Introducing the tool
We’ve been using Link Research Tools for link building projects for many years, so it’s well deserving of its place in our SEO Tools comparison report.
Link Research Tools, as the name suggests, is a toolset for conducting link research on your own website and competitors’ websites, as well as including tools for market research to find link building opportunities.
Link Research Tools (LRT) is a hosted SaaS solution with no software to install. That means you pay a recurring monthly subscription to use the tools online. The product is designed the professional SEO market, particularly agencies, although experienced in-house SEO’s can also benefit from its capabilities.
In all there are about 20 individual tools within the LRT toolset – more than we can cover in one article. We’ll tell you about some of the most important tools in this review, before finishing off with our overall conclusions about the product.
What does Link Research Tools do?
Using all the tools that Link Research Tools has to offer, you can pretty much do everything a successful link building campaign needs.
The different features are grouped under the following subjects:
- Link Risk Management & Site Audit
Competitive Research
Quick Analysis
Backlink Profiling
Link Monitoring
Link Prospecting
Advanced Link Prospecting
Link Risk Management & Site Audit
This suite of tools is all about link penalties, and helping you either recover from them or avoid them altogether.
Since Google’s Penguin update this aspect of link building has become critical for SEOs, and Link Research Tools helps you to ‘detox’ your link profile as well as reclaim any valuable lost ‘link juice’ while you’re at it.
Competitive Research
The starting point for many link building campaigns is to review what links your competitors have.
With Link Research Tools you can identify both the good and bad links other sites have, meaning you can quickly focus your attention on earning links that work.
Quick Analysis
This part of the tool set is handy as it can be used to provide a ‘snapshot’ of yours, or a competitors, link profile.
Instead of trawling through the data manually, Link Research Tools can quickly analyse link profiles and identify the best and worst inbound links.
It can also be used to quickly compare multiple domains/URLs.
Backlink Profiling
This gives you a more detailed and extensive view of a link profile.
Link Monitoring
Link Research Tools will constantly analyse your link profile, and has an alerts system to notify you of any changes.
The Link Alerts can be used to tell you when you, or one of the competitors you are tracking, receive a new link – which can be very valuable information.
Link Prospecting
If you are involved in link building these days, then it’s fair to say you probably spend a lot of your time finding link targets.
The Link Prospecting element of Link Research Tools helps this process by finding viable link targets and also identifying their contact details.
Advanced Link Prospecting
This added extra to the Link Prospecting module gives you even more options when it comes to finding link targets.
With the Advanced module you can find the common links within your niche and discover sites that your competitors link to (so you can try and steal some of their link juice!
PROS
- Extensive backlink tracking and website link structure analysis.
- Audit and recovery tools provide unique Google penalty or website re-launch value.
- Sales and marketing-focused link prospecting tools.
- Domain and competitive comparison tools.
- Real-time backlink alerting.
- Free browser extensions
CONS
- Completely report-based with no pre-populated or configurable dashboards.
- Not much integration between one-off tools in suite.
- No unified navigation beyond static list of tools.
- Keyword research capabilities are limited at best.
- No ongoing position monitoring.
- Comparatively expensive for SMBs.
Who needs Link Research Tools?
It’s all about backlinks, so if you are involved in any part of the whole link building process then you should definitely give Link Research Tools a try.
How much does Link Research Tools cost?
There are four different account levels, which are priced in Euros:
- Starter – €99
- Expert – €299
- Superhero – €394
- Agency – €1299
All of the features of Link Research Tools are available at all account levels, but naturally you get more access and data the higher your account level.
