you, you can give your brand a
nice boost (I didn’t say rankings boost) by getting your KG game on point.
Knowledge Graph uses schema markup to display those nifty little boxes in the SERPs. If you have your wits
about you, you can give your brand a nice boost (I didn’t say rankings boost) by getting your KG game on point.
Webmaster Tools is also one of my favorite tools. Yes, the data is practically never correct but there are a number
of features that I count on to function as an SEO in today’s climate.
The first one are the search impressions. This is literally the only way to accurately extrapolate how many
impressions your keywords are appearing for in the search engines.
There are 100’s of analytics programs out there but none of them can do what Google does, and most of them rely
on this data anyway.
This is an excellent way to truly see how your SERP CTR is and make make changes to your titles / descriptions
based on that.
The second mart of WMT that I consider vitally important is the mobile warnings / testing tool. I don’t know what
the latest statistic is, but mobile makes up a s*** ton of overall traffic.
It is no secret that if you website isn’t responsive, it isn’t going to rank. Google does a good job of giving you the
suggestions that you need in order to get your site ready for war.
In the past 5-10 years I’ve been back and forth a number of times in my thinking with SEO in general. I started off
thinking it was all about signals, backlinks, and Googlebot.
The longer I am in the industry the more I realize it is all about quality control and UX. Give the people what they
want, and Google will reward you!

9. Marcus Taylor
VentureHarbour Twitter
The three SEO tools I use the most (besides the really common ones) are SEMRush,
URLprofiler, and Screaming Frog.
While SEMRush has a lot of cool features, I’m a particularly big fan of their site audit feature,
which tends to flag a lot of site issues missed by Google Webmaster Tools and Screaming
Frog.
On top of this, the competitive data that you can get from SEMRush is extremely useful when doing competitor
analysis, and a (surprisingly) accurate way of seeing which keywords are generating the most traffic for a given
site.
URLProfiler is one of my favourite tools for scraping link data, as it collects data through Majestic, Moz and Ahrefs’
APIs, and then allows you to export the information with a lot of control over different filters.
Finally, Screaming Frog is my go to tool for getting a birds eye view snapshot of a website’s onsite structure and
general health. It’s also particularly useful when you need to get a snapshot of all of a site’s title tags and meta
information, along with the character length of each.
Nathan Rossow
YakSeo.com
Twitter
There are a few tools that I use in my day to day work. My Top 3 are LongTail Pro, Moz Pro,
and Bright Local.
A couple of honorable mentions are Majesitc SEO and< a href="http://www.spyfu.com/">
SpyFu.
LongTail Pro Platinum
This is #1 in my SEO Tool box. Keyword Research in my opinion is one of the most important things in SEO.
I made several mistakes early on when pursuing new niches, I targeted the wrong keywords because I wasn’t
quite grasping the appropriate use of keyword sets. I’d realize my mistakes too late, after I’d spent hours and
hours of work and money.
Looking back, maybe I should have spent more time digging a little deeper into my research. This doesn’t just
mean spend more time on research, you actually have to go about it the right way.
Moz Pro
I use Moz Pro Open Site Explorer to take a look at my sites and the competition. I use this almost daily when I’m
checking out a client’s site or competitor’s backlinks and domain metrics.
A great way to start your backlinking campaigns is to look at the competition.
There is no need to recreate the wheel!
Take a look at the 1st page results and see what properties they are linking to the 1st page sites. Too many people
are looking for some kind of magic sauce when it comes to backlinks and SEO in general; chances are if it’s
working for your competition it’ll work for you.
Also OSE is great to get a quick look at the DA and PA for a site. I use this when I’m scoping out expired domains

10. to add to my network of sites. PBN’s aren’t dead, just saying.
Bright Local
Bright Local is a great tool for me and my business; it is great for anyone doing any kind of Local SEO.
The keyword tracker allows you to select the town or city for the particular keywords that you are tracking.
This is a big deal when it comes to tracking keyword positions for the local business. Bright Local lets you track
and see if you are in that coveted 7 pack.
The Citation tracker that they have is pretty good as well; citations are the bread and butter of local SEO.
There you have it, my top 3 SEO tools. They keep me and my business on track for success. They are all paid
tools, but they are well worth the price for to the time that they save me alone.
My agency can be found at www.YakSEO.com and I blog at www.TakingActionOnline.com where I talk about SEO
and getting started as an Online Entrepreneur.
Scott Moran
Pbnlab.com
Twitter
Here are my 3 favorite tools for SEO and link building for 2015:
1. PBN Lab’s Expired Domain Crawler
How do you launch a new website, complete with an existing backlink profile including
powerful links from current, high-authority websites – before the website is even online? Or,
quickly rank your existing website?
Expired domains are the cornerstones of my link building/backlinking strategy, because they’re a fast, easy
and cost-effective way to get my websites authority instantly – without any fuss!
I was so frustrated with trawling domain drop lists and bidding for domains at auction. I didn’t want to purchase
them from brokers at a premium price and it made no sense spending countless hours myself manually crawling,
filtering and fumbling with lists, to finally look up the domain metrics only to realize they were all rubbish…
So I scratched my own itch and personally developed my own web-based expired domain crawler, which “does
it all” in one easy step, and have released it as a tool for the world to use.
Now, in less than 30 seconds of my time, I can generate my own list of expired domains – which nobody else even
knows about!
To do this, I simply enter in relevant keywords, a country and period in time. The software automatically
generates a list of seed URLs to crawl based on those parameters, and from there the crawler does all the heavy
lifting!

