Off-page SEO is just as important as having great content and making sure your site is technically sound.
In fact, without a solid off-page SEO strategy, you’re unlikely to generate any traffic with owned media alone.
It’s also not a one-and-done deal – whether you’re building links, earning brand mentions, or trying to get some reviews by local customers, you have to put in the work.
And the off-page SEO tools on this list are here to make your work easier.
Let’s get started.
Link building cheat sheet
Respona – The #1 Link Building Outreach Tool
Respona is an all-in-one email outreach software that automates the entire link building process from start to finish.
A campaign with Respona starts by selecting a pre-made campaign template (or starting a custom one) and preparing your email sequence.
Respona’s email sequence builder offers an impressive toolset – from a spam checker and unsubscribe link functionality to AI-powered variables.
Meaning, not just your old “first_name”, but unique, AI-driven personalizations for every single one of your link opportunities.
Next, it has a built-in search engine of its own that runs multiple queries at the same time, and automatically adds relevant opportunities to your campaign.
All you have to do is give it your target keywords and check the results once they come in.
For easier email management, Respona also offers a unified inbox that consolidates all of your inboxes into a single, user-friendly interface. No need to juggle 10 tabs just to check your emails.
Last but not least, Respona also keeps tabs on your email health with daily reports and lets you know if there’s an issue.
Pricing: starts at $198/month, free trial available.
Backlink Monitoring Tools
Ahrefs
Ahrefs isn’t just a backlink checker; it’s a comprehensive SEO tool suite that empowers you to conquer search engine rankings.
From in-depth site audits to keyword research and competitor analysis, Ahrefs covers every facet of SEO.
Dive deep into your backlink profile with Ahrefs’ Link Explorer, uncovering who’s linking to you and analyzing their link strength.
Keyword research becomes a breeze with Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, where you can discover what keywords your competitors are ranking for and analyze search volume.
Beyond backlinks and keywords, Ahrefs offers a robust SEO audit tool for finding and fixing SEO issues, as well as powerful competitor analysis features.
Use the Competitive Analysis tools to track your competitors’ backlink profiles, keyword rankings, and content marketing strategies.
With its comprehensive suite of tools and user-friendly interface, Ahrefs is a must-have for all serious SEO professionals.
Pricing: starts at $129/month.
Semrush
Semrush is a comprehensive platform empowering you to excel in all aspects of digital marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and content optimization.
Uncover competitor strategies with powerful analysis tools, identifying top keywords, backlink profiles, and ad strategies.
Use its in-depth keyword research tool to discover valuable keywords, analyzing search volume and difficulty.
Beyond competitive and keyword analysis, Semrush Listing Management offers tools to optimize your website and content for local SEO.
Conduct technical SEO audits, track keyword rankings, and analyze website traffic.
With its suite of tools and user-friendly interface, Semrush is essential for any digital marketer.
Pricing: starts at $139/month.
SEOptimer
SEOptimer offers robust backlink analysis features to help you understand and improve your link profile.
Track your backlinks, monitor their status, and identify new link opportunities.
Analyze link quality and identify potentially harmful backlinks that could negatively impact your rankings.
Gain insights into anchor text distribution, domain authority, and other key metrics. Identify lost backlinks and understand why they were removed.
Use this data to refine your link building strategy and focus on acquiring high-quality, relevant links.
Pricing: starts at $29/month.
Linkody
Linkody simplifies backlink tracking, giving you a clear and organized view of your link profile.
Easily monitor your backlinks, track their status, and receive alerts about changes.
Identify lost backlinks and discover new link opportunities to grow your backlink profile.
Analyze link quality, identify toxic backlinks, and understand your anchor text distribution.
The tool provides actionable insights to help you make informed decisions about your link building strategy.
Pricing: starts at $14/month.
Check My Links
Check My Links is a free browser extension that quickly scans your web pages for broken links. Identify 404 errors, redirects, and other link issues that can negatively impact user experience and SEO.
With a single click, scan any webpage and get a detailed report of all broken links.
Beyond simply identifying broken links, Check My Links helps you understand the context of those links.
See where the broken links are located on the page and easily edit or remove them.
This tool is invaluable for website maintenance and finding broken link building opportunities.
Pricing: free.
Google Disavow Tool
The Google Disavow Tool is one of the free SEO tools offered by Google, including Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
This tool is crucial for addressing negative SEO attacks, removing the impact of low-quality or spammy links, and recovering from manual penalties.
This allows you to proactively manage your backlink profile and disassociate your website from potentially harmful links.
While powerful, the Disavow Tool should be used with caution.
Only disavow links that you are certain are harming your website.
It’s recommended to consult with an SEO professional before using this tool to avoid unintentionally disavowing valuable links.
