15 Backlink Analysis Tools to Improve Your Backlink Profile

Did you know that Google receives over 1.2 trillion searches every year?

And in order for your website to stand out on page #1 of Google, you need a strong backlink profile among other things.

However, link building without a proper backlink analysis can do more harm than good.

Backlink analysis is the cornerstone of SEO, it shows you all the backlinks you have gained and their sources. It also requires that you analyze the backlinks of your top competitors. This will give you an idea of your website’s ability to rank well in search results.

Here are a few strategies that can help you build a strong backlink profile:

• Generate quality content that high-authority websites might want to link to.
• Leverage backlink analysis tools to analyze your own backlinks as well as those of your competitors to identify link building opportunities.
• Start writing guest posts for high-authority websites and build quality backlinks to your website. Companies with a blog receive 97% more links to their websites.

You can also use backlink checker tools.

Want to know which tools you should use?

Find out in the next section.

Disclosure: This content has a few affiliate links, which means if you click on them, I will get a commission (without any extra cost to you).

What are the Best Backlink Analysis Tool?

Ready to look at our curation of tools?

Ready to find out how you are stacking up against your competitors?

Here are some awesome backlink analysis tools that you can use to build a strong backlink profile:

1. Semrush

Image via SEMrush

Semrush is an all-in-one backlink analysis tool that can help you develop an effective content marketing strategy. It includes innovative features like link audits that can give your business a serious edge.

Semrush also allows you to check the types of backlinks to your site. Knowing this can help you know if a link will add any weight to your domain. You can also monitor the ratio of nofollow to follow links, so that you can focus link building efforts on more dofollow links.

Their website backlink checker allows you to check where competitor’s get their dofollow links. You can also discover relevant industry sources and find out if there are websites interested in referring to your content.

Semrush Features

• Semrush analytics report will give you insights into your competitors' strategies.
• It helps you conduct a deep link analysis and shows the types of backlinks you have.
• You can check the Domain Authority of links to your website and your competitors.
• It allows you to track the geo-location of your backlinks.

2. Serpstat

Image via Serpstat

Serpstat is a growth hacking tool for PPC, SEO, and content marketing. This is an exceptional backlink analysis tool for those who want to make money from their website.

Serpstat gives you access to a list of anchors and referring pages and domains. You can also monitor your page and that of your competitors. See how they work with links and times when their backlink numbers changed.

Their Trust Rank and Page Rank allow you to see what domains would be great for link building so that you only work with reliable sources. You can also find pages that attract the most links.

Want to know more? Read its features to find out.

Serpstat Features

• This backlink analysis tool gives you access to your complete backlink data in one place.
• You can keep track of your competitors’ backlink strategies.
• And Serpstat's SEO tools can help you identify pages that attract maximum backlinks.

3. GrowthBar

Image via GrowthBar

GrowthBar is one of the best backlink analysis tool for SEO, developed by Growth Marketing Pro.

It provides you with SEO insights about every website and keyword when you conduct Google searches. You can find keyword suggestions, your competitors’ backlinks, Google Ads data, and even Facebook Ads data.

GrowthBar covers all of your SEO backlinking needs right from the SERPs. Plus, it’s more affordable than 95% of tools out there.

You can check out your competitors’ top-ranking backlinks and see their domain authority right on the search results page. You can also export any backlink list to a CSV file.

GrowthBar Features

• See any site’s domain authority right in the Google SERPs.
• Access your own domain’s backlink data.
• Keep track of your competitors’ backlinks and their domain authority.
• Export hundreds of backlinks to a CSV file for easy analysis.
• Try it out for free.

4. LinkAssistant

Image via LinkAssistant

This backlink analysis tool gives you a list of your backlinks broken up into categories. You can see which pages brought in the most backlinks and which links have the highest penalty risk.

LinkAssistant’s SEO SpyGlass offers unlimited backlinks, websites, campaigns, and exports.

And the best part?

You can start using SEO SpyGlass for free for unlimited evaluations. They also offer professional and enterprise packages with more features.

Their SEO SpyGlass can also pull links directly from Google Search Console, Google analytics, and other sources. It then becomes easy to see all your backlink profiles in one database.

Want to know more?

Check out their other features.

LinkAssistant Features

• Access historical data and find out how your backlink profile changed over time
• Find out what content brought what backlinks to your website
• Get a report with all your backlinks, referring domains, profile change over time, and a ratio of nofollow and dofollow links
• Use Domain Comparison to monitor competitors

5. Traffic Travis

Image via Traffic Travis

Traffic Travis is a feature-packed tool that helps SEO professionals to improve their link profile and search rankings. This backlink analysis tool allows you to identify high-quality sites and build quality links.