11. Just minutes later, I have my own private list of well-established (but now expired) domains – complete with
Domain Authority, Page Authority, MozRank and Link metrics from Moz – available for registration at any
domain registrar.
The domain lists are filterable and sortable, and have quick links to Moz, Ahrefs, MajesticSEO, Wayback Machine
(and more) so I can quickly and easily validate the domains, ensuring they have a clean, well-established backlink
profile.

12. There are other methods for crawling too. You can use a manual list of seed URLs, or paste in raw HTML and
parse it for seed URLs. I.e. Perform a very specific search in Google, then copy and paste the result page HTML
source into the wizard.
This means it’s easy to crawl authority sites like Wikipedia, or any .gov, .edu sites for expired domains . And
when you find those domains, you know they have great authority right now, with backlinks from those authority
sites.
You can sign up today for access to use my expired domain crawler at www.pbnlab.com.
2. Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool
If you don’t think your page load times matter, think again!
We know this is a ranking signal used by Google, and slow loading websites simply will not rank well – especially
not for highly competitive keywords.
Beyond Google’s ranking signals, consider your visitor for a moment. You have 7 seconds to impress them, and
then have them take action on your website. Every second it takes to load, is a second less you have to get your
message across!
I use the Google Developers PageSpeed Insights tool to quickly establish what’s slowing down my websites,
so I can take action to resolve those bottlenecks.

13. Simply enter in the URL of your website, and Google will analyze the server response time, compression and
caching, scripts plus the visual elements of your website relative to both mobile and desktop browsers.
Google will return a score out of 100% for the URL you provided, and will show you which rules you
passed.
Best of all, for each rule you don’t pass – Google explain in simple terms what it is exactly, and their recommended
steps you can take to resolve it.
Get your site above 90%, and watch your rankings climb!
3. David Naylor’s Keyword Density Tool
A page over-optimized for your target keywords is more likely to “tank”, than rank.
Getting your keyword density somewhere between 1% and 3% is good (it depends a little on your total word
count) and not forgetting that you should also be using semantically similar keywords and phrases.
Using David’s online Keyword Density Tool, you can quickly analyze your entire page and ensure you get your
keyword density spot on. There’s no need to guess!
What I think makes this tool really unique is that it provides you with keyword density relative to your entire page,
and not just the body of your article.
Consider that your keyword may appear in your site name, every menu and other internal links – you can quite
easily, and unknowingly, over-optimize a single page, even if you get the body of your content spot on.
Head over to the Keyword Density Tool, and enter the URL of the page you’re trying to rank – and the keyword
terms or phrase you are trying to rank the page for.
You’re first presented with the summary results page, which provides you with extensive on-page analysis,
including a detailed breakdown of one-word and two-word keywords, your internal-to-external link ratios, and the
juice-passing external links, among other values.

14. But, where this tool comes truly becomes valuable is the comparison page.
The comparison page fetches the top 20 Google results for your keywords, and for each page, it performs the
same on-page keyword analysis for those pages as it has done for your page.
Looking at the table of results, with your site on the first row, you can now quickly compare your page to your
competition, and see exactly how hard they’re competing for those same keywords.
You’ll find pages that aren’t necessarily targeting those keywords at all in terms on-page optimization, but you will
find the sites/pages who truly are working as hard as you are to get inside the top 20.
First step is to check your site:
Have you “ticked every box”, and have your keywords placed at least once in each page element? If not,
there’s room for improvement.
Ensure your total keyword density sits in the 1% to 3% mark – keeping in mind your total word count.
The next step is to take closer inspection of your competition’s pages (and even their entire site).
If they’re competing hard for those keywords, these are the pages you need to pay particular attention to. How are
you going to outrank them?
Looking at their pages, do a little research and consider these questions:
Is this site specifically targeting your niche? Or is it just a single page about your topic on an authority site?
If it’s just a single page, the site’s relevance and internal linking structure is less likely to be relevant – good
news for you.
Is the site old, or new? Older sites tend to hold better rank due to the domain age, but they can be
outranked regardless.
Does their page better answer the question, or provide more value than yours? Don’t let them provide
more value to the visitor. Add more content, make your page easier to read, put in more relevant pictures or
photos.