Pricing: free.
Competitive Analysis Tools
SpyFu
SpyFu specializes in revealing your competitors’ marketing strategies, giving you a powerful edge in the search landscape.
Focusing on competitive analysis, SpyFu lets you see the keywords your competitors are buying on Google Ads, the organic keywords they’re ranking for, and even their estimated ad budget.
See the exact keywords they’re targeting, the ad copy they’re using, and their estimated monthly spend.
Uncover their most profitable keywords and identify opportunities to outbid them or target keywords they’ve overlooked.
On the organic side, SpyFu reveals the keywords your competitors are ranking for in search engine results.
Identify their top-performing content and discover opportunities to create even better content that targets the same keywords.
Pricing: starts at $39/month.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides powerful competitive intelligence, allowing you to benchmark your website’s performance against your competitors.
Gain insights into website traffic, audience demographics, and marketing strategies to understand where you stand in the market.
Analyze website traffic and engagement metrics, including visits, bounce rate, time on site, and pageviews.
See how your traffic compares to your competitors and identify areas where you can improve.
Understand your target audience by analyzing demographics, interests, and other relevant data.
Discover where your competitors are acquiring their traffic and identify potential new channels for your own marketing efforts.
Pricing: starts at $199/month.
Rival IQ
Rival IQ focuses on providing in-depth competitive analysis, especially for social media marketing.
Track your competitors’ social media performance, analyze their content strategies, and benchmark your results against theirs.
Understand what’s working for them and identify opportunities to improve your own social media presence.
Go beyond vanity metrics like follower count.
Rival IQ provides insights into engagement rates, post frequency, hashtag usage, and overall social media strategy.
See which content resonates most with their audience and learn from their successes and failures.
Track their social media advertising efforts and gain insights into their targeting and ad creative.
Pricing: starts at $239/month.
Local SEO & Review Management Tools
ReviewTrackers
ReviewTrackers is a comprehensive platform designed to help you manage and optimize your online reputation, crucial for local SEO success.
It centralizes customer reviews from multiple platforms, giving you a single dashboard to monitor what people are saying about your business.
Beyond simply collecting reviews, ReviewTrackers provides powerful tools to analyze customer feedback.
Identify trends in customer sentiment, understand what aspects of your business are resonating, and pinpoint areas for improvement.
Respond to reviews directly from the platform, showing customers that you value their feedback and are committed to providing excellent service.
Pricing: starts at $89/month.
BrightLocal
BrightLocal provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to help businesses optimize their local SEO.
From citation building and rank tracking to review management and reporting, BrightLocal offers everything you need to improve your visibility in local search results.
Manage and track your business listings across multiple online directories.
Ensure consistency in your NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information and identify any inconsistencies in your Google Business Profile that could be hurting your local SEO.
Track your search engine ranking and see how your performance compares to your competitors.
Monitor your online reviews from various platforms and respond to customer feedback directly from the BrightLocal dashboard.
Pricing: starts at $39/month.
Moz Local
Moz Local simplifies the management of your local business listings, ensuring your business information is accurate and consistent across the web.
Easily distribute your business data to major directories and data aggregators, saving you time and effort.
Beyond basic listing distribution, Moz Local helps you identify and fix listing inconsistencies that can negatively impact your local SEO.
The platform scans your listings for errors and provides recommendations for correcting them.
This ensures that search engines and potential customers have access to accurate and up-to-date information about your business.
Pricing: free.
Email Outreach & Deliverability Tools
Hunter
Hunter specializes in finding and verifying email addresses, making your email outreach and deliverability efforts more effective.
Quickly find the email addresses associated with any website or domain, allowing you to connect with the right people.
Beyond finding email addresses, Hunter verifies their deliverability, reducing the risk of sending emails to invalid or inactive addresses.
This helps protect your sender reputation and improve your email deliverability rates.
Hunter also provides tools for bulk email verification, making it easy to clean your email lists and ensure you’re reaching real people.
Pricing: starts at $34/month.
Lemwarm
Lemlist’s Lemwarm feature is designed to improve your email deliverability by gradually warming up your new email accounts.
This automated process simulates real email activity, signaling to email providers that your account is legitimate and improving your sender reputation.
Lemwarm sends and receives emails from a network of other Lemlist users, gradually increasing the volume over time.
This helps your emails avoid spam filters and land in the inbox.
The warm-up process is fully automated, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your email marketing.
Pricing: starts at $24/month.
Mxtoolbox
MXToolbox provides a suite of free tools designed to diagnose and troubleshoot email and DNS issues.
From checking your MX records and SPF settings to analyzing email headers and blacklists, MXToolbox offers a wealth of information to help you ensure your email is flowing smoothly.