With Traffic Travis, you can perform a full SEO health check on the website and discover mistakes that may affect your rankings. You can also monitor your rankings and find out areas that need more effort.

Traffic Travis Features

• It helps you identify valuable link opportunities and build a strong backlink profile.
• Traffic Travis allows you to analyze your competitors’ link building activities.
• You can learn from your competitors’ link behavior, mistakes and successes.

6. Rank Signals

Image via Rank Signals

Rank Signals is a useful backlink analysis tool. It helps you discover your competitors’ backlinks, identify new link opportunities, and improve your link profile.

Rank Signals Features

• It helps you with competitor analysis so you can identify your competitors’ best links.
• This tool helps you identify spammy and bad links.
• Rank Signals link explorer identifies and tags nofollow links.

7. Ahrefs

Image via Ahrefs

Ahrefs can help you grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and monitor your backlinks. This backlink analysis tool provides you with all the options you might need to track your backlinks and keywords.

You know what makes it so popular?

Read its features to find out…

Ahrefs Features

• Learn why your competitors are ranking high.
• It provides you with ideas of how to outrank your competitors.
• And it can help you in searching for keywords and uncovering backlink opportunities.
• It can also help you with competitive analysis and web monitoring.

8. Majestic SEO

Image via Majestic

Majestic (formerly Majestic SEO) is the largest link index database and a specialized backlink analysis tool. It has two link indexes: 1) Historic Index 2) Fresh Index. The historic index gets refreshed monthly while the fresh index gets refreshed daily.

Majestic Features

• Majestic provides you with lots of features if you want to improve your backlink profile.
• The Majestic search engine is useful for SEO professionals, entrepreneurs, developers, and media analysts.
• Its Site Explorer tool helps you explore a domain/URL in detail.
• And its Backlinks History Tool helps you determine the number of backlinks to a domain.

9. Monitor Backlinks

Image via Monitor Backlinks

Monitor Backlinks is one of the best backlink checker tools. This is a must-have backlink tool for SEO experts, marketers, and entrepreneurs.

Monitor Backlinks Features

• These SEO tools help you with link building that can help you grow your website traffic.
• Monitor Backlinks can help you recover your valuable lost links.
• It allows you to track keyword rankings over time and analyze the impact of your backlink changes on your rankings.

10. cognitiveSEO

Image via cognitiveSEO

This backlink analysis tool helps SEO professionals and agencies improve the rankings of their websites. With this backlink tool, you can increase the traffic to your website and monitor your site’s backlinks. It also provides you with an effective analysis of your marketing strategies and useful insights into your business.

cognitiveSEO Features

• cognitiveSEO allows you to audit and improve your link profile.
• It sends you real-time notifications for the new links you have gained.
• cognitiveSEO offers a 14-day free trial.
• This backlink checker tool also helps you assess your competitors’ link strategy and identify valuable link opportunities.

11. SEO SpyGlass

Image via SEO SpyGlass

The SEO tools from SEO SpyGlass help you with backlink research, cleanup, and competitive analysis. Using this backlink analysis tool you can find all links to a domain with their powerful backlink index, SEO PowerSuite Link Explorer.

SEO SpyGlass Features

• It guards you with efficient and advanced safety features.
• You can create clear and catchy backlink reports.
• It runs on multiple platforms.
• You can spot traffic-generating backlinks.

12. Backlink Watch

Image via Backlink Watch

Backlink Watch is one of the best backlink analysis tools to help you stand out prominently in SERPs.

Backlink Watch Features

• This backlink checker tool shows you anchor texts of all your backlinks.
• Backlink Watch also provides pagerank and shows you all your outbound links.
• It has an available nofollow flag for inbound links.
• And it lets you know the total outbound links on a page.

13. Moz Link Explorer

Image via Moz Link Explorer

Link Explorer is one of the best backlink checker tools used by many marketing professionals. With the help of Link Explorer, you can build a strong backlink profile.

Want to know more? Let’s look at some of its key features.

Link Explorer Features

• Discover domains that link to your website with this backlink checker tool.
• Uncover link building opportunities by comparing the backlink profile of your competitors.
• Check the Domain Authority of websites that link to you and your competitors.

14. OpenLinkProfiler

Image via OpenLinkProfiler

OpenLinkProfiler is one of the most useful backlink tools that can help you build a strong backlink profile.

OpenLinkProfiler Features

• This backlink checker tool helps you identify potentially harmful links to your site.
• OpenLinkProfiler is a free link research tool that helps you analyze the backlinks of a website.
• It allows you to find pages that drive the maximum number of links.
• This tool sends you email notifications for every newly discovered link.

15. Linkody

Image via Linkody

Linkody is a reliable backlink analysis tool. It is the easiest way to track your link building campaigns for your clients or for your website.