15. Where are their links coming from? Throw their URL intoMoz’s Open Site Explorer,Ahrefs and/orMajestic
SEO. Are the links from other sites in your niche? How many powerful links are pointing to their page? How
many links are there in total? Can you replicate their powerful links, or outweigh their many weak links with
a few powerful links?
So now that your page is optimized for your keywords, and you know who your competition for that page truly is –
time to get to work outranking them!
Chris Higgins
Marketingsignals.com Twitter
As a marketing agency we are fortunate to have access to a whole host of cool tools and
pieces of software to help us with our day to day tasks.
They all do their job really well, but I definitely have my favourite and as you may expect
these are the ones I use most often at all stages of a client’s campaign, from inception
through to ongoing monthly delivery.
SEMrush
The first port of call for me is always SEMrush. The interface is really intuitive and gives a quick snapshot of a
client’s visibility in just a few clicks.
Having a visual representation of a client’s traffic and keywords over a period of time really helps take stock of how
well a current campaign is performing.
I’m not the only person in the office who’s a massive fan of SEMrush. Our paid search team also use it to track and
analyse competitors paid campaigns.
If the above wasn’t enough to be shouting from the rooftops about, SEMrush also allows you to analyse sites
across more than twenty TLDs, this has been invaluable when it comes to us pitching for global campaigns.
Ahrefs
Once a client comes on board we take stock of their current e-assets; including how well their site is performing, as
well as auditing the backlinks pointing to their domain. In order to do this we need to pull data from a reliable and
trusted source.
My personal preference is Ahrefs. Now we do gather data from other sources, but I find ahrefs gives you the
highest number of active links; Handy if your client needs a little backlink cleanup before the start of a campaign.
This is based on our own research.
The other reason Ahrefs wins my vote over the other data providers is the speed of download. Sometimes I can be
waiting a lifetime for OSE to download!
LinkRisk
Similar to SEMrush there is another piece of software I use throughout the lifecycle of a campaign. LinkRisk is a
platform of apps designed to help the discerning digital marketer in a number of ways.
My first port of call within LinkRisk is always the audit app. This allows me to automatically import links pointing to
a client’s site and quickly filter and weed out any potentially unnatural or spammy links.
I’m then able to compile a disavow, if needed, ready to be uploaded to the client’s Webmaster Tools account.
Before LinkRisk came to be I used to do this in Excel.
Now while excel is a powerful tool, it took an age. Hooray for LinkRisk.

16. There’s also a handy rankings app, which allows you to keep a close eye on client’s keywords across different
countries. You can set up alerts when rankings drop, gain or reach the coveted number one spot. Handy if your
client is rankings motivated.
I’m also a massive fan of the aptly named “Peek” app, which allows you to search for sites for outreach. Simply
search using buzz words around your topic and filter using the metrics or page attributes tools.
This app is just perfect for blogger outreach and more traditional PR.
Use tools to help you work smarter and save you time and money
The one thing that all these tools have in common is the ability to save you time, lots of time, hence the reason
they make it into my top three list and firmly on my bookmark bar.
Nauf Sid
AffPayDay.com
Twitter
My 3 favorite free SEO tools are – Google Keyword Planner (GKP), Open Link Profiler, SEO
Quake.
Although I have many more paid tools that I use, these tools can give beginners an edge of
their competition.
How I use them effectively:
Google Keyword Planner
Nothing new here, it’s an awesome tool we all use and know. For my keyword research phase, this is my go-to tool
even though it is built for advertisers. It can be used in a variety of ways ie. for keyword research, niche research
and advertising.
But let’s discuss its use for niche affiliate sites.
I brainstorm and enter my main keyword and note down 5-8 keywords it throws up Then I plug them all in again
one by one in GKP. Now, that I have multiple CSV files, I have thousands of keywords with low search volume that
are just waiting to be dominated.
Then I just follow the inverted pyramid model and build articles on keywords having low search volumes.
This gives me enough foothold in the SERPs to build upon.
Open Link Profiler
It’s again a free tool to find backlinks of your competition.
If you don’t have Majestic or ahrefs subscription, use this as it’s quite good for a free tool and displays good
information and has tons of filters.
SEO Quake
It’s a free toolbar available for Firefox and Chrome. SEO Quake reveals tons of info about your competition in the
SERPs and is my top tool for doing niche/competition research.
Just enable it and browse the SERPs and get a bird’s eye view of the top sites in the SERPs.
I use it in conjunction with MozBar.

17. ALERT: Get Instant Access To My Personal List Of FREE Internet Marketing Tools
Philip Kleudgen
RestaurantCoverings
Twitter
There are several free and paid tools I use for different purposes. Those who know me may
have recognized that I’m all about viral marketing, that’s why SEO isn’t my first priority.
That doesn’t mean I don’t know the value of quality on-page SEO or backlinks, I’m just not
involved in stuff like PBNs or automated link building for my main blog currently.
As far as I can tell there’s a proven structure I follow to gain new backlinks and traffic at the same time without
additional effort. That’s where the tools come into play.
WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast
This free plugin helps you to get every single aspect of on-page SEO in place with ease. I like the breadcrumb
function and also the ability to remove the “category” slug from URLs on my niche affiliate sites.
It also makes it easy to add unique meta tags in several places and disable or nofollow archive pages. There are
other options that can help to verify different analytic codes like Google or Pinterest analytics.
If you have a video site there’s a nice paid add-on available to improve visibility in the SERPs even more.
For me, this plugin is a must-have SEO tool on every site I build. If you haven’t installed it already go and check it
out.
Twitter
Because I follow a more social marketing approach my second SEO tool has to be Twitter. It’s the network I’m
most active in on a daily basis and it makes any outreach process a breeze.
I use Twitter to connect with Influencers by favoring and retweeting their tweets regularly, do advanced keyword
research and much more. You can also message people directly and 9 out of ten times get a response.
This has helped me to get hundreds of shares in no time and also backlinks from other bloggers who saw those
shares. I’ve had shares from accounts like @seosmarty or @seo, for example.
Over time, I was invited to take part in roundup posts and gained natural backlinks from mentions in other blog
articles. Definitely one of the most underutilized tools in my eyes and far more helpful than most website owners
know.
Buzzbundle
Like Matt I use Buzzbundle every week to promote new and older articles on different social platforms. It
automates a lot of my Twitter outreach too and makes my time spent a lot more efficient.
I especially love the fact that it tracks all my posts in some kind of timeline so I can see clearly what I did on any
given day. There’s a free version of this tool and you can check out Matthews tutorial or the review I have on my
site to learn more.
In summary, I want to make a point that no matter what tools you use outreach is the best way to success.
Networking is key and will get you on track faster than you ever thought possible.
Josh Tasman

