Countless hours of research and experimentation have led many digital marketers to reach the same conclusion:
If you want to rank higher on Google and generate more organic traffic, you need a high-quality backlink profile.
As proof, consider Ahrefs’ recent research from late 2023. Their team discovered a positive correlation between the amount of referring domains a site has and the amount of organic traffic it generates.
In other words, more referring domains means more traffic!
They also found that pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords.
However, link-building is a time-consuming process that typically proves to be too much for most businesses.
That’s why they choose to outsource link-building instead.
This is where a business pays an experienced digital marketing agency to build backlinks for them, saving them the hassle. They also get to capitalize on the agency’s existing expertise and link networks, which is definitely one of the perks (but not the only one by a long shot).
Link-building requires quite a bit of expertise, staffing, and an existing infrastructure to truly yield results, which is why more and more businesses are choosing to outsource.
Yet, it can be challenging to find a suitable link-building partner, let alone actually achieve your goals.
Fear not; we’re here to help.
In this article, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide to outsourcing your link-building, so stay tuned to learn more.
What is Link-Building Outsourcing?
Outsourcing occurs whenever a company hires an external provider to perform tasks that are typically handled internally.
In other words, it’s where you hire someone else to do your work for you.
Therefore, link-building outsourcing involves hiring an individual or digital marketing agency to build backlinks for your website.
It’s common to outsource link-building since it’s such an involved, time-consuming task (that at times can be extremely tedious).
Most small and medium-sized enterprises don’t want to bog down their staff with link-building duties, and hiring an in-house link-building team is extremely expensive. Consider the fact that hiring just one employee costs companies anywhere from $4,000 to $20,000 – and that DOESN’T include salary or benefits.
When you factor in the average salary for an experienced SEO link-builder, which is around $98,000 (according to ZipRecruiter), hiring just one could cost your company $118,000 for one year of employment.
Compare that to the average cost of an outsourced backlink, which is $500 – $1,000 per link. If you had a budget of only $20,000, you could still build 20 – 40 high-quality backlinks through outsourcing. That same $20,000 wouldn’t even cover the recruiting costs for adding a single link-builder to your team.
When you crunch the numbers like this, it quickly becomes clear why so many companies choose to outsource their link-building: the cost savings alone are worth it.
What does the link-building process involve?
We’ve mentioned a few times that link-building can be a cumbersome process, but why exactly is that?
Here’s a quick look at the core components of link-building (coincidentally, these are also the tasks link-building agencies will perform when you outsource to them):
- Developing custom strategies. Each website will have unique needs when it comes to link-building, which is why professional link-builders always develop custom strategies. They need to conduct a thorough audit of the website’s current SEO performance and backlink profile to understand what work needs to be done. The client’s industry and niche also matter as certain link-building methods work best for certain industries.
- Analyzing competitors. The purpose of link-building is to outrank your competitors on search engines like Google, and you can’t do that without analyzing them first. Expert link-builders always analyze their clients’ competitors to uncover any pressing backlink gaps, which are where a client’s competitor has a lot more backlinks than they do. This lets the link-builder know precisely how many backlinks they need to build to ‘close the gap.’
- Conducting email outreach to bloggers and website owners. This is one of the more time-consuming and tedious aspects of link-building. Identifying a backlink opportunity online isn’t enough. To make it a reality, a link-builder has to reach out to site owners, bloggers, and journalists to secure backlink placements. Common techniques include trying to write guest blogs, adding valuable link insertions (like backlinks to relevant products), and fixing broken links. It can take a lot of emailing and prospecting before a single link is built, which is why some find the process frustrating (and choose to outsource).
- Creating content. Content creation can also be part of the link-building outsourcing process, although it depends on the provider. Some agencies stick with outreach and fixing broken links, while others opt to create content like guest blogs, infographics, and videos to attract backlinks.
- Monitoring progress and analyzing reports. A link-builder’s work is never truly done, as after the links are built, it’s time to analyze the results. Link-builders constantly check to see when their backlinks take effect, and if they were able to achieve their desired goals, such as outranking a competitor. If their goals weren’t achieved, it’s back to the drawing board.
As you can see, quite a bit goes into link-building. The fact that it’s such a comprehensive process is yet another reason why companies choose to outsource it.
What are the Benefits of Outsourcing Link-Building?
Besides saving you from a complicated and tedious process, there are plenty of other benefits to outsourcing your link-building.
We’ve already mentioned how outsourcing is way more cost-effective than hiring an in-house SEO team, which is why smaller companies **** it.
