Balancing expenses and ROI is always a concern for business owners, and outsourcing link building is no exception. Link building goes far beyond getting backlinks to your site. It demands expertise in SEO, content strategy, and relationship management. A link building expert brings years of expertise, industry connections, and proven tactics. So, is it worth the cost?
At tiny lever, we can make it simple by delivering premium link building services backed by exceptional SEO content. Our content planning and outreach strategies can help your website climb the rankings and attract valuable traffic. With our focus on creating valuable connections and user-centric content, you’ll be closer to achieving long-term results and sustained organic growth.
As a link building services provider, we will explain link building pricing, the value of link building experts, and the short- and long-term ROI. After reading, you’ll be able to decide whether it’s worth investing in a link builder or not.
Let’s jump in!
What is the Financial Cost of Hiring a Link Building Expert?
A link building expert professionally acquires high-quality, relevant backlinks to your website to improve its ranking. Delegating this task is ideal if you're looking for efficiency or professional assistance. Such professionals have proven strategies for securing valuable links, conducting targeted outreach, and handling the research.
Understanding the Costs for Link Building Services
When outsourcing link building services, you should know the different factors. Link building prices are relative to the scale and specialization of the service, as well as the service type and provider.
1. Link Building Agencies
Generally, it is costly to hire the services of a link building agency. The prices can vary from $2,000 to $ 15,000+ monthly, depending on the campaign’s scale. Also, the cost is often tied to a specific link KPI. More established agencies may charge $15,000 for large-scale projects or enterprise-level campaigns.
2. Content Marketing Agencies
These agencies may offer link building as part of their content marketing services, hence their varied pricing structures. Established agencies in the US/UK operate from about $65 per hour for small businesses or individual projects to about $6000 per month.
Mid-sized companies anticipate paying between $10,000 and $20,000 a month. For medium-level enterprises, costs vary from $20,000 to $60,000 monthly, while for huge seven-figure companies, the costs lie in between.
3. PR Agencies
Public relations agencies can be another avenue for link building, though their pricing models vary. Freelancers or small PR firms may charge hourly rates ranging from $125 to $500, while larger firms typically charge retainers between $2,500 and $20,000 monthly. PR agencies often won’t engage nationally or globally unless the budget is $15,000+ per month.
4. Freelance Link Builders
You can hire freelance link builders for a more flexible, lower-cost option. Rates for experienced freelancers typically range from $50 to $100 per hour, with some variation based on experience and location.
However, when you hire a freelancer, you pay for their time, not necessarily for specific link placement results. You may also cover the cost of the necessary tools according to their needs.
5. Per-Link Charges
For a freelance or SEO agency, per-link charges can vary widely. The cost for each link can range from as low as $100 to over $1,500, depending on the link's quality and the publication's niche. High-quality links from authoritative sources will cost more, while lower-quality links from less-established publications may be cheaper.
6. Monthly SEO Campaigns
Ongoing SEO campaigns typically include link building and other SEO strategies. Small-scale campaigns start at around $3,000 monthly. More comprehensive or enterprise-level SEO campaigns can cost $15,000 or more monthly. These campaigns often involve multiple link placements and broader strategies, making them more expensive.
Key Variables That Influence Link Building Pricing
An outsourced link building campaign doesn't come with a fixed price. Several factors determine how much you'll pay for these services. Let’s take a closer look at each of these factors.
- Niche Complexity: High-competition niches, such as personal finance, healthcare, and insurance, often command higher prices. These industries are considered Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics requiring more trusted, authoritative links. In contrast, low-competition niches, like gaming, non-profits, or hobby-related websites, generally have lower costs.
- Quality of Links: High-authority links, such as those from websites with a high Domain Authority (DA) or Domain Rating (DR), are more expensive. While cheaper options for low-quality links exist, they can lead to search engine penalties.
- Geographic Location: Professionals from developed countries like the United States or Canada have higher link building costs. In contrast, outsourcing to countries with lower living costs can reduce expenses.
Pros and Cons of Outsourcing to Different Providers
Each option has pros and cons, whether outsourcing link building to an agency, hiring a freelancer, or building an in-house team.
Outsourcing to an Agency
Agencies are the most expensive option, typically charging monthly retainers or project-based fees. Costs can vary significantly depending on the scope and scale of services.
Pros
- Comprehensive Service: Agencies provide a full range of services, from strategy development to execution, including access to specialized tools and expert teams.
- Scalability: Agencies can easily scale efforts up or down based on your needs.