18. FrugalHack.me Twitter
Building a network of backlinks is not a quick process. Well, it could be if you buy them, but
that’s not a good idea. Google’s algorithms will notice if you have a huge surge in backlinks
overnight and they’ll penalize you for it.
Never buy backlinks, instead just use these simple “tools” to improve your backlinks.
Guest blogging is one of the best ways to add backlinks to your site and improve your SEO.
Just reach out to other bloggers in your niche and ask them if you could write a guest post for them in return for a
backlink.
That helps them out, because it adds one more fresh blog post to their site and it helps you out by providing a
backlink (and likely increasing your viewership).
Get active on social media and forums.
Every forum and social media website offers you the ability to store a website or blog on your profile or in your
signature, so if you’re active more people will see those links and click them which helps Google know their valid
backlinks.
That not only helps your SEO, but it also helps you build relationships with other people in your niche.
Create custom made graphics for your site and submit them to Pinterest. Pinterest is one of the most widely
used social networks around, which can equate to lot of backlinks if you submit your graphics to it.
When I started using this strategy, my Pinterest views jumped 70% in about a week. It’s crazy how useful Pinterest
can be for generating backlinks!
If you do start creating your own graphics to use on your site, make sure they are eye catching. In other words,
make sure someone would actually want to click on it.
There’s no one size fits all when it comes to backlinks and SEO, but if you leverage the above methods, I
guarantee you’ll see results!
Nathan Thomas
IncomeBully.com
Twitter
SEMrush, Google keyword planner/Market Samurai and GSA.
I love SEMrush mostly for looking into competitor keywords to see what kind of content and
keywords are ranking, how much traffic they’re getting from it and analyzing if it is something
I can easily “steal” away from them.
Often times I will find someone ranking for a lot of keywords and topics that I never even thought to target. When I
first discovered SEMrush, It allowed me to triple my search engine traffic within 60 days just by having better
content, and on page optimization.
I like things that are easy, and when it comes to SEO, I like finding relevant, profitable traffic and ranking a site,
blog post, or article the easiest way possible. This tool allows me to do that.
Another SEO tool I can’t live without is Market Samurai, though one could argue that you can get by on just using
the Google Keyword Planner, which is true I suppose. I’m a bit biased though since Market Samurai was the first
keyword research tool I ever bought.
Easy competition analysis, expected traffic and traffic value makes it a very useful tool for me. It’s not going to help

19. you find any additional keywords than what you find in Google’s Keyword Planner, but it does automate the
process for you when analyzing some important competitive stats.
When you start out, it seems you have more time than money but once you get going you definitely have more
money than time, and that’s where the benefits of automation come to play.
To be honest, I have never been big on backlinking but have always used link pushing and tiered links as part of
my strategy for hard to rank properties.
Most of my clients are in the local SEO arena, and it’s a slightly different game, most sites can be ranked with little
to no backlinking, even in extremely large cities.
Back in the day I liked doing a bunch of link wheels and using SEnuke and while I guess the software still serves a
specific purpose, it’s hard to mention tiered links and not have GSA in the same sentence.
Combine GSA with Kontent Machine and you have quite the 1-2 combo for tier 2 properties.
I also love GSA because it’s not just for tier 2 blasting.
I’ve been able to build really great, high quality and relevant backlinks for tier 1 properties.
Mandy McEwen
ModGirlMarketing.com Twitter
1.Raven Tools – By far my favorite all-in-one tool I use almost daily. Raven Tools is well worth
the $99 a month as it provides invaluable resources for my firm, Mod Girl Marketing.
In terms of link building, Raven Tools has numerous features.
Raven is great for competitive link building research. By using Raven’s “Backlink
Explorer” function, you can run a “fresh index” of a competitor’s website URL to see what
links they have been acquiring over the last few months.
It also lets you sort by the source, citation flow, date, anchor text, nofollow, or image link. It also has a search bar
so you can type in keywords to pull up particular links.
If you want to view a URL’s historic link history, you simply check the “historic index” box.
There are lots of other tools within Raven that are helpful for link building and all around digital marketing.
For example, you can also use Raven’s “Link Manager” to monitor your links. You can turn on link monitoring to
get alerted when your links change. It also shows you screenshots of your links, which is nice for reporting.
Raven is my #1 SEO and link building tool.
2. Google Webmaster Tools – I use GWT to help with various SEO tasks including link building. By looking at the
“links to your site” tab, you can view sites that link to yours, how often they link to you, and the pages of yours that
are linked the most.
You can also view the anchor texts used to link to your site.This feature plus by looking at the “search queries” tab,
you can see how people are linking to your pages and how they are finding your pages.
Take a look at the keywords being used and make a list of ones you see as being the best “buyer keywords” and
make sure you have those included within your inbound marketing campaigns.
You can also make a list of great keywords and run them through the Google Keyword Planner and find even more
related keywords and view search volume.

