10 Best Backlink Monitoring Tools To Track Your Link Building

It’s a known fact that backlink monitoring is an important facet of an effective link-building campaign.

Securing off-page links, otherwise known as backlinks, is one of the most common white-hat SEO strategies used by SEO agencies and is the key to improving your position within the SERPs.

The question is, how do you monitor your success?

In 2024, 67.5% of SEO experts believe that backlinks will continue to have a big impact on your search engine ranking, so it has never been more important to ensure that your backlinking strategy is up to scratch.

(Image Source: Userp)

If you want to ensure that your next backlinking campaign skyrockets your SERP ranking, you may want to invest in a backlink monitoring tool.

If you regularly engage in backlink monitoring, you quickly become aware of the websites that will give you the best SEO results and the ones to avoid that could actually harm your ranking position.

With this in mind, we’ve jumped into the benefits of backlinking and the importance of backlink monitoring, and we’ve even thrown in ten fantastic backlink monitoring tools to try out in your next link-building campaign.

Are you ready to upgrade your backlinking strategy? Let’s begin.

What Is a Backlink?

Put simply, a backlink is a hyperlink to a page on your website that appears on another website.

Historically, backlinks were used to help reinforce blog content and give credibility to online article sources. However, in recent years, they have become a goldmine opportunity for brands looking to improve their ranking within the SERPs.

If we rewind the term backlinking all the way back to 1966, Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, first created the idea.

Developing the first ranking algorithm, called PageRank, Brin and Page decided that a website’s authority would be determined by the number of other competing websites linked to it. Essentially, the websites with the most external links found themselves at the top of the search page.

While this concept is much more complicated in a modern-day search landscape, the idea still remains the same.

Each time a link to your website appears on a high-authority domain, it sends a signal to the search engine that your website is a credible, authoritative source. Therefore, search engines like Google are more likely to rank your website higher in the SERPs if links to your web pages appear on leading domains within your industry.

(Image Source: Backlinko)

Creating an effective backlink campaign should be a crucial part of your SEO strategy.

While it may seem like a simple concept. Scoring and retaining backlinks on competitive domains is a lengthy process, and securing them isn’t easy.

If you want your backlinks to be most effective, it’s vital that they are pitched to high-quality, relevant domains. When backlink monitoring, make sure the domains you choose cannot be ignored by your search engine.

A high-quality backlink campaign focuses on building backlinks on domains relevant to your industry, prioritises natural, searchable keywords, and is constantly tracked using a backlink monitoring tool.

With this in mind, let’s have a closer look at some of the benefits associated with backlink building

What Are The Benefits Of Building Backlinks?

The primary purpose of a backlink is to help both a search engine and your audience judge the value of your website.

According to experts at Backlinko, websites with a high Ahrefs/Moz/SEMrush Domain Rating directly correlate with a higher ranking position in a Google search.

However, when carried out correctly, you’ll find that running a successful backlink campaign will improve more than just your SERP score.

Here are just a few ways building backlinks could transform your success as an online business:

• Improved Search Engine Ranking: The most obvious benefit of a powerful backlinking campaign is an improved search engine ranking. With more high-quality backlinks under your belt, you raise your chances of appearing further up in a search engine result.
• Greater Authority Within Your Niche: If you gain more backlinks from high-authority sites within your niche industry, you quickly establish yourself as a powerful payer amongst your target audience. If you’re constantly linked as a source within high-authority blogs, you will be viewed as an opinion leader within your industry, which will, in turn, drive more leads to your products/services.
• More Website Traffic: A backlink aims to drive consumer traffic back to your website. If you link to a product or service page, you increase the chances of the page receiving clicks from qualifiable leads. This boost in referral traffic could lead to more conversions or even a subscription to an ongoing service.
• Enhanced User Experience: Your backlink acts as a direct path for a consumer to discover your brand. With the ability to provide users with additional resources and information after clicking on your link, you improve their search experience online.
• Boosting Consumer Trust: If your backlink appears on a leading website within your industry, you’ll automatically be considered a credible source amongst your audience. When your content is linked to by a respectable source, it suggests that your brand voice is trustworthy and valuable.
• Faster Indexing: When a search engine crawls a webpage, it also uses the backlinks on that webpage to quickly discover and crawl new content. High-ranking sites are often crawled first when a search engine generates a search result. If your backlink is featured on a top-ranking website, it could lead to faster indexing of your content, too.
• Improving The Diversity Of Your Traffic Sources: If you only rely on singular traffic sources, such as consumers coming from social media links and paid advertising campaigns, you close your website off to new traffic sources. Using link building as a new avenue for attracting traffic to your site opens up your brand to a wider audience of potential leads.
• Outranking Your Competitors: If you want to outrank your competitors, engaging in a backlinking campaign is a great way to ensure that your site appears higher in the SERPs. With a robust backlink profile, your website will be deemed more authoritative by a search engine, and you’ll remain ahead. The key here is to also conduct backlink monitoring on your competitor’s website to ensure that you’re securing backlinks on similar domains.

