Yes… the black box of link building. The truth? Good link building is time consuming and labour intensive. It is also said to be the most difficult part of SEO. I hated it for years. This is also backed up by a public poll done by Gael Breton from AuthorityHackers.
Even the professional SEOs consider link building the MOST challenging task in SEO.
Yet, today we’re able to streamline link building through automation, saving time without compromising quality. I built a process that leverages automation and simple LLM tools to perform certain link building tasks traditionally handled manually.
From prospecting and outreach to reply management.
So how affordable can link building be? SEO can be a wild west at times and you’ll be exposed to all types of links from different SEOs. There’s Fiverr styled links, forum link building, blog commenting link building and more. Fiverr is notorious for offering links at dirt cheap prices.
Today, you can go on Fiverr and acquire backlinks for your website. Hundreds of them for probably $5 per link.
Now… can quality link building really be dirt cheap through backlink service providers on Fiverr?
The True Cost of a Backlink
High quality backlinks are one of the top two important ranking factors if you asked me. That’s because high quality backlinks are the hardest to procure.
To second this, Ahrefs studied 14 billion web pages and revealed that 96.55% get no organic traffic from Google. They found out that one of the top reasons for this is the absence of backlinks.
You can understand why many SEO agencies themselves use white labelled outsourced link building solutions when serving clients.
According to an Ahrefs study, the average backlink costs $83. (Note: this is before factoring in your content costs if you’re providing a guest post in exchange for a backlink.)
How to Figure Out How Many Backlinks You Need
So do you automatically go out and procure as many backlinks as you need? No. Through examining your backlink gap with top competitors, you can estimate what it might actually cost for your site to reasonably increase your rankings, hence organic traffic.
Not all backlinks are created equal.
Here’s an example of spammy backlinks from my competitor. Google devalues these backlinks, yet they are still counted by most backlink analysis software!
The key here is to understand how to properly analyse good links, and then look at the gap (number of links) between you and your competitor. There is no foolproof mathematical way, but this can give you a good estimate.
Quality backlinks are often placed on quality websites with real traffic that rank organically for keywords relevant to your niche. These sites often request a placement fee, and you’ve also got to get a writer to produce the content for the guest article.
For example, if you’re a law firm website, you have no business getting backlinks from education websites. You are ‘supposed’ to be getting backlinks from other legal sites and sites that are related to your industry.
This is relevance, which can be roughly estimated with Majestic SEO’s trust flow metric. I won’t be getting into my process for auditing a link in this article, but I hope you get my point: there’s quite a bit of work that goes into merely auditing links.
Can You Really Get Cheap Links from Fiverr?
Butttttt Marcus, isn’t Fiverr promising to get me to a domain rating of 80 for only $10 per link?! How can these link brokers charge up to $300 per link?!
Yes, there IS a difference in quality when outsourcing. Be warned: engaging subpar providers can lead to penalties or harm your brand’s reputation.
One search on Fiverr, and you’ll be inundated with promises to skyrocket your domain authority to a million for just a few dollars.
Spammy Fiverr link building services often promise hundreds or even thousands of backlinks at unbelievably low prices. Here’s an example where you can get hundreds of dofollow backlinks for only two hundred Singapore dollars. That’s $2 per high quality dofollow backlink!
These offers are typically “too good to be true.”
In their deliverables, they may rely on black hat SEO tactics, such as fully automated link generation or links from irrelevant, low quality websites, known as link farms.
Such link building strategies can tarnish your website’s reputation (in Google’s eyes) by associating it with untrustworthy sites or even result in penalties from search engines!
Some old school link building strategies involve participating in forums and then linking back in your post signature. This leads to individuals spamming and creating threads hoping they are able to drive traffic back to their site. Today, most forums aren’t going to like outbound links (and a lot have disabled them), and it’s not a scalable strategy.
The Do It Yourself Cost of Link Building
If you want to bring link building in house, you can too. You’ll need some paid SEO tools for research, outreach tools and/or virtual assistants to assist.
You’ll need to manage outreach campaigns, track replies, and negotiate. Secondly, your process must include auditing the quality of the websites. On top of that, you’ll need a content writer to craft the guest article for the site where the link will be placed.
Yes, a significant portion of sites request some form of payment for publishing on their website. This is the ugly truth about ‘free SEO’. It’s never truly free.