Linkody Features

• It gives you insights into your competitors’ link building strategies.
• Linkody easily identifies low-quality or spammy links.
• It analyzes your link profile using a large number of metrics.
• And it tracks and monitors your backlinks 24/7.

Bonus Tool: Kerboo

Image via Kerboo

Kerboo is one of the best backlink checker tools available today. This tool is used by many brands, agencies, and SEO professionals to improve their link profiles.

Kerboo Features

• Kerboo removes all spammy links from your website and ensures that they don’t reappear in the future.
• You can combine multiple link data sources into one true view of the links.
• This tool helps you get a grip on any link-related issues or opportunities.

FAQs

Q1. What is backlink analysis and why does it matter?

A. Backlink analysis is the process of analyzing the quality of all of the backlinks you have gained and their sources. It is the cornerstone of SEO and helps you get an idea of your website’s ability to rank well in search results.

However, you also need to analyze the backlinks of your top competitors to get an idea of where you stand against them.

Backlink analysis matters because it helps you identify harmful links and remove them to improve your link profile. At the same time, analyzing the backlinks of your competitors can help you identify opportunities to build high-quality backlinks.

Q2. What is a backlink checker?

A. A backlink checker is a tool that helps you track and access all links to your site or to any other website. You can use it to see who is linking back to your site and identify your top-performing content.

You can also use a backlink checker to find the most valuable backlinks of your competitors and examine their link profiles. This can help you identify sources that you may be able to build high-quality backlinks from.

Q3. How do you do a backlink analysis?

A. To perform proper backlink analysis, you should follow the steps below:

Step 1: Select one of the best backlink checker tools available in the market such as Semrush or Ahrefs to track all of the backlinks to your site.

Step 2: Analyze the total number of backlinks, the number of unique referring domains, anchor text variants, fresh links, and link quality.

Step 3: Compare your backlink profile with those of your competitors to identify more link building opportunities.

Step 4: Identify negative links by looking for link spikes or links from spammy websites. Get them removed to ensure that they don’t negatively affect your search rankings.

Step 5: Review the entire backlink analysis report generated by the tool to analyze what you can do to improve your link profile.

Q4. How can I check backlinks for free?

A. There are backlink checker tools such as Ahrefs that allow you to check backlinks for free.

Q5. What is a good number of backlinks?

A. You can never have enough backlinks to your site. Many website owners build up to 10 backlinks per day to improve their site’s SEO performance.

However, the quality of backlinks matters more than their quantity. You should, therefore, focus on building backlinks from high domain authority websites in your niche.

Some of the sites that I trust for acquiring links in the digital marketing industry include Forbes, Content Marketing Institute, Mention.com, and Social Media Today.

Q6. How do SEO backlinks work?

A. Backlinks are built when one website mentions and links back to another site. Backlinks from high authority websites impact your SEO performance in a positive way because they represent the site’s confidence in your site.

Google considers mentions and backlinks as a way to judge your authority in the niche and, thereby, ranks you better in relevant search results.

Q7. How many types of backlinks are there in SEO?

A. There are two types of backlinks, which include:

• Dofollow links: They are the most valuable type of backlinks for SEO purposes.

When a site gives you a dofollow link, they tell Google that the link is organic and that they’re vouching for the accuracy of the content on the linked URL.

• Nofollow links: They are less valuable as they ask search engines like Google to ignore a particular link. They are used to tell search engines that they should not follow this specific link.

A reader will not be able to differentiate between a dofollow and a nofollow backlink. The difference is in the source code that determines how Google will view the backlink.

Q8. How many backlinks per day are safe?

A. You can build as many authoritative backlinks as you want every day. But if you buy spammy links, Google is likely to penalize your site.

However, if you build a lot of high-quality backlinks naturally in a day, you will not get penalized.

Q9. Which types of backlinks are the best for SEO?

A. Dofollow backlinks from high authority sites are the best for SEO.

Q10. Which is the best backlink checker?

A. The best backlink checker tools include:

• SEMrush
• Serpstat
• GrowthBar
• LinkAssistant
• Traffic Travis
• Rank Signals
• Ahrefs
• Majestic SEO
• Monitor Backlinks
• cognitiveSEO

You can check out more backlink checker tools, their features, and their pros and cons in the post above.

Ready to Start Using These Backlink Analysis Tools?

Backlink tools are extremely useful in helping you build a strong backlink profile. They can help you analyze your competitors’ backlinks so you can devise strategies to outrank them. Use the best backlink checker tools mentioned above to increase your website’s credibility and traffic.

Do you know of any other useful backlink analysis tools? Please let us know in the comments below.

Disclosure: This content has a few affiliate links, which means if you click on them, I will get a commission (without any extra cost to you).