20. Choose the best keywords and use them when creating your inbound marketing campaigns.
3. Ahrefs.com – For a quick, no-need-to-login analysis, Ahrefs is a great solution. I use their free account version
when I’m wanting to view various factors of a URL, and quickly. You don’t need an account to view the number of
links, URL rank, domain rank, referring domains and more.
Personally, I like Ahrefs better than Moz’s Open Site Explorer.
Mikael Uusitalo
Cubicledropout.com
Twitter
I like to keep my toolbox small and light. Meaning, I don’t need or use that many tools on a
daily basis. I rather master the complete ins and outs of a few ones than being an average of
many of them.
As of now I mostly use these ones:
Ahrefs – There is an ongoing battle between the link indexes everyone claiming to have the largest index. I on the
other hand just keep an eye of the round figure in terms of number of links and URL’s and stick with the one that
seem to perform well.
I jumped onto the Ahrefs wagon a long time and I yet to find a reason to move. I mainly use Ahrefs for two reasons,
link profiling for clients, their need and potential issues, and link building, gaining the same links as any
competitors, for both clients and my own projects.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider – Screaming Frog is the tool every SEO needs to have in their arsenal. If you are like
me, working with clients, it really is the Swiss Army Knife of on-page analysis and evaluation.
Whenever you get in on a new project or finish one up you should use Screaming Frog to verify that your on-page
is on par.
URL Profiler – With solid off-page and on-page capabilities out of the way it’s time to tie the disciplines together,
enter URL Profiler.
This tool adds another layer of data from additional services and extends my capabilities to perform link- profiling
and prospecting, outreach, and on-page analysis even further.
Some highlights:
Content wise I can import and run analysis data from Screaming Frog and apply data from different services to for
example, assess the amount of dupe or thin content through Copyscape, while at the same while comparing the
same URL’s with data from Google Analytics.
Off-page wise I have the ability to add even more link data from other link indexes, import social shares, classify
content types and topic for easy categorization and scrape contact information easily for expedited outreach.
For the anyone building a PBN there is also a set of great tools to extract valuable information on the domain you
plan to buy to verify the quality of said domains, including drop history, WHOIS and Archive.org data.
Darren DeMatas

21. IntertwineMarketing Twitter
I am always evaluating my SEO toolbox and I am constantly switching out tools as my
business evolves. It seems like every other week a new tool is launched or an established
company updates their SEO software.
This is the reason I only do monthly subscription, not annual.
Right now, I am currently using 4 tools: Ahrefs, Buzzsumo, BuzzStream and SEMRush.
All of them are “critical” to my daily workflow. Here is a breakdown of my top 3 tools, in the order that are most
important to my business.
My first go-to SEO tool is BuzzStream.
I love BuzzStream because of its flexibility and customization. You can pretty much make it do anything from a
CRM point of view. BuzzStream is a critical tool for me to scale content promotion and email outreach. At the end
of the day, it is people that create links to sites.
Building relationships with other site owners is the most important thing to my business. When you can add value
to another online business, the links will start to flow. BuzzStream is powerful, but it can be easily misused.
Don’t treat it as a link begging tool and you’ll be better off.
Buzzsumo is one of those tools that kind of popped up from nowhere and is getting a lot of traction with SEO’s
and content marketers. I use Buzzsumo for two main purposes.
The first is to help me identify sharable, linkable content by topic. This helps me create content that people will
love. As Rand pointed out, social sharing is a critical aspect of increasing reach, which can indirectly result in links.
The second purpose is to find influencers that will be interested in my content. Oftentimes, I will export influencers
from Buzzsumo into Buzzstream and then conduct outreach from there.
In most cases, people are happy to get a heads up on something I just published because they are really
interested in the topic of my content.
Every SEO needs a backlink analysis tool. None of them will be able to find every backlink on the web, but after
testing several tools, Ahrefs is my go-to. It is super easy to use and they are constantly making their product
better.
I stand behind any company that continues to innovate. I am constantly evaluating sites within my niche to see
which ones are getting links. The next step is to figure out why they are getting links and what I can do to adapt
their strategies to my websites.
Jon Dykstra
FatstacksBlog.com
Twitter
1. Google Keyword Planner
2. Ubersuggest.org
3. Hittail
My SEO focus these days is keyword selection primarily seeking out long tail keywords. I don’t actively build links.
Instead I publish plenty of content targeting long tail keywords and promote that content across each niche’s
growing social media channels.