Here’s a look at the other benefits that we haven’t mentioned yet.
Outsourcing gains you access to SEO expertise
It’s not just that link-building is a time-consuming process; it’s also extremely intricate and changes all the time.
As a result, it’s not something anyone can pick up and learn within 30 minutes.
Instead, link-building takes years of experience and expertise to master. Not only that, but link-builders have to stay on top of countless Google algorithm updates, SEO trends, and new strategies.
What worked yesterday in link-building most certainly does not work today.
Instead of giving yourself a crash course in SEO and trying to stay on top of algorithm updates, it’s much easier to just outsource link-building to the professionals who have been doing it for years.
It’s a scalable solution
Scaling is an extremely difficult process for any organization, not just startups.
Why is that?
It’s because it inevitably becomes too costly to manage the human capital involved. In other words, as you scale your operations, you have to scale your team, too, which comes at a cost.
The great thing about link-building outsourcing (and outsourcing in general) is that you don’t have this problem.
As your business expands its capabilities, you can scale your link-building efforts without having to hire additional in-house staff.
The results?
Your business will continue to grow, and so will your online presence!
You gain access to existing infrastructure
Link-building en masse isn’t something anyone can do. It takes an existing infrastructure to be able to consistently build backlinks from lots of different domains.
While an individual working alone can build a backlink or two, they won’t be able to help a company that needs to build 100+ backlinks to close a gap between them and a competitor.
By outsourcing your link-building to an experienced agency, you gain access to their existing relationships, partnerships, and outreach capabilities. Needless to say, this makes the process way more effective. These agencies are used to building tons of backlinks at breakneck speed, and they have the infrastructure to make it happen.
Superior risk management
Believe it or not, link-building is actually quite a risky endeavor.
This is because there are certain link-building tactics that violate Google’s guidelines and qualify as ‘link schemes.’
Google doesn’t want websites building tons of backlinks just to rank higher in its search results.
Why is that?
It’s because Google’s reputation as a quality search engine is on the line. If a website wants to rank at the top of Google for keywords related to their business, they may engage in manipulative tactics like using private blog networks (PBNs).
These are vast networks of ‘dummy sites’ that only exist to link back to a core site (the one attempting to rank #1 on Google). As a result, these websites are garbage and provide no value to users.
Also, if Google allows sites to rank #1 that use manipulative tactics, their content may be subpar in quality, or they may make false claims (which can lead to lawsuits and other bad things). That’s why Google cracks down on PBNs and other link-building techniques that violate its guidelines with manual penalties.
If your site receives a manual penalty, it will disappear from the search results, rendering you practically invisible to your audience.
By outsourcing your link-building, the professionals you work with will know how to avoid costly penalties, which is a plus.
How to Outsource Your Link-Building: A Step-by-Step Guide
Okay, now that you’re clear about what outsourcing can do for your business, let’s learn how to put it into practice.
Before you go hiring the first SEO agency you see that offers outsourcing, ensure that you complete the following steps first. That way, you’ll avoid hiring an agency that won’t help you achieve your SEO goals (and may actually do more harm than good).
Step #1: Ensure your website is ready to outsource link-building
Most link-building agencies charge by the link, meaning you’ll purchase services from them on a link-by-link basis.
This means a few things:
- Your outsource provider won’t fully take over your link-building strategy (unless you go with a managed service)
- You need to know how many links you need to build to achieve your goals beforehand
- Your on-page and technical SEO needs to be on point for the backlinks you build to have an impact
The last point is the most important because, without flawless on-page and technical SEO factors, it’ll be difficult to rank for your most important keywords.
For example, if your technical SEO is out of whack and you have duplicate content (two pages trying to rank for the same keyword), both pages may disappear from the SERPs (search engine results pages) entirely.
At that point, it won’t matter how many backlinks are pointing at each page since they aren’t even ranking.
Steps to take before outsourcing link-building
Before you pay an agency to build links for you, ensure that:
- Your content is valuable, engaging, and well-written
- Each page contains at least 1,000 words (less than that is labeled as ‘thin’ content by Google)
- Use relevant keywords you discover through research (you can use our free keyword planner to find them)
- Include keywords in title tags, metadata, URLs, image alt tags, and the first 100 words of your content
- You don’t have any indexing errors (you can check for them using Google Search Console’s Index Coverage Report)
- Fix any broken links (especially if they direct to important pages)
Signs that your website is ready to outsource link-building
Once your SEO is in order, you can start to consider outsourcing your link-building.