As you build up your backlinking campaign, it’s important to regularly monitor backlinks that you secure on high authority sites.

For continued success, we recommend that you connect with websites that are happy to provide you with a follow-link and a permanent place on the blog for that guaranteed link juice.

How Do You Build Backlinks?

Before you start backlink monitoring, you need to build them first.

There are many ways to build backlinks online. While most white-hat link-building strategies favour organically earning backlinks from your chosen domain in the form of a link exchange or guest post, you can also speed up the process by buying backlinks.

(Image Source: Ahrefs)

In theory, there are four ways most SEOs acquire backlinks for their website, these are:

Manually Adding Links: For companies with more than one website or a partnering brand, manually adding links to a website is probably the easiest way to increase your backlink portfolio. If you have access to another domain, you can easily add links to your products and services within blog posts and other promotional media.

Buying Backlinks: You can offer a website money in exchange for a backlink on their domain; however, this method is riskier. If you choose to buy backlinks rather than earn them organically, search engines may rank your website lower if your backlink appears on a website that is not relevant to your industry or a domain that is a repeat offender for adding countless spam links.

Asking For Links: This is probably the simplest method of building a backlink campaign; however, just asking for a link has the lowest success rate. There are plenty of ways to ask for links. These include email-based outreach and approaching journalists on platforms like Connectively. However, brands often want compensation for the links they place on their website. This could be in the form of payment or an exchange. While this works for some, be careful when continually exchanging links. Search engines may pick up on this and rank both websites lower as a result.

Organically Earning Links: This is probably the best way to build backlinks. Earning a link refers to creating something worthy of linking out to. This could either be a fantastic blog post on your website that competitors naturally want to reference or a guest posting strategy that offers website traffic-driving content while still earning you a backlink to your brand.

Earning links is the safest way to build backlinks that remain on a domain permanently. If you craft content that high-authority domains naturally want to link to, you provide potential consumers with the opportunity to engage with something worth their time if they choose to click on your link.

Organic linking to powerful content not only helps define your brand as a thought leader but could encourage more leads to convert.

Can You Monitor Backlinks?

Now we’ve covered how to build a backlink, let’s get on to backlink monitoring.

The best SEO campaigns are monitored from start to finish. Marketers who regularly monitor changing traffic trends and the rise and fall of their competitors know exactly where to place their links for the best outcome.

If you want to be certain that your backlinking strategy is up to scratch, ensure that you regularly track the success of your live backlinks and conduct competitor backlink monitoring to find new opportunities for future link placements.

In this next section, we’ll explore backlink monitoring, its importance, and how you can set up your own strategy for ongoing SEO success.

Why Is Backlink Monitoring Important?

Backlink monitoring can help you gain control of your link-building strategy.

When you use a backlink monitoring tool, you gain more insight into your website’s current link profile, the quality of your live links across the web and their success rate over time.

When you add backlink monitoring to your SEO strategy, you are also more likely to find hidden problems within your strategy, such as broken links or the removal of a link. Better still, you can use the same backlink monitoring tools to evaluate the success of your competitor’s link profile, too.

(Image Source: Vazoola)

Here are just a few reasons why backlink monitoring could transform your SEO strategy and better prepare you for future link-building campaigns.

Improved SEO Results

As mentioned previously, backlink monitoring could drastically improve your position within the SERPs.

If you are regularly tracking your website’s link profile, you can quickly identify issues with your live backlinks, such as broken linking or a link on a domain whose ranking is plummeting. If you identify these problems quickly, they can be fixed promptly before they affect your overall SEO performance.

If you monitor your backlinking strategy over a long period of time, you can also see patterns in how your link profile is evolving and determine whether you’re earning more backlinks or facing a dip in engagement.

Beating Your Competitors

The online marketing landscape is fierce. You will always rival competitor backlinking strategies, so starting one step ahead of the competition is crucial.

