Over the past few years, so much of SEO has changed. But one thing left untouched is the power of quality and natural backlinks.
Old school SEO was about backlink quantity, but now we’re in a place where it’s more about the quality and relevance.
One key to successful online business is to always monitor backlinks of your website – and competitors’ sites too. You need to know your competitor’s SEO strategy – traffic resources, keywords, and referring domains.
I can say that there are lots of premium tools for long-time pros, like SEMrush and Majestic. But for beginners, these link analysis tools have what you need and come at a cheaper price. If you’re an SEO newbie with a limited budget, try these tools to monitor backlinks.
Table of Contents:
- SE Ranking
- Sitechecker
- RankActive
- Ahrefs
- Coupler.io
- OpenLinkProfiler
- RankSignals
- BuzzSumo
- Monitor Backlinks
- Mention
1. SE Ranking
SE Ranking is one of my favorite backlink checkers that allows you to check incoming links to your website based on Google Webmaster Tools data. It’s a paid tool (starting at $9 / month) and also includes website audit, rank tracking, keyword research, and competitor rank tracking.
You can generate a detailed link analysis for the following parameters: index / noindex, follow / nofollow, cached / not cached, date discovered, Moz Domain Authority, anchor text, anchor text, Alexa rank, Ahrefs rank, social popularity and more.
From there, you can disavow links and generate a file to submit to Google Webmaster Tools.
2. Sitechecker
Sitechecker is a great backlink tracker for SEO and marketing managers to track and analyze your backlink profile for your website. The tool enables you to keep track of all your backlinks, get notified once any of them will be lost, and will bring them back to life.
With its easy reports, you can evaluate your link-building strategy and do the best to increase its efficiency. You can reveal the most used anchors by other websites that lead to your website. Moreover, you can check out which landing pages have the most links and figure out how these links affect your website traffic.
3. RankActive
RankActive is a pretty new tool available on the market that helps you discover backlinks in live mode. The tool has a huge in-house backlinks database, and graphs and tables will show which links are good for your SEO and which ones don’t work. The tool provides not only the full list of backlinks with detailed metrics for each one but also shows all lost and gained links.
RankActive enables you to track your competitors’ backlinks to learn more from your competitor’s strategy and improve your SEO campaign. All the data provided by RankActive is available in Excel format. Moreover, you can get your backlink report on your email scheduled and monitor your progress on time.
4. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools to monitor website backlinks. It has a free version where you can monitor 10 backlinks and 2 domains per request. The paid versions start at $99 per month for a complete analysis of the backlink profile: dofollow/nofollow, anchor text, image backlinks, etc.
If you ever get a penalty from Google, it will be a lifesaving tool, giving you an exact percentage of anchor text on your site. Ahrefs’ crawler is currently the only one to detect backlinks in JavaScript besides traditional HTML. It also crawls 4.1 million pages per minute, meaning you’ll be able to see new, broken, and lost backlinks very quickly.
“Ahrefs is the second most active web crawler after Google and they have the best backlink database in the industry,” said David Munoz from Mission Legal Center. “And this is the only tool that does such an awesome job at everything the tools have to offer like keyword research, site explorer, website audit, and many more.”
Thanks to the addition of “link loss” reasons (e.g., 404, noindex, 301, etc.), there’s no need to guess why some backlinks dropped out of your site. Besides analyzing anchor texts, you can also avoid penalties by disavowing suspicious links from the Ahrefs’ dashboard.
5. Coupler.io
Coupler.io is an unusual tool that helps you monitor your backlinks. It doesn’t work as a standard backlink monitoring tool but it allows you to consolidate all your links from all your business units. This tool is perfect for small businesses and freelancers.The best thing about it is the ability to store and organize all your data in one place that you can review later on. You can directly import links to Google Sheets using Coupler.io or automate the data transfer by setting up a schedule. To visualize your data, you can even create bar graphs, pie charts, and Venn diagrams.
6. OpenLinkProfiler
OpenLinkProfiler is a great tool that provides up to 200,000 links per report. It has a large and fresh database of links and shows which links are active in the last 90 days.
The free version allows exporting up to 100 backlinks in .csv format. If you want to export more, you can use the paid version. The tool also provides the nature of the linking website and the category of each link. You’ll get the overall idea of backlink influence, anchor page, link date, and more. This information will help you get an overview of the links that lead to your website.
7. RankSignals
RankSignals is another free tool that helps you find competitor’s backlinks and traffic sources to build up your link-building strategy. Using this tool, you can get a number of dofollow and nofollow links and a number of unique domains leading to your site.
It shows not only the PR of the site and the link anchor text but other parameters like PageRank, Alexa Rank, social signals, and unique backlinks. Find out all bad, spammy links and have the option to disavow them.
8. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is one of the most popular backlink checkers that helps you track the backlinks of your website and your competitors. The tool allows you to monitor not only keywords and domain names, but also see the highest-ranking pages and see who is pointing to these pages.Using this tool, you will get notifications about new links and build good relationships with those new sites. “The tool is perfect for getting organic growth with quality backlinks,” says Saitej Makhijani from SendX.io. “This insight allows you to optimize your marketing strategy to generate more links for pages that don’t perform well.
9. Monitor Backlinks
Monitor Backlinks is one of the most popular and recent SEO tools to track link profiles. You can check out up to 10 results without registering. If you want to get more results, the paid tool starts at $25. The tool provides the overview of a domain, SEO metrics, keyword rankings, anchor text reports, and lets you disavow low-quality links.
Monitor Backlinks provides a detailed analysis of each link and domain and quickly reports it to Google Webmaster Tools to disavow links if required. You can also monitor all mentions about your brand that you meet across the web.
“Monitor Backlinks is a great tool for small businesses to detect spammy backlinks and prevent from the Google penalty,” says Gregg Hollander from Hollander Law Firm. “It allows SEO specialists to locate good backlinks that they don’t know about which can generate a lot of traffic.”
10. Mention
Link reclamation is about finding people who have mentioned you without linking to you. Once you’ve found them, you can reach out and ask them to include a link back to your site.
SEO expert Matthew Barby shares his link reclamation process using Mention that complements your backlink strategy:
- Step 1: monitor brand mentions. Set up alerts by adding keywords related to your brand or products.
- Step 2: set up notifications or daily email alerts. Check your mentions daily or as they happen.
- Step 3: checking for links. Out of all your mentions, find articles that mentioned but didn’t link to you. These are the opportunities you want.
- Step 4: reach out. Contact the author to request a link for the mention. In Matthew’s experience, the success rate is higher if the post is recent. This is why real-time monitoring helps heaps.
Wantmore ways to monitor backlinks? Download our free cheat sheet for 5 ways to spice up your SEO strategy with media monitoring.
Over to you
Performing SEO tasks, you should always keep your eye on links, keywords, audit info, positions, and more for your own company and competitors. Experiment with adding some of the tools above to your SEO stack to get an overall picture of important backlink profiles.