Signs that you should start outsourcing include:
- Your content is ranking on search engines, but not as high as you’d like
- Most of your direct competitors have higher domain authority than you
- You’ve put together a comprehensive SEO strategy, and link-building is the only missing aspect
- A web page you can’t outrank has more backlinks than you do
These are all signs that your SEO strategy needs link-building in order to truly thrive. In each scenario, valuable backlinks are what will move the SEO needle most, especially when trying to outrank competitors or improve domain authority.
Step #2: Give yourself a barebones link-building education
Before researching outsourcing providers, you should have a basic grasp of the core tenets of link-building.
Why?
You should because if you don’t, you risk getting taken advantage of by less-than-truthful digital marketing agencies (trust us, they’re out there).
Familiarize yourself with concepts like domain authority, link juice, backlink audits, and common link-building techniques. Knowing the lingo will also help you understand the reports a link-building agency will give you on their progress and successes.
To make things easy on you, check out our extensive link-building guide from our Learning Hub.
Step #3: Determine your budget
At this point, you know for sure that you need to outsource your link-building, and you’re familiar with the basics.
You know the difference between a high-quality backlink and a total waste of time, which will save you from getting hustled.
Now, it’s time to plan out your budget. We’ve already mentioned that the average backlink prices range from $500 – $1,000 (some ‘premium’ links are far more expensive than that).
While the costs tend to be far lower than hiring in-house, link-building still doesn’t come cheap.
There are lots of reasons for this including:
- The amount of outreach involved
- Required expertise
- Strategizing
- Content creation
- Placement fees
You should come up with a monthly budget for backlinks, as you’ll want to remain consistent with your link-building efforts.
Let’s say you have $20,000 allotted for link-building each month. At that rate, you could build roughly 20 – 40 links each month, which isn’t bad. If you’re trying to bridge a backlink gap consisting of around 200 links, it’ll take 5 – 10 months to reach your goal.
This is the kind of math necessary to determine a link-building budget, so get to number crunching.
Step #4: Select a provider
Alright, now we’re at the most important step. It’s finally time to start doing some online research!
When it comes to outsourcing link-building, you’ll have two options: freelancers or digital marketing agencies.
Here are the pros and cons of each:
- Freelancers cost less but often lack the resources and capabilities of an agency
- Agencies have top-tier resources, infrastructure, and staffing – but are on the pricier side
Ultimately, your choice will come down to your SEO needs.
If you only need to build a small number of high-quality links to outrank the competition, you may be better off using a highly-rated freelancer (specializing in building valuable links in your field, of course).
On the flip side, if you need to close a sizable backlink gap (think hundreds of links), then you’re much better off going with an agency. They’ll have the resources and connections to build lots of links at once, which is what you need if you’re trying to close a huge gap.
Here are other crucial factors to look for when looking for outsourcing providers:
- Glowing testimonials and reviews (both on the provider’s website AND third-party sites)
- Specific expertise (they should know your niche)
- Years of experience and a solid track record
- A pricing structure that aligns with your budget (it’s nice to have premium options for future scaling)
- Understand their communication structure (how will they report results to you? How can you get in touch to ask questions?)
- Use tools like our SEO audit tool and backlink checker to check their website (actions speak louder than words; they should have flawless SEO metrics and lots of backlinks)
Red flags to watch out for
Lastly, here are some red flags that should have you turning tail and heading in the opposite direction:
- Fast turnaround. Agencies offering fast turnaround for link-building are often up to manipulative tactics that could land you in *** water with Google. Quality link-building takes time.
- Cheap links. Freelancers and agencies offering dirt-cheap links are not to be trusted. You get what you pay for, and a $5 link won’t do anything to help your rankings.
- Making guarantees. This is another sign of untruthfulness, as it’s impossible to make 100% guarantees with link-building.
Start Outsourcing Your Link-Building to Achieve Long-Term SEO Success
To recap what we’ve covered so far, outsourcing link-building is a great way for smaller companies to save time and money.
Yet, you need to make sure that you’re ready to outsource before making the decision.
Are you looking to outsource not just link-building, but ALL of your SEO?
Then you definitely need to look into HOTH X, our fully managed SEO service. It’s where we hook you up with a dedicated campaign manager who will develop a comprehensive SEO strategy for your business.
Rather than just outsource your link-building, why not outsource the entire SEO process so you don’t have to worry about it?
HOTH X includes link-building, on-page SEO, and technical SEO all in one package, so don’t wait to try it out!