You can use backlink monitoring tools to monitor your competitors’ link profiles and analyse their current placements.

Not only does this help you benchmark your own link-building success, but if you map their next move, you can approach high-authority sites first for new link opportunities.

Refining Your Strategy

Engaging in a backlink campaign can be risky if you’re running blind. If you use a backlink monitoring tool to identify potential faults within your strategy, you reduce the risk of causing harm to your SERP score.

When monitoring your backlinks, you can easily refine and twerk your strategy on the go for guaranteed success.

Backlink monitoring can also give you more insight into how to move forward with your other SEO content. For example, if you can see which piece of blog content has generated the most links for your brand, you’ll have a better understanding of the topics and keywords that are likely to spike engagement in future content.

Preventing Penalties

It’s important to monitor exactly where your links are published to prevent potential SEO penalties.

Search engines regularly penalize domains with spammy or irrelevant backlink profiles. If you stay on track with where your backlinks appear, you can avoid them appearing on such websites.

How To Start Backlink Monitoring

Once you’re ready to monitor your backlinks, it’s time to set your goals and record your benchmarks.

Before monitoring backlinks, establish the metrics you plan to use to track your success and think about what goals you’re aiming to achieve by gathering insights from your live link campaigns.

For example. If you’re using a backlink monitoring tool to benchmark your link profile against your competitor, you’ll want to measure different metrics to a brand that is using a backlink monitoring tool to discover and recover broken links.

While you should track all aspects of your backlink campaign, customising your monitoring method to your individual SEO goals is the key to seeing results.

5 Key Metrics To Monitor In Your Next Backlink Campaign

If you’re new to backlink monitoring, we’ve got you covered. There are plenty of metrics that you can track in a backlink campaign, but the most important factors to pay attention to are a referring domain’s authority, how your backlink has been earned and your search visibility post-campaign.

According to experts at Databox, 76% of SEOs believe that the most important metric to track when conducting backlink monitoring is the number of backlinks earned, while 72% of them rank the authority of referring domains as their top metric to monitor.

(Image Source: Databox)

Here are our five top metrics to track when backlink monitoring:

• Domain Authority: The most obvious metric to track in any SEO audit is the rise or fall of your domain authority. In essence, when you gain more backlinks from high-quality referring domains, your website’s DA score should rise as a result. If your DA is falling despite scoring new backlinks, it could indicate that something in your strategy needs tweaking.
• Referring Domains: A referring domain is the process of one domain linking to another domain. While you may have numerous backlinks from one website, the number of individual domains referring to you holds more weight. Sites with a higher number of referring domains are likely to have a higher authority score when ranked by a search engine. Therefore, when backlink monitoring, it’s important to track both your volume of backlinks and referring domains for a better understanding of your campaign’s success.
• Search Visibility: Your search visibility is a marker of how likely your website is to appear when a user searches for a certain keyword or phrase. If your backlink anchors are well-researched and positioned, Google is more likely to react well to your link acquisitions. Tracking your change in search visibility helps you discover if your backlink campaign has made your brand more visible to your target searchers.
• Social Signals: This metric is slightly different to the rest. While many backlink monitoring methods track live links, those who monitor their brand mentions and social signals can identify opportunities for further link-building. For example, if a leading brand retweets your content or mentions you within their blog or on their social feed, you have a better chance of acquiring a link insertion when you approach them.
• Return On Investment (ROI): Your ROI measures how profitable your link campaign is. When monitoring backlinks, calculate your ROI by subtracting the cost of the campaign from the revenue you have generated. This result is then divided by the cost of the campaign, leaving you with your profit percentage.

Could a Backlink Monitoring Tool Boost Your Chances Of Success?

Most link-building campaigns consist of more than a few links, making it difficult to keep track of them as they expand across the web.

Investing in a backlink monitoring tool could help make tracking your links more efficient by pulling results from all over the Internet in just a few seconds.

Backlink monitoring tools contain features such as:

• Domain rating scorers that reveal the authority of new link placements
• Broken link checkers to identify if your backlink is inaccessible
• Referring domain trackers that rank your highest authority referring domains
• Competitor monitoring features to aid you in monitoring competing strategies
• Data visualisation to help spot patterns within your backlink building
• Link removal tools that get rid of links on potentially harmful websites

While most backlink monitoring tools require you to sign up and subscribe for a monthly fee, they are well worth the payout. Using a specialised tool, you are twice as efficient and twice as likely to find your links on high-quality domains that will help improve your search ranking.