- Expertise and Results: You’re paying for a team of experts with industry-specific knowledge and proven results.
Cons
- High Cost: The upfront investment can be substantial, making it a less viable option for small businesses or those with limited budgets.
- Less Control: You might have limited involvement in the day-to-day processes, and the agency may need to align with your unique goals fully.
- Overkill for Small Needs: Agency services can feel excessive for smaller businesses or those with less complex link-building needs.
Hiring a Freelancer
Freelancers charge hourly rates or per project. They are more affordable for smaller projects or companies with limited budgets.
Pros
- Flexibility: Freelancers allow you to engage their services as needed without long-term commitments.
- Lower Upfront Costs: Freelancers typically cost less than agencies or in-house experts. They are best for short-term projects or small-scale link building efforts.
- Direct Communication: You have more control and direct interaction with the freelancer.
Cons
- Quality Variability: The quality of work can vary depending on the freelancer’s experience and workload.
- Limited Resources: Freelancers may have access to tools, resources, or team support that are different from those of agencies. This could limit their effectiveness on larger campaigns.
- Less Consistency: For ongoing work, freelancers may become less reliable over time, especially if they’re balancing multiple clients.
Employing an In-House Link Building Expert
Hiring an in-house expert is often the most expensive long-term option.
Pros
- Full Integration: An in-house expert is deeply immersed in your brand and can collaborate seamlessly with other departments.
- Dedicated Focus: With a full-time role, an in-house expert offers consistency and a dedicated focus on your link building strategy.
- Long-Term Investment: Over time, an in-house expert can develop a deep understanding of your needs and deliver tailored strategies that evolve with your brand.
Cons
- High Upfront and Ongoing Costs: Hiring an in-house expert involves a significant financial commitment, not just in salary but also in benefits, training, and overhead.
- Limited Flexibility: An in-house expert might not be a good fit for businesses with fluctuating link-building needs or those that need them seasonally.
- Resource Intensive: Unlike freelancers or agencies, hiring and maintaining an in-house employee can be a heavy burden.
The Value Provided by a Link Building Expert
Link builders traditionally concentrate on attaining high-quality and worthy backlinks. By taking care of the acquisition, discussion, and placements, they relieve other internal teams of responsibility to attend to other matters. Let’s explore how valuable these experts are:
Expertise In Strategic Link Acquisition
Link building experts employ various innovative strategies to acquire authoritative and industry-relevant links. Here are some of their unique approaches:
- The Skyscraper Technique: This involves identifying high-performing content in a niche, creating a superior version, and reaching out to sites linking to the original. They use tools like BuzzSumoto to find popular content and improve it. Then, using Ahrefs or Semrush, they find sites that link to the original piece and contact them, highlighting how their improved content adds more value.
- Leveraging HARO (Help A Reporter Out): With HARO link building, they can earn high-quality backlinks by responding to journalist queries. They also provide valuable insights to increase their chances of being featured in media outlets and earning authoritative backlinks.
- Conducting Competitor Backlink Analysis: They analyze competitors' backlink profiles to identify valuable opportunities, using tools like Backlink Gap to compare backlinks.
- Broken Link Building: Find broken links on other websites and suggest your content as a replacement. They contact site owners by suggesting other content as a suitable replacement.
Time-Saving Benefits of Professional Link Management
Link building experts help businesses save time and resources by efficiently managing the complex process of acquiring high-quality backlinks. Here's how these specialists help companies streamline their link building efforts:
- Effective Communication: These professionals know how to craft personalized, compelling outreach messages that are more likely to resonate with potential link partners. They know how to enhance engagement and response rates, which can avoid the trial-and-error process.
- Network Utilization: Their pre-existing connections with website owners, bloggers, journalists, and influencers streamline the outreach process. This cuts down on the time required to find and approach potential partners, ultimately leading to faster acquisition of quality backlinks.
- Social Media Engagement: They leverage social media platforms to build rapport and engage with potential link partners long before formal outreach begins. Their meaningful conversations provide value upfront, saving businesses the time they would otherwise spend on cold outreach attempts.
Professional link builders use advanced strategies and specialized tools to streamline every phase of the link acquisition process:
- Outreach Tools: Experts use powerful outreach platforms that automate target identification, contact data collection, and follow-up management tasks. These tools allow for more efficient link building campaign execution, reducing the need for manual tracking.
- Targeted Lists: Experts have a link building plan and highly targeted lists of sites and prospects, ensuring every outreach message is sent to the right person. By maintaining detailed, organized lists, they avoid redundant outreach and maximize the effectiveness of each message.