Use MXToolbox to quickly identify potential problems with your email setup.
Check if your DNS records are configured correctly, verify your email server’s reputation, and diagnose any issues that might be preventing your emails from being delivered.
Pricing: free.
Digital PR Tools
Cision
Cision offers a comprehensive suite of tools for PR and marketing communications professionals.
From media monitoring and distribution to influencer marketing and analytics, Cision provides the resources you need to plan, execute, and measure your campaigns.
For digital PR, Cision’s media database allows you to identify key journalists and influencers, understand their coverage areas, and connect with them directly.
Distribute your press releases and media kits to a wide audience, ensuring your news reaches the right people.
Monitor media coverage across various channels, track mentions of your brand, and analyze the impact of your PR efforts.
Pricing: contact the team for a quote.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free service that sends you email notifications whenever new content mentioning your chosen keywords appears online.
This allows you to stay informed about your brand, competitors, industry trends, and any other topics you’re interested in.
Set up alerts for your brand name, product names, competitor names, or any other relevant keywords.
Choose how often you want to receive alerts and the types of sources you want to monitor, such as news articles, blog posts, and web pages.
Pricing: free.
Muck Rack
Muck Rack is a platform designed to connect PR professionals with journalists and media outlets.
It provides a searchable database of journalists, their contact information, and their areas of expertise, making it easier to find the right people to pitch your stories to.
Beyond contact information, Muck Rack offers insights into journalists’ past articles, social media activity, and preferred topics, helping you personalize your pitches and increase your chances of success.
Track media coverage of your brand and your competitors, monitor media trends, and measure the effectiveness of your PR campaigns.
Pricing: contact the team for a quote.
Social Listening Tools
Brandwatch
Brandwatch excels in social listening, providing in-depth analysis of online conversations to help you understand what people are saying about your brand, industry, and competitors.
Monitor mentions across a vast range of online sources, from social media platforms and forums to blogs, news sites, and review sites.
Brandwatch uses advanced AI and natural language processing to understand the sentiment and context of conversations.
Identify key influencers, track brand sentiment over time, and uncover emerging trends.
Analyze conversations to understand customer opinions, identify potential crises, and gain valuable insights into your target audience.
Pricing: contact the team for a quote.
SproutSocial
SproutSocial offers robust social listening capabilities alongside its social media management tools.
Monitor conversations relevant to your brand, industry, and competitors across various social networks.
Track brand mentions, analyze sentiment, and identify key influencers impacting your online presence.
Respond to mentions directly from the platform, participate in relevant conversations, and build relationships with your audience.
Analyze social media trends to inform your content strategy and create more engaging content.
Pricing: starts at $199/month.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite integrates social listening directly into its social media management platform.
Monitor conversations about your brand, competitors, and industry across multiple social networks.
Track brand mentions, analyze sentiment, and identify emerging trends to inform your social media strategy.
While primarily a social media management tool, Hootsuite’s listening features allow you to stay on top of relevant conversations and engage with your audience directly from the same platform you use to schedule and publish content.
Pricing: starts at $99/month.
Link building cheat sheet
Now Over to You
To make the most of your online presence, you should take advantage of these off-page SEO tools to grow your backlink profile, generate more brand mentions, customer reviews, and, of course, PR coverage.
Need help getting more high-quality backlinks?
Don’t hesitate to start your 14-day free trial with Respona to see how we can help.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What are the most important off-page search engine optimization factors?
The most important off-page SEO factors include the quality and quantity of backlinks, brand mentions, social media engagement, and local citations (for local businesses).
These signals tell search engines that your website is trustworthy and authoritative.
How much time should I spend on off-page SEO?
The amount of time you dedicate to off-page SEO depends on your industry, competition, and goals.
Generally, it requires consistent effort and ongoing maintenance.
It’s not a one-time task but a continuous process of building relationships, earning links, and managing your online reputation.
How can I get high-quality backlinks to my website?
Earning high-quality backlinks involves creating valuable content that others want to link to, building relationships with influencers and other website owners, and participating in relevant online communities.
Avoid black-hat link building tactics, as they can harm your website’s rankings.
What is the difference between on-page and off-page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to optimizing elements within your website, such as content, title tags, and meta descriptions.
Off-page SEO focuses on activities outside your website to build its authority and reputation, like earning backlinks and brand mentions.
Both are crucial for a successful SEO strategy.
Are free off-page SEO tools effective?
Some free off-page SEO tools can be helpful for basic tasks, such as checking for broken links or monitoring brand mentions.
However, they often have limitations in terms of data and features.
Paid tools typically offer more comprehensive data, advanced analytics, and time-saving automation, making them a worthwhile investment for using a more serious off paage SEO technique like broken link building.
