High quality backlinks the most important ranking factor if you asked me. Quality backlinks are also the hardest to procure. Even SEO professionals have mentioned that link building is the hardest task in the SEO process.
To second this, Ahrefs studied 14 billion web pages and they revealed that 96.55% get no organic traffic from Google. They found out that one of the top reasons for this being the absence of backlinks.
You can understand why many SEO agencies themselves use white labelled outsourced link building solutions when serving clients.
Nonetheless, Fiverr is here to save the day… or is it?
There are clear 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, conversions from SEO efforts etc. Secondly, outsourcing your link building can be more cost effective than hiring full time SEO specialists.
The True Cost of a Link
The cost of a done for you high-quality backlink is estimated to range from $150 to $300. This is due to the extensive effort involved in link building. Typically, most outsourced link-building agencies provide either guest post placements or link insertions as part of their link-building services.
Here’s an example of a “white hat” link building agency’s price chart:
That is a whooping $160 USD for ONE link.
Yes, good SEO isn’t cheap. You’ll need SEO tools for research, outreach tools, virtual assistants to project manage.
Then, you need to manage outreach, track replies, and negotiate. Secondly, your team must audit 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.
Not to mention, a significant portion of sites—50% or more—request some form of payment for publishing on their website.
Poor Quality Outsourcing – Sub Par Providers
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 do follow back links for only two hundred Singapore dollars. That’s $2 per high quality do follow back links!
These offers are typically “too good to be true.”
In their deliverables, they may rely on “black-hat” SEO tactics, such as automated link generation, backlinks from private blog networks (PBNs), or links from irrelevant, low-quality websites.
Such link-building strategies can tarnish your brand’s reputation by associating it with untrustworthy sites or even result in penalties from search engines!
This is why I took link building into my own hands and developed a well-oiled system to manage it. Supported by a team of trained virtual assistants, SEO tools and a few simple ChatGPT-powered AI workflows.
Criteria for Selecting a Quality Link Building Service
You’ll want to know the quality of links pointing to your website. Imagine if there are hundreds of pornographic links pointing to your website. Is that trust worthy in search engines eyes?
Now, to be specific, our Singaporean led SEO agency looks at a couple of key metrics when it comes to building links.
Every link building decision is manually audited by a team. Yes, they are nonetheless assisted by a couple of cool A.I. workflows.
Link Relevancy
A high-quality service should prioritize securing backlinks from sites closely related to your niche. For example, if you’re a fitness brand, links from health, wellness, or sports-related websites carry more weight than random, irrelevant sites. Relevant links signal to search engines that your website provides authoritative content in your industry.
Our team uses Majestic SEO to determine link relevancy. Majestic SEO provides you with topical trust flow.
Quality of Organic Traffic
The quality of organic traffic one of the key factors a link building agency should account for when assessing link-building opportunities.
Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush can help analyze a website’s organic traffic by showing you the keywords it ranks for and the estimated traffic it generates.
When evaluating a potential backlink source, look for keywords that are related to your niche or industry. They don’t have to be 100% niche related. You can highly consider parallel niches too. For example, if a small business service site links to my SEO agency site. That’s 100% fine too.
Quantity of Organic Traffic
There are different opinions on this, however, it’s a consensus amongst the SEO community that sites with at least 300 – 1000 organic traffic show that they are trusted by search engines.
Hence, a credible link-building service will prioritise links from such sites, as this indicates the potential for real visitors to click through to your site, improving both SEO and referral traffic.
Domain Authority/ Rating (DA/DR)
In my experience, high domain authority or rating is one of the most overused pitches. There are countless high-domain-rating sites out there that struggle to rank for any meaningful keywords.
Domain rating can even be “manipulated” by sending low-quality links to inflate the score. This issue became even more apparent after the helpful content update, as many high-DR sites saw their traffic plummet due to thin or poor-quality content.
From our perspective, domain authority or domain rating isn’t a critical direct ranking factor. Our link-building team uses it cautiously and sparingly when assessing a website’s overall strength and credibility.
How to Budget for an Outsourced Solution?
A good link-building campaign is typically executed over a 6 to 12-month period. Hence, it’s important to start with the end in mind: how many links are needed to outrank your competitors?
Begin by calculating your link gap—the difference between the number of high-quality backlinks your competitors have and those your site currently holds.
Use SEMrush to analyze the backlink profiles of your top-ranking competitors in your niche. I’ve written in detail on how to calculate an accurate backlink gap. Once you identify the gap, work backward to estimate the number of links required to close it. This includes calculating the cost per link, which typically ranges from $150–$300 for a high-quality, done-for-you link.
Transparency and Documentation
Ever paid one of those agencies and felt like nothing was actually being done? When choosing an outsourced link-building solution, always request that they show you the anchor texts and backlinks from the websites.
Transparency and documentation are key pillars of a reliable outsourced link-building service.
Conclusion
To sum it up, link building is undeniably one of the most challenging yet crucial aspects of SEO.
High-quality backlinks IS the needle mover.
While outsourcing link-building efforts can save time and free up operational bandwidth, it is essential to not cheap out on this. Investing in reputable providers that provides transparency and relevancy ensures you’re building a penalty free foundation for your website.