- Workflow Management: They implement streamlined workflows to organize every step of the link acquisition process. This includes creating detailed partnership spreadsheets, tracking communication history, and auditing contact lists regularly to ensure no leads are missed.
Delivers Measurable Results through Enhanced Rankings and Conversions
Link building can enhance a website's performance in several key areas: positioning in search engine results, organic visits, and actual conversions. Here are the link building benefits that contribute to a website's overall success.
- Impact on Search Engine Rankings: Link building directly influences search engine rankings. Search engines like Google consider backlinks as votes of confidence from other websites, assuming their content is valuable and relevant to users. Pages ranking first in Google search results have an average of 3.8 times more backlinks than competing pages.
- Increase in Organic Traffic: As link building efforts improve search engine rankings, websites experience a corresponding increase in organic traffic. Ahrefs found a direct correlation between a website's number of links and monthly organic traffic it receives.
- Boost in Conversions and Revenue: Backlinks from relevant publications and reviewers are particularly valuable. They attract individuals seeking to purchase within a specific niche, further contributing to the bottom line.
Evaluating Cost vs. Value
If you're deciding whether to invest in expert link building services. Do you focus on upfront costs or the long-term payoff? Here’s how to make informed decisions.
Short-Term Costs vs. Long-Term Gains
The decision to outsource link building services may appear costly to businesses. This is especially true when the company is small or a start-up firm that has to invest in marketing in the initial stages. Still, the overall effectiveness of professional link building speaks about continual and gradual SEO enhancements without depending on paid traffic sources.
For example, if an e-commerce company just started offering various products online, it might use paid ads to generate high traffic. This can bring advantages and fast results, but it is an expensive continuous activity that won’t be profitable once it stops paying for ads. On the other hand, employing link building services might be costly initially but yield positive results.
Measuring Success Through Metrics
When assessing the value of link building experts, you can use these indicators to see how effective their services are:
- Organic Traffic Growth: As a key sign of effective link building, organic traffic growth can be measured by tracking the percentage increase in organic sessions month-over-month or year-over-year, monitoring the growth in unique visitors from organic search, and analyzing the rise in page views driven by organic traffic.
- Keyword Rankings Improvement: Improvement in keyword rankings means better visibility for targeted keywords. Metrics to monitor include the number of keywords ranking in the top 10 positions, average position improvements for target keywords, and higher rankings for competitive head terms. Tools like Google Search Console or SEO platforms can track these changes.
- Domain Authority Growth: Predicts how well a website might rank on search engine results pages. Track the overall increase in your DA score, compare your DA growth to competitors, and assess the rate of improvement over time. Generally, a DA score between 40 and 50 is strong, while scores of 60 to 100 are considered exceptional.
When Is Hiring a Link Building Expert Worth It?
While building links is an essential part of improving your website's search engine rankings, there are specific situations where hiring an expert will most likely pay off:
- Highly Competitive Industries: Professional link building can be a game-changer, especially in competitive sectors. Examples include e-commerce sites competing for product-related keywords, finance institutions striving for visibility, and real estate and law firms looking to boost local SEO performance.
- Large-Scale Campaigns: Professional management is essential for enterprise-level websites with numerous product or service pages, multi-location businesses, or content-heavy sites. A link-building expert can effectively scale outreach, manage relationships with multiple publishers, and maintain quality across a high volume of backlinks.
- New Websites: Websites with minimal initial backlink profiles, such as startups launching their first online presence, small businesses moving to digital marketing, or rebranded companies with new domains, often benefit greatly from expert link building.
Key Takeaway
Hiring a link building expert is an investment with long-term value. While it can be costly, the benefits can be significant. It's not just about getting backlinks but about getting valuable ones for your website’s performance. When you consider the time saved, zero penalties, and the chance for steady growth, the value of link building experts is clear.
While link building may promise many positive outcomes, businesses should prioritize content creation, improve user experience, and build a strong community. These strategies can build a better online presence and offer real value to your audience. The key to long-term success is focusing on what your website offers, producing high-quality content, and engaging with users.
Looking for a link building expert and comprehensive SEO services? tiny lever is an SEO marketing agency that crafts SEO-optimized content and practices ethical link building. We’re always iterating our approach based on historical performance so we can fine-tune our SEO strategy and maximize results. Contact us via david@tinylevermarketing.com or fill out this form to grow your brand’s online presence sustainably and organically.