22. This strategy has worked very, very well for me over the past year.
For example, I launched one blog in February 2014 and within 12 months, hit 180,000 monthly organic search
sessions without actively building links and publishing decent content targeting long tail keywords.
Here’s a screenshot revealing the organic search traffic for the past 30 days:
The 3 SEO tools listed above are what I currently use for keyword research. Each serves a purpose.
Ubersuggest.org is very good at helping me find new topics and very long tail keywords.
Google Keyword Planner I use to check search volume as well as to find keywords.
Hittail suggests long tail keywords based on current organic search traffic (it does a good job at finding some gems
based on existing traffic).
Ashley Faulkes
Madlemmings.com
Twitter
I think it makes sense to start at the beginning when it comes to SEO, and that is with
keywords. Without the right keyword research, the rest of your SEO is wasted.
I use a combination of Google Keyword Planner (for the basic volume and idea research)
and SEMRush for further ideas and competition research (to show me what I might have
missed).
It is not always an easy task to find keywords that you can rank for, so having multiple ways to do this helps you
reach your goal.
For example, it might be that you are in a crowded niche and untouched keywords are hard to find. But when you
look at a competitor in SEMRush you find that they rank for a term you had never even thought of.
And in many cases these words never come up in simple keyword tools. So SEMRush has helped me uncover
many hidden gems in SEO.
No SEO is complete without a link analysis tool, and I love using Majestic for a number of reasons.
They have their own metric (Trust Flow) which is one of the few ways we have of knowing how well ranked a site
could be (the other is Domain Authority from Moz). Especially since Google has not updated PageRank for so

23. long.
The other area I love is their huge backlink index. It allows you to see a website’s links in detail which is useful for
a whole bunch of reasons.
I use it to monitor anchor text ratios, which is crucial for keeping Google happy (no more over-optimizations
please) as well as exploring mine/my clients links and those of competitors.
This is also a great way of uncovering lots of new and unheard of link building opportunities.
There are also lots of other ways Majestic (and tools like it) can help you with SEO. They break down which pages
have the best links and from where.
They also show you what new links are coming into a site (so new link ideas to watch out for) as well as where you
have lost links recently. All in all, such a tool is an absolute must.
Christoph Engelhardt
It-Engelhardt
Twitter
Twitter
I’m trying to build good links to my website and that means I need to reach out and build
relations to influencers in my niche. Twitter is just ideal for that: You can enter just about any
conversation and over time build a relationship to people.
My friend Paul Shapiro has recently shown me an interesting way to target influencers, that I am currently trying
out: http://searchwilderness.com/get-followers-on-twitter/
KingSumo Giveaways
This has got to be a total outlier among the tools mentioned here. This plugin for WordPress lets you set up
giveaways very easily.
The unique thing is that the contest is very viral: When you enter the contest you get one entry in the contest and a
„lucky URL“.
Now if you share that lucky URL with your audience and other people sign up, you will get three (3!) additional
entries per sign up.
You know how in normal giveaways it’s a bad idea to tell others about the contest, because it dilutes your chances
of winning the prizes? It’s the exact opposite here!
You need to share your lucky URL with people and get them to sign up or else you stand no chance of winning.
This build in virality makes sure you get a lot of links back to your website.
My friend Josh was able to grow his email list by almost 200,000 – and get a bunch of links – just using this plugin.
Tip: Sign up to Josh’s newsletter and receive a 50% discount for the KingSumo giveaway:
http://joshuaearl.com/kingsumogiveaways/
Google Webmaster Tools
OK. At first I wanted to add my own tool to this list, but that’s lame – right? Right!
So no of this self-promotional bullshit. Instead, I’m going with the obvious answer. So obvious in fact, that it is often

24. overlooked. But if you get any meaningful traffic from Google, you absolutely need to set this up.
First of all, if Google considers your site to be „spammy“ they’ll let you know through Google Webmaster Tools.
Secondly, Webmaster Tools is the only place where Google gives you a guesstimate of your search engine
rankings. Hey… it’s something.
Lastly, there are a number of other helpful tools like submitting a sitemap or structured data viewer here, that are
well worth exploring.
Pro-Tip: If your site runs on HTTPS, set it up accordingly in GWT. Believe me, it’s easy to get this wrong when you
are too hasty…
Dustin Woodard
DustinWoodard Twitter
I’ve been exposed to a lot of tools during my 17-year career in SEO.
Before I share my 3 must-have tools, I’d like to mention that my least favorite tools are page-
grading tools that try to dumb down SEO by assigning a score to pages on your site &
providing “fixes”.
If you are relying on tools like this to drive your SEO efforts, you are likely operating at an
amateur level.
Here are 3 critical tools for my SEO consulting business:
1) Google Webmaster Tools – Nearly a decade ago, Google brought me in for user testing on GWT and there
wasn’t much reason to use it. That has changed dramatically.
Whether I’m studying crawling issues, duplicate content issues, keyword data, internal or external link data, or
search impressions, having access to my client’s Google Webmaster Tools is critical.
2) Basecamp – communication is key for most consulting arrangements. I give my clients free reign to ask me
questions anytime they want as often as they like.
Basecamp allows me to communicate with individuals or with a group in a much more reliable manner then email.
We can share files, assign to-dos, and keep track of our evolving strategies and conversations.
3) Crawling tools – It’s is very valuable to crawl sites like search engines do. For heavy-duty crawling, I prefer to
use Screaming Frog.
If your crawling needs are a little lighter or the interface is too daunting, Moz’s crawler might fit your needs.
I’m always on the look out for improper redirects, dynamic URL issues, poorly optimized title tags or meta
descriptions, coding mistakes, and crawling issues.
No tool or platform is a replacement for SEO expertise. There is much more to SEO then a narrow focus on
technical aspects.
Knowing what to do with the information tools provide, plus digging into aspects a tool could never provide, is what
separates highly successful SEO results from mediocre results.
Dom Wells

