The Benefits of Outsourcing Link Building
If you’re just getting your feet wet in the SEO game, you should really consider outsourcing your link building efforts to an SEO agency that knows what they’re doing.
Here’s a few reasons why you should consider outsourcing link building:
Time and Cost Savings: Outsourcing will free up your resources so that you can focus on more pressing aspects of your business. Outsourcing is also more cost-effective than handling things in-house since you don’t have to invest into hiring, training and managing additional staff.
Efficiency: Experienced link builders can leverage existing relationships with website admins to earn more powerful backlinks than you’d be able to on your own, in a shorter time than normal as well. Building these types of connections and relationships from scratch can often be a shot in the dark. It’s a complex process that is inconsistent at best if it’s your first time doing it. SEO agencies have processes in place to make the process push-button, simple and painless.
Risk Mitigation: Link building can be a complex and time-consuming process, one where mistakes can have real-world negative consequences on your business. If you build the wrong types of backlinks or from the wrong types of websites, this could result in an SEO penalty on your website. These can be a real pain to recover from, requiring vast amounts of resources and time. By outsourcing to professional link builders, you can minimise the risk of these costly mistakes. This ensures that your backlink profile remains strong, compliant with Google guidelines and resilient to future link spam updates that Google implements.
Scalability: When outsourcing link building to a pro, you can easily scale the campaign up or down depending on your needs and available budget. This kind of flexibility allows you to optimise your SEO campaigns on the fly. If you build links in-house, it’s much harder to make these kinds of adjustments since you have staff who are locked into contracts.
Quicker SEO Results: Working with a specialised team results in stronger results in terms of both quantity and quality of backlinks earned. This leads to stronger search engine rankings, increased organic traffic and improved conversions on your website.
Why Link Building Matters for SEO
Producing new pages (ie. blog content) for your website can be seen as widening the net of total keywords you can rank for.
Backlink building is like reeling the net in, improving rankings of individual pages and keywords.
Metaphors are nice and all for understanding concepts, but you want data as well, right?
Here’s a study by ahrefs that shows there’s a positive correlation between backlink volume and rankings on Google.
Build more backlinks, rank higher. SEO doesn’t have to be complicated. KISS.
How Much Does an In-House Link Builder Cost?
According to GlassDoor, the average link builder makes $66,379 per year. On average, you can expect an in-house link builder to bring you 13-15 high quality backlinks per month. In annual terms, that’s a range of 156-180 backlinks per year at a rate of $368 to $425 per backlink.
If you took that same $66,379 budget and put it towards outsourcing link building to an experienced SEO agency, you’d build more backlinks of the same or better quality since the average rate would be lower.
For example, if you outsourced your backlink building to us at Spacebar Collective, we only charge $300 per backlink so you’d get 221 backlinks for the same price. That’s an additional 41-65 backlinks you’re losing out on by link building in-house!
Preparing Your Site for a Backlink Campaign
According to John Mueller in a reddit comment, Google finds it hard to call a site authoritative after 30 articles. This means that without a base library of content, it’s going to be difficult to rank for valuable keywords, regardless of your link building efforts.
That’s why we recommend first building out your base library of content, at least 30 blog articles that position your website as a topical authority of a subject. This will help strengthen your odds of improving rankings as you build backlinks towards your content and money pages.
On top of working towards becoming a topical authority on a subject, here are some other things we consider pre-requisite to link building efforts:
- Indexability: Is your website visible to Google and being indexed properly? Try submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console and fix any errors it gives you (if at all).
- Accessibility: Accessibility compliance will make your website available for everyone, and in turn, make it easier for search engine crawlers to understand as well. Since Google puts weight on the user experience, this is a crucial aspect of SEO that doesn’t get discussed often enough.
- Easy Navigation: Every page on your website should be accessible within 3 clicks. That is to say, your menus should be logical connections to everything you have to offer. You can use tools like Screaming Frog to get a visualisation of your website’s pages to fix any navigation issues.
- Fix Technical Issues: Have a strong technical SEO foundation. Page load speed is especially important for the user experience and should be prioritised before backlink building.
What to Look for in a Link Builder
When shopping around for a link builder to outsource your off-page SEO efforts to, it’s crucial that you ask the right questions. We’ve identified 3 key areas that you’ll want to dive into before trusting your backlink budget to a link builder.
Proven Experience: Ask to see case studies of successful link building campaigns or at the very least, screenshots of results they’ve achieved in the past. It’s also important to ask if the link builder has relevant experience, so ask if they’ve earned links within your specific industry in the past. This is important because building backlinks in different niches may require different strategies, especially if you’re in an industry notoriously difficult to build links for like finance or cannabis.
Pricing: Not too high and not too low. You’re looking for the Goldilocks of backlink building. If a link builder prices their backlinks too low, it’s unlikely they’re doing things above board. If a link builder prices their backlinks too high, it’s likely they’re gouging you for an absurd profit margin. Don’t trust anyone selling quality backlinks for under $100 or average backlinks for over $500. At the lowball, you’re going to wind up with some sketchy backlinks. At the high end, you’re better off looking at slightly cheaper options. The most reputable link builders will charge somewhere between $250 and $400 per backlink.
Transparency: Since low quality backlinks can actually hurt your SEO, you should seek link builders who are transparent about their operations. How exactly are they getting backlinks? You should understand their process at a basic level, from link prospecting to content production. Transparent operations are also a must-have when outsourcing link building. Ideally, link builders should disclose which websites they’re in talks with to secure link placements so that you can do your due diligence and approve which ones will actually get produced.
Professional Backlink Building Services
There are 2 pricing structures for backlink building services: monthly retainers and à la carte per link. Monthly retainers are great for ongoing SEO efforts, while paying per link is better suited if you have a specific number of backlinks you want to build.
Managed Link Building Subscriptions: Paying for link building on a subscription basis is ideal if you want consistent results over the long-term. Agencies or freelance link builders will commit to building a minimum amount of links every month for a monthly subscription fee. When spread out over the course of a year or several years, the savings from this payment model can be massive. Working on a monthly subscription also allows the link builder time to better understand your brand voice, build more contextually-relevant backlinks and fine tune the campaign over time.
If you’re interested in a monthly link building subscription, contact us today and we’ll get you a quote that fits your specific needs.
Paying Per Backlink: If you don’t have complete buy-in from the leadership at your company to tackle SEO as a growth channel, paying per backlink is a great option because you can treat it as an experiment before committing a larger budget.
For those that are ready to tackle outsourcing link building today, we have 3 tiers of backlink packages available on our backlink building service page.
