All business owners, at some point, face a dilemma whether or not to invest into link building. If you have been looking at link building agencies and their pricing, you have probably noticed that the cost varies from sub $50 per link to above $1,000 for a link on high-authority sites.
Due to their limited resources, many usually look for cheaper alternatives as the price of premium link building services simply doesn’t seem worth it.
While that is a fair reasoning for someone inexperienced in link building, when you dive into the field, you quickly realize that proper link building simply can’t be done for a nickel.
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In this article, we will dissect what a proper link building campaign should look like and everything it entails.
But first, let’s quickly touch on the importance of link building in general.
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Why is link building crucial for your website growth?
A big SEO survey asked more than 600 SEOs about the importance of link building for businesses. 72% of participants answered that link building is a crucial ranking factor.
But why is it so crucial to build external links pointing to your website?
Do you want your business to be found online? Do you want people coming to your site without you having to spend thousands of dollars on paid promotion?
If the answer is yes, it means that you would love to have big organic traffic. And the only way to increase your organic traffic is by getting and building links from relevant authority sites in your niche.
As most of the link building projects are done by sharing and publishing content on sites where your target audience like to gather, link building often comes with additional benefits like:
- building brand awareness
- increasing brand trust
- building relationships with influencers that have the potential to send referral traffic (potential leads) to your website
- building other types of partnerships that can have a positive effect on your business growth
Cost breakdown of premium link building services
The main difference between agencies that ask on average $500 for a link and those that charge $50 for the same is the quality of the link itself.
That being said, there are agencies that overprice their services. To have an easier time noticing when someone has been underdelivering, here is what a premium link building service should look like:
- They take time to research your target audience
- They use non-generic personalized pitches when reaching out to influencers and editors
- They only target reputable sites in your industry that have good metrics (decent DA, steady organic traffic, clean backlink profile)
- They let you be involved by reviewing things like topic suggestions and preapproving sites to send pitches to
- They produce high-quality content
- That content is published on relevant sites under your name and bio (inserting links in an existing post doesn’t bring you nearly as much brand trust and awareness)
Now that we got that out of the way, let’s discuss 3 things that have the biggest impact on the price of link building in general.
#1 Personalized manual outreach
Assuming that we’re talking only about white-hat methods of link building, the first and very time-consuming step is manually outreaching to relevant businesses. In order to have a satisfying response and conversion rate, it’s crucial to research the website you’re pitching to.
For instance, if you’re looking to build a backlink from Semrush, you need to research their audience and type of content that’s working for them. As you can imagine, it requires time to come up with exciting article ideas that resonate with their audience. On top of that, the stronger the site is, the details for pitching and content submission are harder to match.
Finding relevant sites, writing personalized pitches, and sending timely follow-ups is extremely time-consuming and it doesn’t even include all of the back and forth where you have to exchange 10+ emails to sort out certain specifics that might arise.
#2 Content production
The times of writing generic content and ranking your website with a few spammy backlinks are far behind us. Nowadays, this strategy can lead to a penalty which can cost you more to recover from than if you invested in high-quality link building service. Quality over quantity is a piece of advice to always follow.
Writing high-quality content that’s going to be published on an authoritative website requires a lot of effort that needs to go into research, writing, and editing.
Because of that, the rates of qualified writers are often between $30 and $200 per a standard 1000 word article (the price can vary a lot depending on the niche.)
Keep this in mind whenever someone says to you that they can build “high-quality links” for you in the sub $100 range.
#3 Access to powerful (but expensive) link building tools
On a small scale, successfully performing a link building campaign is possible without access to link building tools. However, the amount of time you can save and a number of opportunities you can find with the right tools is beyond compare.
For example, versatile tools that not only support link building but have a tremendous amount of extra features can cost over $1000 per month. If you don’t run a link building agency and you are not an enterprise, it is rarely worth it to invest in such expensive tools.
To give you a better picture, here is a list of essential tools for running a long-term link building campaign:
- Blogger outreach tools like Pitchbox, Buzzstream or Ninja Outreach
- SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Alexa
- Tools for finding the right contact information like Snov.io, Clearbit Connect, VoilaNorbert or Email hunter
The costs of link building tools can easily reach four-digit numbers, but the power and potential of these tools justify their price when they are used on a big enough scale.
Quality Has Its Price
The price to outsource link building process can seem high, but if the agency you are outsourcing to follows what we have outlined in this article, it’s always a better choice than some shady sites that let you buy 100 links for a few bucks.
Having a crucial process as link building in reputable and professional hands is well worth the money as organic traffic growth combined with funnel optimization is one of the best ways to drive revenue growth.
With a good business model and strategy, traffic will turn into leads and leads will convert into customers – and your returns will be far higher than investments.
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[…] They offer insanely low pricing. When content creation itself costs between $30 and $150, anyone that offers links for less $100 has to cut corners somewhere. Quality has its price. […]
Link building shouldn’t be considered as an expense.
Actually it is an investment which pays for a long term. It usually take a few months to see the result from link building but there are a few more things too keep in mind along with link building that is content writing and selecting anchor text.
One thing you must remember that links from low DA sites which are 100% relevant is more valuable to link from high DA sites which aren’t relevant.