Off-page SEO can be a chore for some. Link building isn’t easy in the modern age of SEO and with so many signals, techniques and prospects out there, it can be hard to know where to start.
Luckily, there is a whole arsenal of tools at our disposal – both paid and free – that you can use to make your life easier in all these areas. Not only can these tools speed up some of the more long-winded processes that come with the territory, but they can also increase the scale of your strategies and improve success rates.
In this article, we’ve got an up-to-date list of the best tools available in 2020 for off-page SEO. Here’s a quick preview of which tools we’ll be looking at today:
The more advanced tools on that list are paid but there are plenty of free tools in there, too, for specific off-page SEO and productivity tasks. So let’s get started.
Price: Free
I know it seems really obvious to include Google here, but so often we see curated SEO tool lists that omit it, so for the sake of being pretentiously obvious, it makes an appearance.
Google indexes the entire web. Translation: Google has a list of every place you could potentially ever want to get your site linked!
When you’re looking for off-page SEO opportunities (eg: the best SEO blogs to get juicy backlinks from), it makes sense to get this list directly from the source by searching for “seo blogs,” “seo news” and other related queries into Google Search.
Price: Ahref prices start from $99/month (you’ll be charged in USD)
Backlinks make the web go round in terms of traffic, for both referrals and search visibility. Therefore, analysing and keeping track of this data is key on both your own and your competitors’ websites. All three of these tools work hard to crawl the web and keep an extensive index of backlink data.
You can also use these tools to unearth new link opportunities relevant to your industry. Some also offer additional analysis features, such as Majestic’s Clique Hunter tool, which can make this process much faster.
Linkclump is a Chrome extension that can highlight multiple links at once on a page and then serve an action for those links, whether it be copying them to paste into a spreadsheet or opening them in multiple tabs.
This may not sound like a lot, but if you’ve ever had to copy or click a huge list of links one by one, you’ll know it’s one of the most tedious things on earth. This will not only save you time and effort when doing your job, but a tiny fraction of your sanity too.
Check my Links is my go-to tool when carrying out broken link checking on external sites.
Found a resource list you’d quite like to get your content cited on? A broken link check on said page which identifies some issues means you A) have a helpful reason to contact the webmaster to begin with, and B) have given the webmaster a reason to edit the site, thus increasing your chances of gaining a backlink.
You can then also use Linkclump to copy and paste all the broken links you find into your outreach email, too.
Web Archive is exactly what it says on the tin – a historic index of pages and sites across the web.
As for using this for off-page SEO, it can be incredibly useful when you find broken links with Check My Links. When you find a link to a 404 page, the chances are that there was once good content on it and other sites will be linking to it too.
You can use Web Archive to find out what this content was, recreate (and improve) it, and then outreach to other sites requesting they update the broken link back to the updated resource.
Talkwalker Alerts is an alternative to Google Alerts that simply works better.
Don’t ask me why, but for some reason around 2013, Google Alerts broke, and although it’s been “fixed” since then, it hasn’t been updated to meet the needs of modern SEO. Talkwalker’s offering delivers either immediate, daily or weekly alerts when it finds whichever search term you are following on the web.
These alerts are useful for no end of things; tracking brand mentions, tracking competitor mentions, unearthing new off-page opportunities via footprints and much MUCH more.
There are numerous plugins you can get for your browser that give you separate metrics on the web page you are browsing, however SEOquake has most of what you need under one roof, including page rank, domain age, Cache date, social shares and more.
SEOquake also works in SERPs, allowing you to see metrics of every website from a single page and has a handy option that highlights nofollow links with a strikethrough.
Price: Free version available, paid version £149 per year
Screaming Frog is mainly praised for being an excellent, on-site SEO tool, however, once you understand the ins and outs of the software you’re sure to find uses for off-page SEO too.
A personal favourite use of mine is for brand mention link reclamation by using Screaming Frog to crawl the complete list of pages I have found and using a custom filter to see if there is a hyperlink back to said brand’s website or not in the HTML. This can save hours (or even days!) over manually checking each mention.
Price: Prices start from $24 per month
For outreach management, there are very few rivals to the online software platform Buzzstream. Divided into two key areas, Buzzstream is a tool for managing A) link building and B) PR and social media.
What they say: “Media fragmentation has resulted in millions of micro-influencers having conversations about products and services across the social web. Building and effectively managing relationships with these influencers is the key to getting found by customers.”
Due to the evolution of search engines and the introduction of social media, people have fundamentally changed the way they shop and learn about products. What does BuzzStream do? The aim is to bring order to the chaos of developing authentic relationships with word-of-mouth influencers across the social web.
Whether you are new to link building or an experienced ‘outreach-er’, you’ll understand the power of management and organisation in this department. Staying on top of things can become overwhelming and this quirky platform will keep you on top of opportunity.