10 Backlink Monitoring Tools To Try In 2024

There are plenty of backlink monitoring tools to choose from when tracking your link-building campaign. Depending on your experience with SEO, your budget and your individual backlinking goals, you can opt for brilliant allrounders such as the Ahrefs backlink checker or focus in on one area using Mention’s social signals tracker.

With this in mind, we’ve compiled a list of the ten best backlink monitoring tools for continued SEO success in 2024.

1. Ahrefs

First up, let’s talk about Ahrefs’ backlink checker. As a complete suite of competitive SEO tools, this impressive platform can serve all of your link-building and domain-monitoring needs.

Offering impressive features such as keyword tracking, live link monitoring, and competitor research, it allows you to quickly identify whether your link-building strategy is performing well online.

(Image Source: Ahrefs)

Ahrefs goes the extra mile and provides you with an in-depth data analysis of every link. The built-in backlink checker can tell you information about the referring domain, the page ranking, how much traffic it receives and even the quality of the anchor text.

Ahrefs’ backlink checker can also identify broken links and hunt down websites that link out to multiple competitors, providing you with more opportunities for future link placements.

As one of the best SEO all-rounders on the market, Ahrefs backlink checker is a brilliant choice for SEO beginners and seasonal professionals.

Price: Ahrefs backlink checker starts at $99 per month for one user space but offers a 7-day free trial to test out its premium features.

2. Moz

Next, we have Moz. As the leading domain authority checker worldwide, Moz certainly knows what constitutes a high-ranking backlink strategy.

Moz’s backlink checker is, therefore a great choice if you’re looking to improve your DA score. Offering an extensive link profile analysis, Moz is brilliant at revealing whether a link is helping or harming your SEO score.

(Image Source: Moz)

Moz’s backlink checker can accurately identify links on spam sites, while its built-in research tool can help you collect new information about where your competitors are finding success, opening up new opportunities for link partnerships.

Moz Pro goes the extra mile by ensuring that your love backlinks are as effective as they can be in improving your domain authority. With the ability to conduct an in-depth analysis of each and every link, Moz offers suggestions on how to improve your linking strategy to boost your website traffic.

Price: Moz Pro’s standard package starts at $99 per month but is extremely scalable depending on your individual SEO needs. Their top-end premium package for larger enterprises and SEO professionals costs $599 per month.

3. Linkody

Linkody is a brilliant tool to use if you’re looking for a dedicated backlink checker. This backlink monitoring tool prioritises natural backlink building by delving deeper into your link profile and analysing factors such as your spam score, domain authority of referring sites, and the anchor text used to link to your content.

(Image Source: Linkody)

With access to all of the data from top SEO tools on the market, such as Moz and Majestic, Linkody gathers information about your backlink campaign from a diverse range of sources before presenting its findings on a simplified dashboard.

In fact, Linkdoy’s winning feature is its functionality as a backlink monitoring platform. With Linkody’s checker tool, backlink monitoring is simple, and findings are easy to digest for SEO beginners.

Price: As the perfect beginner tool, Linkody starts at $14.90 per month for backlink monitoring of two domains, making it one of the more affordable backlink checkers on the market.

4. SEOptimer

This backlink monitoring tool does what it says on the tin. SEOptimer is a free platform that provides users with a report on the strength of their backlink profile across the web.

Simply copy and paste your URL into its search bar, and the tool quickly ranks and sorts your backlinks according to how powerful they are in driving traffic to your domain.

(Image Source: SEOptimer)

This is a great option for those who want a fast and fuss-free link profile report. It is also super simple to understand for users who are new to search engine optimisation.

Another highlight of this tool is its keyword ranking feature. In addition to ranking your backlinks in terms of effectiveness, you can discover which keywords your competitors are ranking for and adjust the anchors of your links accordingly.

Price: The basic version of SEOptimer is free. However, you can upgrade to their premium package, which ranges from $21-$120 and allows you to generate reports for multiple domains at once.

5. Majestic

Majestic is one of the most popular backlink monitoring tools on the market. With the largest link intelligence database available, you can track your backlinks in real time and receive information on the authority of referring domains as well as a comparison to competitor links from the same domain.

Offering two brilliant metrics for monitoring backlinks, Majestic uses Trust Flow to gauge the quality of a link, while Citation Flow focuses on ranking the quality of a referring domain based on its relevancy and trustworthiness.

(Image Source: Majestic)

Majestic is also great at providing its users with a simplified visualisation of its data findings. The tool’s link graph feature is especially useful, as this helps you understand the growth of your link-building journey in one easy-to-read graph.

