8 of the Best Tools for Tracking Inbound Links
Jun 05, 2019
Written by Casey Bjorkdahl
Casey Bjorkdahl is one of the pioneering thought leaders in the SEO community. In 2010, Casey co-founded Vazoola after working for a Digital Marketing Agency for five years in New York City. Vazoola is now one of the fastest growing and most widely recognized SEO marketing firms in the country.
If you're looking for ways to improve your marketing results, you need to understand where your inbound links get the most traction.
Luckily, there are a lot of tools for that. The best one for you might depend on your business model or approach. But there are some definite contenders for the top tool regardless of your industry niche.
Keep reading to learn more about what today's top SEO backlink checker tools can bring your business.
1. Ahrefs
This tool has a vast database, with trillions of links indexed across billions of pages. 65,000 dedicated CPU cores process results so you can get answers to your questions in real time. This allows you to fine-tune your approach like never before.
Also, the enormous database size and the ability to look at organic search scores for your competitors help you to better target keywords.
The providers of the service also cultivate an atmosphere of learning for the DIY marketing efforts of small businesses.
With the 24/5 customer service line and the dedicated social media communities, this service provides a robust solution.
2. Majestic SEO
The most significant advantage this tool has is that it's free to use. You get a reliable service for that price considering Majestic SEO uses its own web crawlers to build its backlink reports.
It also offers a variety of other tools for webmasters to help optimize the performance of your pages and your client sites.
All those tools get more powerful when you commit to a paid subscription.
This makes it easy to upgrade, so you only start paying when you are ready to use the extra tools effectively.
3. Google Search Console
It's a great idea to use this tool alongside one or more of the other tools listed. It's free to access if you're already using Google Analytics.
In addition, the information is directly from the source, using the search giant's own data.
This makes it a powerful reality check against other results. And a third tool allows you to triangulate better the error rate you see to increase the accuracy of your projections. The one big drawback is that you can only look at your own sites.
4. Rank Signals
This is another free tool, but you do have to create an account to use it. In addition to inbound links on your pages, it also offers a variety of additional data when you pull up page research.
This lets you get a better look at competitors, including their social media following size, Alexa page ranking, and daily traffic numbers.
Those results aren't available on some of the other tools, so this can be a good one to pair up with another essential service or two.
5. Kerboo
This tool offers a lot of value. It's not the one you should grab as a stand-alone resource or anything like that. But its unique data set allows you to get insights you won't get from other resources.
Maybe you don't need it, but most professionals would kill to be able to look at:
- How the addition or subtraction of links affects pages
- Which links are most effective in real time
- And monitor how the addition of individual inbound links changes the overall traffic pattern for a page.
Kerboo provides unique and valuable insights.
6. SEMrush
This is a powerful tool for viewing competitor sites. It also enables you to compare how the backlink quantity and placement is working for many of the other businesses competing for your customers.
That insight gives you the tools needed to go for their market share, but it doesn't come free. You will need to pay for a subscription to get more than a few trial searches.
However, because there are a few free searches available, you should check it out before deciding to purchase it.
7. Open Site Explorer
This tool comes from Moz, a significant player in the search optimization and online marketing field.
It has a robust set of free tools that include backlinks, page authority, and spam rankings. But to be able to unlock its potential, you need a paid subscription.
Then you get extras like the ability to track pages over time, direct comparisons, and more.
8. Backlink Watch
A reliable service with all the necessary information, the significant innovation here is the ability to sort links by dofollow and nofollow status. That's worth a look to many marketers.
Choosing the right tools means understanding your current goals. Don't be afraid to check out a few options.