25. HumanProofDesigns
Twitter
I use loads of different tools, but knowing which 3 are critical is tricky. Sometimes we use
tools only for a short time, like once a month, but the work it does is essential.
Other tools I might use on a daily basis, but I could probably make do without.
So based on a mixture of the importance that they play in my website/business’s success,
and the frequency that I use them, here are my 3 most critical tools.
1.) WordPress.
Don’t laugh! WordPress is essential to my SEO needs. A lot of people don’t realize just how much easier SEO is
when your sites are built on WordPress. There are some basic mechanics and coding practices that you don’t
even have to pay attention to thanks to WP.
Matt Cutts said years ago how much of an advantage WordPress gives you, and I couldn’t agree more.
You can type up a post, fill out a few boxes and the title, hit publish, and Google will be able to find your post, read
it, and know what it’s about pretty much right off the bat.
I don’t think I’d know where to start with meta titles and things like that if I was building a site in HTML.
2.) A Keyword Tool.
No one tool is necessarily more critical than the other. I’ve used multiple over the years to great success. I
currently swear-by Long-Tail Pro, but Market Samurai and others are fine too. What’s critical is that there is SOME
keyword research being done.
People will tell you that keywords are or aren’t everything (depending on how they do things), but when it comes to
SEO, I don’t know how you can do it without at least a foundation built on keywords.
Even if you’re writing the posts first and then finding a keyword that fits, you’ll still be getting a lot more traffic and
better SEO results when using a well researched keyword.
On a personal business note, since I sell ready-made and custom-built niche websites, I wouldn’t get very far if I
didn’t have a good keyword tool!
3.) Open Site Explorer.
As the first two tools I’ve listed are SEO based, I’ve picked out a link building tool for the final one. Out of all the
link checking tools, OSE is the one I use the most. Majestic and AHRefs are for deeper analysis, but I find I’m
always going to OSE first.
Whether I’m checking out a competitor’s link profile, investigating an expired domain, preparing a skyscraper post,
or whatever the need, I probably use Moz’s tool on a daily basis.
Plus, if you rearrange the letters of OSE, you can get SEO, which is always a good sign.
Joking aside, no real link building campaign will get very far without at least one visit to OSE per day, which is why
it makes my list.
Sante J. Achille

26. Blog.Achille.Name Twitter
Link building is a mix between art and science, a hybrid activity, difficult to immagine and
conceive at the very outset with an unpredictable outcome.
The paradigm shifts in Search Engine technology have profoundly changed the way links are
perceived amongst the more illuminated search professionals: a signal of trust and
cooperation, a source of quality traffic of a trusted source as opposed to a beam of energy to
boost rankings.
With billions of pages and trillions of links on the web, finding an answer to the question which SEO/Link Building
Tools are critical to your businesses success & how do you best use them is complex to say the least.
Software tools are only as good as the hand (and the head) of the user: experience, good judgement and
painstaking work are the ingredients to success. The SEO world is a colorful arena populated with an ever
increasing array of tools with slick interfaces offering tons of data leaving us with the arduous task of interpretation.
I am not a software tool freak, there are less than a handful of tools in my SEO Tool bag and there are many
reasons for that – maybe we can address this in another Q&A.
Now to what I use for Link Building in my SEO Efforts. Majestic, the Marketing Search Engine and SEO Backlink
Checker.
Majestic is your best bet to reaching a qualified Clique of websites for you to quickly identify and evaluate as
potential link building prospects.
A completely independent platform of tools built to fit the needs of professionals in a number of fields (not only
SEO), Majestic offers 3 key elements to SEOs and professionals in Search Advertising and Social Media:
– Trust Flow
– Citation Flow
– Topical Trust Flow
Start your link building efforts by creating a short list of 10 neighboring categories. With the Majestic Search
Explorer you can research and create a list of quality websites. Each website can be analysed and ranked in light
of their Trust Flow, Citation Flow and Topical Trust Flow, down to page level.
Sounds complicated? It’s not “Trust” me
More info at www.majestic.com
Tommy Landry
ReturnonNow.com
Twitter
As an SEO by trade, I’ve used a number of SEO tools in the past. Most of them are focused
on analysis and interpretation.
While I’ve tested true “link building” tools like GSA Search Engine Ranker and others, those
methods come with too much risk.
Along that line of thinking, let’s focus on the key tools I find myself turning to most frequently.
Bing and Google Webmaster Tools
When I first started out consulting for search engine optimization, my business was bootstrapped very tightly.

