I’m going to let you in on a little secret about link building: You don’t need to use premium tools to get high-quality backlinks.

What you’re really paying for with premium SEO tools is better data research and increased productivity.

But premium tools are useless if you don’t know how to research for low-hanging fruit keywords or conduct competitor research to help you find potential backlink opportunities, among other things.

Therefore, the success of your link building campaign has to do more with skill instead of the tools you’re using.

That’s why free link building tools are great options to start you off on the path to better backlinks.

With the right skills in place, you can produce results comparable to premium link building tools without having to shell out hundreds of dollars every month.

Then, once you’ve used up all the tools available and the data isn’t enough, only then will you need to move on to paid tools for your link building efforts.

To help you get started with your link building campaign, these are seven free link building tools that you can use first.

These will help you maximize your costs and get the most out of your skills.

7 Free Link Building Tools to Help You Achieve Premium Results

Ubersuggest

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Keyword research is at the very heart of your link building strategy.

To generate better results from your campaign, you need to zero in on keywords that you want to rank for in Google Search. It’ll determine how you’ll create optimized content or determine anchor text variations.

However, the problem with keyword research using free tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, is that you can no longer see the exact search volume. It only shows you a search volume range that the keyword falls under.

While Google has every right to tweak its tool according to what they deem fit for it, you need to find an alternative tool that’ll yield better data regarding a keyword’s search volume.

Ubersuggest is shaping up to be that tool.

The tool was recently purchased by Neil Patel, who turned the tool into a Google Keyword Planner killer.

Instead of the range, you can see an estimated figure for the search volume. You no longer have to make the mistake of optimizing your content for a keyword that doesn’t attract lots of searches.

With Ubersuggest, you can make better-informed decisions for your SEO campaign as to which keywords to optimize for.

Monitor Backlinks Free Backlink Checker

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Checking the link profile of your site or your competitor’s is an important step in your link building campaign.

On the one hand, it helps you establish the current links your site has. From there, you can identify which backlinks you should watch over and maintain over time.

On the other, it reveals to you backlinks of sites similar to yours. You can then find backlinks that you can copy and get an idea of their link building strategy.

In-depth backlink research is usually reserved for premium tools. There aren’t any free tools that’ll uncover backlinks as thoroughly as paid tools. However, the Monitor Backlinks Free Backlink Checker comes pretty close.

The tool will help not only uncover a maximum of 300 backlinks (one link per domain), but also reveal relevant SEO metrics to determine which backlinks are the best and most worthwhile.

This feature makes it easier for you to organize the links and target which ones to get for yourself from your competitors.

The only caveat with this tool is that backlink searches are limited to once a week. If you want to search for a site’s link profile at will, you need to sign up for a paid subscription of Monitor Backlinks to run on-demand backlink checks.

Drop My Link

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One of the most invaluable free link building tools available to you is Google Search, no question. Everyone uses Google to find answers to their questions, and if you use the right search operators, you can find super-specific queries and new backlink opportunities.

But knowing which search operators to use can be difficult, given the multiple operators that can be used. Instead of manually figuring out the right combinations, you can use Drop My Link to make your life easier.

Upon creating an account, enter your keyword or niche to find sites where you can build links.

Choose a category from the drop-down list of the type of backlink you’re looking for. The options include:

• Blog platforms
• Comment backlinks
• Forum backlinks
• Guest posts
• Link roundups
• Resource pages
• Sponsor/donation links

After choosing the category, you can set up the Footprint to determine which search operator to enter on Google Search.

Then, hit the “Search” button. The tool will redirect you to Google Search with the results of the query.

From here, it’s up to you to find a way to get backlinks from the pages. For example, for comment backlinks, you can go to one of the pages from the result and leave a comment with a link to your site.

SEOQuake

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Running a quick quality audit of a site page or SERP is made accessible using SEOQuake.

It’s a Google Chrome extension that’ll give you a comprehensive overview of site pages based on different SEO metrics. You can see errors and issues that your site needs to improve on.

However, the best use for SEOQuake is to extract SERPs data using the same metrics, to determine the best link building sources at a glance, without having to dig into each website.

With the tool installed, go to Google and search for your keyword. Once on the SERPs, SEOQuake will do its magic to supply the data of each parameter for the results.

You can use a different view of the SERPs so you can view the results from ascending to descending order, depending on which parameter you chose.

Most of the results are drawn from SEMrush. In fact, you can get more juice from SEOQuake if you have a paid subscription of SEMrush.

Nonetheless, the tool is good enough as it stands to determine a site page’s quality based on the different available parameters. You can even extract the data in a CSV file if you need to dig a little deeper.

FindThatLead

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Blogger outreach is all the rage nowadays. It’s a great way to build relationships with influencers and get a link back to your site in the process.

To pull this off, you need to develop great content to use as link bait for influencers who you’re planning to reach out to. Then, you just need an email address to send outreach mail and follow-ups to people.

To send them the email, however, you need to find out their email address.

One option is to go to their site and find the contact form to fill out. However, it’ll be much more convenient for you to find their email addresses instead so you can send everything via email and keep better track of your outreach efforts.

To help you find those email addresses, FindThatLead lets you search for ten emails a day (a total of 300 a month). Upon searching for the email, the tool will verify if the email address is correct or not.

You can install the Chrome extension after signing up for a free account. Whenever you visit the website of an influencer that you want to reach out to, click on the FTL button on your browser to see the email addresses of the people on the site.

Check My Links

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If you’re into the broken link building strategy, then you need a free tool that’ll let you find broken links within a page. Check My Links is that tool—it’s a Chrome extension that’ll analyze the links on a page and determine if they’re broken or not.

The best way to use this tool is by searching for broken links on pages that you want to build links to, like resource pages. Click on the Check My Links icon from your browser to unveil the status of each link on the page.

If it has broken links, you can email the site owner informing them of the broken links that they should replace or remove. You can then suggest that your relevant page be linked to instead, if they’re interested.

Streak

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For your blogger outreach campaign, you’re probably using Gmail to keep costs low. While manually sending emails and follow-ups to influencers is nerve-wracking, it’s doable nonetheless, especially if you’re not sending emails to over hundreds of people.

However, once you exceed hundreds of people in your outreach campaign, keeping track of the progress of each will be difficult.

Instead of referring to a separate spreadsheet for the status report of each influencer, you can use Streak to help manage your contacts much easier.

It’s another Chrome extension that primarily works as a CRM. But it works like a charm as a blogger outreach tool as well.

You can label the recipient and add them to your deal flow, so you know who to reach out to and which ones you’ve already closed. The tool also lets you snooze messages and create reminders for emails that you need to follow up on or reply to.

Conclusion

The free link building tools featured above should help you shore up your link building strategy before using premium tools.

I mean, if free tools are good enough to help you find opportunities to your site, then you might as well go for it!

Also, link building is never about using the most expensive tools and unearthing the most data.

It’s about turning your research into actionable items that’ll help you generate more backlinks to your site.

The free link building tools above will help you develop your skill for building backlinks.

By getting acquainted with these tools, you train yourself to make the most out of the information provided to you.

That, in itself, is the best quality that every link builder could have.