To scale, you must break it down to a process:
- Link Prospecting
- Outreach
- Content
- Placement and documentation
This is our project management process:
I get web researchers, outreach managers, SEO project managers and content writers all working on one single sheet:
- Tracking and documenting every link built
- Tracking and documenting relationships built so that they can be repurposed in the future
The Labour Cost of an Offshore Team
If you’re looking to use guest blogging as a way to get backlinks, then you’ll require virtual assistants (VAs) for your link building process. I enjoy using the Upwork platform. It has a good HR system, a billing system, and helps track my coordination with freelancers. I recommend it. They’ve increased the fees to use the platform. However, it’s still pretty good.
Here’s a breakdown of the roles I typically hire to automate link building effectively:
- Link Prospector ($6 to $8 SGD per Hour)
The link prospecting role is to identify potential link opportunities. Link prospectors are trained on tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs or Majestic SEO to find websites relevant to your niche and evaluate them based on factors like relevance, content quality and traffic.
The prospector ensures you’re targeting the right websites from the start.
- Outreach Manager ($14 to $18 per Hour)
Once the prospects are identified, an outreach manager takes over. They handle all communications, from sending outreach emails to managing responses in your inbox.
- Content Writer ($40 to $70 SGD per Article)
Our link building system is mostly guest article oriented. Hence, well written guest posts are required. I hire dedicated content writers from Upwork who create content tailored to the requirements of the target websites, ensuring our placements are accepted.
Total Labour Cost of a Link Building Campaign Executed In House
Here’s an estimate of the breakdown I myself faced when building a link building campaign.
You can expect to face such costs for a good quality link building outreach campaign.
| Cost Category | Details | Monthly Cost (SGD) |
|---|---|---|
| Labour Costs | ||
| Link Prospector | 20 hours @ $7/hour | $140 |
| Outreach Manager | 15 hours @ $13.50/hour (email campaigns and follow ups) | $203 |
| Content Writers | 8 guest articles @ $55/article | $440 |
| Tools & Software | ||
| Ahrefs | Starter plan ($29 USD = $39 SGD) | $39 |
| Majestic SEO | Standard plan ($50 USD = $67 SGD) | $67 |
| Mailshake | Basic plan ($29 USD = $39 SGD) | $39 |
| Hunter.IO | Starter plan ($49 USD = $66 SGD) | $66 |
| Google Workspace | Business Starter plan | $11 |
| Site Placement Fees | ||
| Guest Post Placements | 8 sites requiring payment ($100 to $150 SGD avg = $125/site) | $1,000 |
| Total Monthly Cost | For 8 High Quality Backlinks | $2,182 |
| Cost Per Backlink | $2,182 ÷ 8 links | $273 |
You’re expecting to look at around $2000 SGD in costs to place 8 high quality links if you build up an in house link building team.
This is also assuming you have the technical knowledge to train your team to prospect, communicate and place links optimally!
The Cost of Using a Link Broker
There can be benefits to outsourcing. It frees up your in house SEO or digital marketing team to look at SEO as a holistic activity, such as focusing on content and conversions. Secondly, outsourcing link building can be more cost effective than hiring full time SEO link builders.
The cost of a done for you high quality backlink is estimated to range from $150 to $300 USD. The pricing is somewhat similar to doing it in house.
Here’s an example of a quality link building agency’s price chart:
Typically, most outsourced link building agencies provide either guest post placements or link insertions as part of their link building services.
Nonetheless, it is $160 USD for ONE link. That translates to around $200 SGD.
Good links are pricey because of the extensive effort involved in link building.
So How Affordable Can Good Link Building Be?
Yes, we’ve all heard the age old story that original, helpful content that fulfils the user’s query is a ranking factor. Then you’ve got the nerdy technical SEO considerations that include interlinking, silo structure and on page SEO tweaks.
Yet, link building is one of, if not THE top ranking factor.
Here, I use guest blogging as my main link acquisition strategy. You’re simply writing high quality relevant content and offering it to another blog or site. It is scalable and I can make it into a process.
Then again, this process requires content writers, backlink prospectors, and an outreach team to put everything together. Yes, good SEO isn’t cheap.
If you’re looking to invest in link building, I suggest skipping Fiverr. You’ll be way better off engaging a high quality link building agency that is able to do customised outreach and place high quality links that are highly relevant to your site.
This isn’t just a matter of affordability but the end outcome. If you aren’t looking to invest in quality link building, then perhaps SEO is not for you at this stage of your business.
Link building is undeniably one of the most challenging yet crucial aspects of SEO. It is not a surprise that high quality backlinks are the needle mover.