Price: Free version available, paid versions start from $49/month per user
Streak for Gmail is exactly what it says on the tin – customer relationship management for your inbox.
Not only does it have a pretty interface that is very intuitive to use, but it’s fantastic for managing your outreach process from “Hello, how are you?” to “Thanks for the link!”
This means no prospect currently in the outreach pipeline gets lost or forgotten. You can also add useful notes to emails for both current and future reference.
If you can’t afford to splash out a few bucks on BuzzStream, consider this as the alternative.
The first line on Niels Bosma’s page for SEOTools for Excel is “Real SEOs work in Excel.” We can’t argue with that statement, and we also can’t argue with just how useful his brainchild is either.
SEOTools for Excel can import a whole wealth of data into your spreadsheets, for both on-site and off-page SEO purposes. Not only can you access page rank and social shares, but it makes good use of Majestic’s API too.
One of my favourite uses for this tool is sorting prospect lists by their authority and signals, thus meaning I can prioritise them in terms of importance and benefit.
Price: Free tools available, prices for full paid version start from $99.95 per month
SEMRush has a lot of data, which can be useful for everything from penalty analysis to backlink audits. A great all-rounder.
Price: Starting from £249 per month
Kerboo is a tool developed by hands-on SEOs for hands-on SEOs, which gives it a very competitive edge for a wealth of activities, from discovering and disavowing links to ongoing monitoring and reporting.
The feature particularly of interest for off-page SEO is the “Peek” function. By simply adding relevant keywords relating to a site’s industry or subject matter, Kerboo will go off and do the prospecting for you. Not only will it discover potential sites for outreach, but it can sort these by SEO value and authority, as well as harvest contact and social channel information.
Kerboo’s most impressive aspect we felt was their email search. Going a few steps beyond the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Kerboo brings back all that information and then some!
A great example of how you could use this feature is that it can track down almost everywhere online a person is writing and contributing content using their email address, thus opening up a wealth of further link building opportunities.
Price: Starting from €100/mo per user
Contentbird is a tool that serves as an all-round hub of information and data tracking for SEOs, however I feel it favours link building primarily.
Almost every step of the link building process is incorporated into Contentbird from start to finish. First, it has a link prospecting tool that goes off and does the bulk of the hard work for you. From there you can then send outreach from within the tool itself and track this outreach from pending to success. The outreach feature also allows you to save templates and pull in information about the person/site you are contacting automatically, so every email is easily customised for the recipient.
Second, Contentbird doesn’t stop working once a link has been built; your entire backlink profile is monitored and checked regularly, meaning no removed or lost link will go under your radar.
Contentbird also offers an alert service to track your most important business phrases around the web, be it your own brand, competitor mentions or those discussing subjects relevant to your industry.
However, by far my favourite feature is how easily you can create and tag almost anything, be it contacts or stages in the outreach process. Not all agencies and marketers follow the same process for outreach, so being able to tweak this to your own style of working is a massive bonus.
Of course, we can’t write an article like this without mentioning our own prescriptive marketing platform, Apollo Insights. Much more than just a link-building too, Apollo collates every piece of data available about your website from lots of the tools mentioned above, analyses it and identifies any threats and opportunities in your search marketing campaigns. It’s what sets us apart from other SEO agencies and why we’re able to give our customers the edge in their industries.
Check out how Apollo can help prevent link penalties
If you’d like advice from our SEO experts, call us today on 02392 830281. In the meantime, you might find these other SEO-related articles useful:
Google’s mobile-first indexing: what you need to know in 2020
SEO tactics for discontinued products
3 ways to bridge the gap between SEO and PPC
Lee has been working in the online arena, leading digital departments since the early 2000s, and oversees all our delivery services at Vertical Leap, having joined back in 2010. Lee joined our company Operations Team in May 2019. Before working at Vertical Leap, Lee completed a degree in Business Management & Communications at Winchester University, headed up the online development and direct marketing department for an international financial services company for ~7 years, and set up/run a limited company providing website design, development and digital marketing solutions. Lee had his first solely authored industry book (Tactical SEO) published in 2016, with 2 further industry books being published in 2019, and can be seen regularly expert contributing to industry websites including State of Digital, Search Engine Journal, The Drum, plus many others. Lee has a passion for management in the digital industry and loves to see the progression of others through personal learning, training and development. Outside the office he looks to help others while challenging himself, having skydived, bungie jumped and abseiled (despite a fear of heights) with many more fundraising and voluntary events completed and on the horizon. As a husband and dad, Lee loves to spend time with his family and friends. His hobbies include exercising, trying new experiences, eating out, playing countless team sports, as well as watching films (Gangster movies in particular – “forget about it”).
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