27. We didn’t have the money to invest in monthly SaaS fees for analysis tools. Instead, we made up for it by leaning
on the search engines themselves by way of their standard webmaster tools offering.
These tools cover most of what you need for the basics, from on-page audits to link analysis to page load time and
crawl errors. Sure, it takes some work to extract the information you need and format it for presentation, but it was
worth it for the rock bottom price of free.
Raven Internet Marketing Tools
Once the business reached a decent run rate, I immediately adopted Raven for all members of my SEO team.
Raven connects to Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools to pull in all of the data available in those
platforms.
But even better, Raven can API over to your social media accounts, your blog, Majestic (for link analysis), Moz (for
standard metrics like MozRank and Citation Flow), and quality keyword research platforms.
For a $249 monthly investment, you get access to a wealth of information that saves a great deal of time an effort
as compared to manually assembling data from the various platforms they partner with.
Market Samurai
I originally adopted Market Samurai on behalf of an employer several years ago, and it remains one of the best
tools in my arsenal.
Although my primary uses for Samurai are keyword research and SERP competitive analysis, they also provide
features for rank tracking, content publishing, and promotion.
For a one-time license that lasts in perpetuity, Samurai is one of the better values among the SEO Tools on the
market.
Pavlos Giorkas
ClixsenseSuccess Twitter
The first tool – if I can call it a tool – for me is fiverr.com
You can find many vendors there who use top quality methods to produce quality PR 8 & PR
9 links manually for 5 bucks only.
No hassle, time-saving method. I produce links through this method to the different blogs I
operate once per month. This way I get to look more ”natural” to Google’s eyes.
Since I stated using this ”tool” I’ve seen my content to overthrow other top 10 place holders many times.
The second tool I use is SEMRush.
With SemRush I am able to monitor my competitors and actually understand where do they get their backlinks
from, what websites connect with them, from which keywords they receive their traffic from and a ton of other
features that help me understand my competitors better.
Competition is a good thing. It makes you want to become better and better. That is why I always choose 2 – 3
competitors from the niche I operate in, (that have slightly better stats than mine) and I try to become better than
them.
Sometimes I am not able to achieve it but the adrenaline generated and the increase you bring to your websites
stats, simply worth every minute you spend.
The third tool is called Long Tail Pro. Long tail pro was build by Spencer Haws – an SEO Professional – who made
a lot of money through niche sites.
This tool is essential for my online niche website building business because It let me choose which niche to

28. ”invest” my time,with – literally – lightning speed and hellish accuracy.
Apart from that, Long Tail Pro has a number of other features that make my life a lot easier that simply I will not
going to analyze here. Just remember that speed is a better motivator that anything else around you.
Jonathan Tavarez
JonTavarez.com
Twitter
Majestic SEO – With this tool, we’re able to keep an eye on our link building progress as well
as that of competitors.
This tool and those like it are essential in getting an idea of what Google is indexing as a link
and the power behind that link.
I can easily compare the top competitors, their backlink profiles, identify link opportunities, and more. An
alternative to this is Ahrefs which some people prefer. I tend to use both whenever possible for two reference
points.
Screaming Frog – It is common knowledge that SEO is a combination of on-page optimization (context, topic,
performance) and off-page optimization (link building, citations, mentions, social).
This tool is perfect for on-page SEO which can be done manually, but who wants to do that?
If you have a decent sized site, nothing beats that speed of Screaming Frog. With this software, we’re able to spot
any red flags in the fastest amount of time. Time saved is money earned!
Scrapebox – This tool has stood the test of time. If I ever need to scrape Google for possible link building
opportunities or content creation ideas, Scrapebox delivers. It’s best to use private proxies for higher success
rates.
Several other good reasons to use this tool is for an additional source of competitive analysis, local seo citations
building, and even market research.
Competitive analysis can be done with the Backlink Checker add-on. You simply load the sites you want to pull
backlinks from and WAH LAH!
Do you do local SEO? Well, with Scrapebox you can find your competitors citation sources with little to no effort.
Just add their NAP and harvest!
Probably the most underrated reason to use Scrapebox is market research. You can easily find
communities/websites where your topic is being discussed for either an opportunity to A) Chime in and/or B)
Connect with influencers.
Gerald Weber
Stdcheck.com
Twitter
The 3 link building tools that are critical to success as it applies to link building are SEMRush,
Majestic SEO and Moz.
While there are many different applications for SEMRush the specific way I use this as it
applies to link building is to identify organic search traffic trends of a particular domain.
While metrics like Domain Authority and Majestic’s metrics such as trust and citation flow can give you some idea
as to the authority/quality of a domain, SEMRush can tell a story that isn’t always apparent with other metrics.

29. The idea here is if you see a sharp delcine or a complete drop off of organic search traffic then it’s probably a safe
bet that the domain has fallen out of favor with Big G and therefore a link from that web property is not likely to
help you very much regardless of other domain metrics.
Next up is Majestic SEO. With the death of PageRank as we know it trust and authority metrics are more important
than ever before. This brings us to one of the common reason I use Majestic SEO for trust and citation flow
metrics.
These two metrics are both great metrics I use when sizing up links targets. I also use Majestic SEO to do
competitive backlink analysis and also to take a look at the backlink profiles of prospective link targets.
Lastly but certainly not least on the list is Moz. I most frequently use Moz for domain authority and page authority
metrics when Identifying links targets. lastly I use Moz’s open site explorer to do competitive backlinks analysis.”
Wrapping It Up
So there you have it – the experts have spoken!
Here are the top tools as recommended by the experts above ranked by order of votes-
The Best SEO/Link Building Tools (as voted by 29 experts!)
1. SEMRush – 8 votes
2. Google Webmaster Tools – 7 votes
3. Majestic SEO – 7 votes
Other mentions:
Screaming Frog SEO Spider – 6 votes
Google Keyword Planner – 5 votes
Ahrefs – 4 votes
Market Samurai – 3 votes
URL Profiler – 3 votes
What are your favourite SEO & link building tools? Let me know below in the comments!