Price: The basic version of Majestic is free for those who want to check only one domain, however, for a more in-depth review of multiple domains, prices start at $49.99 per month.

6. SEMRrush

SEMRush is another brilliant SEO all-rounder that is a great tool to have under your belt when backlink monitoring.

Not only can SEMRush perform a detailed analysis of your backlinking efforts, but it can also compare and contrast your link profile with that of your competitors simultaneously to suggest where you rank.

SEMRush’s backlink audit is one of the most comprehensive on the market. This powerful backlink monitoring tool can find broken links, refer domains that may affect your ranking, and even geolocate your top placements to help you tailor your strategy.

(Image Source: SEMRush)

Their extensive competitor analysis is also not to be forgotten if you want to gain more insight into your competing brand’s backlink profile. SEMRush can reveal the referring domains most used by competitors and suggest opportunities for you to get ahead.

Price: Starting at $119.95 per month, SEMRush is one of the pricier options on the market. However, it does offer a free version that is limited but still effective when performing a fast search.

7. Linkio

Linkio is a backlink monitoring tool created by OutreachLabs that directly focuses on the outreach side of backlinking. This tool searches for the best-referring domains for your websites and automatically constructs an AI-generated prospect list to outreach your links to.

This is a lifesaver if you’re looking to send out a large amount of link requests at once.

Linkio uses data from third-party tools such as Moz and Ahrefs to provide information on the best linking opportunities to build up your domain authority and analyse your current live link profile.

(Image Source: Linkio)

Linkio can also analyse your link quality by checking the number of pages that Google has indexed.

Price: Linkio starts at $19.99 a month, which gets you a monthly analysis of up to 10,000 backlinks from three domains.

8. Mention

Next up, we have Mention. This tool may not offer the same features that a traditional backlink monitoring platform promises, but it’s a brilliant aid for reviewing your backlinking strategy.

Mention monitors your brand mentions and social signals across a range of platforms, even if they are not accompanied by a follow-link. Using Mention, you can discover new opportunities to generate live backlinks from unlinked mentions.

(Image Source: Mention)

Mention’s software includes numerous data visualisation tools which give you an idea of how your visibility is growing online and suggest how you can tweak your SEO strategy accordingly.

Price: Prices for Mention start at $29 per month for brand mention alerts for up to two sites.

9. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is another brilliant all-rounder for SEO professionals. It includes an extensive backlink monitoring tool that can provide insights into new link-building opportunities and keep you up to date on how your link profile is evolving.

Using their backlink authority checker, you can automatically verify that your backlinks are appearing on referring domains, which will help improve your ranking rather than hinder it.

(Image Source: SE Ranking)

SE Ranking also comes with a built-in alert system that regularly informs you about any potential changes to your link profile. This could be the addition of a new backlink or the removal of one, keeping you in the loop throughout your campaign

Price: Prices for SE ranking start at $33 per month, but this tool offers a 14-day free trial for new subscribers, allowing you to try out its extensive tool kit of SEO monitoring features.

10. RankActive

Last but not least, we have RankActive. This is one of the newer backlink monitoring tools on the market, but it certainly packs a punch.

RankActive prides itself on reporting on links in ‘live mode’. With a large database of in-house backlinks, you can not only monitor your current links but plan out your next move in real-time. You can work through numerous graphs and tables to determine which link, anchor, and referring domain combinations are likely to grant you the most ‘link juice’.

(Image Source: Rank Active)

RankActive also has a comprehensive competitor monitoring feature that reports on competitor backlinks and where they have seen the highest spikes in engagement. This can help you determine what prospects to reach out to next with new backlink opportunities.

Price: The RankActive monthly plans range between $99 and $229, depending on the number of websites you want to check.

Wrapping Up

We’ve established that backlink monitoring is essential in a modern-day SEO campaign.

If you want your backlinking efforts to have a positive effect on your overall ranking, it’s important to regularly track your referring domains and your competitors’ link profiles to ensure that you move up the search string.

For the greatest shot at success, SEO beginners should invest in a backlink monitoring tool like Ahrefs or Majestic to aid all aspects of their SEO strategy.

If you’re a more seasoned professional, you may want to open up new opportunities to improve your link-building using tools like Mention, which focuses on one specific area of your online strategy.

However you approach your backlink building, those who strive to get their brand mentioned on high-authority domains will undoubtedly see their ranking rise in 2024.