How Much Does Link Building Cost

While developing your SEO strategy, you may come across the possibility of purchasing backlinks.

This subject is fraught with ambiguity. Some believe it is a horrible concept that will harm your brand, while others believe it is an excellent strategy to focus on.

So, what does link building do for your website’s authority and brand? Let us take a look at the end-to-end service that is link building!

Although some individuals have reservations about purchasing backlinks, the fact is that it may increase your website’s search engine results. The price of link building might be lower than you expect, too!

Link building is a vital component of any successful SEO campaign, and as we approach 2024, it is becoming increasingly critical to understand how pricing patterns in this business are developing.

The importance of high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites has never been higher, and organizations are always looking for new methods to improve their link building strategy.

It might range from $2400/month to $18000/month, depending on the path you choose with link development. However, each approach for outsourcing link building and acquiring connections has advantages and disadvantages.

We will go over all you need to know about link building costs and pricing in 2023 in this post. This post will present you with the information you need to manage the complex world of link building prices in 2023, whether you are a small company owner or a marketing expert.

In 2023, why are backlinks so significant?

Backlinks are still important in 2023 since they have a big influence on the SEO of your website. According to a recent poll, 91% of SEO specialists think backlinks are important ranking factors.

They inform search engines that your material is worthwhile, which raises its position in search results. Additionally, backlinks direct targeted visitors to your website, increasing conversion rates and revenue.

Additionally, they support the development of your website as a leader in the field, boosting credibility and trust. Therefore, whether natural or acquired, investing in backlinks is crucial for your SEO strategy.

What Is Paid link building?

When you purchase backlinks, you are effectively paying another website to connect to yours. It is a two-way street: you pay them money in exchange for a referral link.

The purpose of buying backlinks is to boost your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) by leveraging the authority of other websites.

This is why many individuals purchase backlinks. Backlinks are a crucial element in Google and other search engines’ algorithms for ranking web pages.

It is crucial to remember, however, that Google continuously modifies its algorithms to penalize websites that engage in black-hat SEO practices, such as purchasing low-quality or spammy backlinks.

As a result, it is critical to proceed with caution when purchasing backlinks and only engage with trusted suppliers. High-quality backlinks from reputable websites can boost your search ranks; however, low-quality connections might damage your site’s reputation and rating.

There are various different types of backlinks you can purchase. These are the most common among them:

• Editorial links
• Guest post links
• Blog comments
• Forum posts

What is Natural link building?

The phrase “natural link building” refers to backlinks that arise on their own without the website owner actively seeking them out via guest blogging, paid links, or other link building strategies.

Natural links are formed when other webmasters, bloggers, or website owners link to your material (blogs, images, products, videos, etc.) because they feel it will be useful to their readers and enrich the content of their own websites or pages.

Natural link building does not include guest posting, link exchanges, or any other link building strategies.

This strategy is preferred by Google and other search engines. Creating natural linkages, on the other hand, requires time and effort. It might take years for new websites to gain enough natural links and connections.

As a result, SEO professionals routinely acquire link building packages to supplement their off-page link building efforts themselves.

How Google Views Link Building

There may be a misconception that Google despises link builders because of the numerous algorithm adjustments (like Penguin) designed to discourage and battle spammy link building techniques.

These changes have completely destroyed several link building techniques, such as forum connections, directory listings, and PBNs.

However, that is a good thing because the widespread overuse of these cheap link building strategies has caused pages that do not actually deserve to rank highly to occupy the top spots.

While high-quality content that used only white-hat techniques or did not engage in any link building tactics at all was buried under several pages of results.

The adoption of these improvements has only emphasized the value of moral link development, enabling quality content (and ethical content marketing teams) to stand out from the crowd.

Google advises webmasters to concentrate on producing top-notch content that will inevitably garner backlinks from other reliable websites.

A trustworthy backlinks supplier places a strong emphasis on building high-quality backlinks through high-quality content marketing, which is comparable to gaining natural connections.

Why Should You Buy Backlinks?

You may be asking why you should think about purchasing backlinks for your website. The short answer is that it may improve your website’s search engine rankings, authority, and overall online visibility.

In this part, we will go over the most important reasons for purchasing backlinks and how they may help your website.

Boost your search engine rankings

Backlinks are seen as a vote of confidence in your website by search engines such as Google. Search engines are more likely to rank your site higher in search results if you have high-quality backlinks from trusted domains. This might increase your website’s exposure and organic visitors.

Increase domain authority

Domain authority is a measure that reflects your website’s legitimacy and reliability. Backlinks from reputable websites may boost your authority, making your website more desirable to both search engines and people.

Improve your internet visibility

By collecting backlinks from well-known websites in your industry, you may expose your website to a bigger audience. You have a higher chance of attracting new visitors and prospective clients as more people become aware of your website.

Drive targeted traffic

Receiving backlinks from relevant websites will most likely bring users who are interested in your products or services. This tailored traffic may result in improved engagement, fewer bounce rates, and maybe more conversions.

Increase indexing speed

Backlinks assist search engine crawlers in finding and indexing your website’s pages more rapidly. Faster indexing implies that the content of your website will be visible in search engine results sooner, making it simpler for users to reach your site.

Your Choices Concerning link building

It goes without saying that a link building strategy is a complex process with several stakeholders; writers and content marketing managers are just a few of those often required.

However, there are three options that normally have a great influence on link building pricing and how site owners can approach a link building campaign:

1. To create it in house
2. Using independent contractors
3. To work with organizations

Each of those choices has advantages and disadvantages in terms of things like cost, adaptability, and efficiency, so it is critical to understand them all in order to make the best choice.

Let us examine the three choices in more detail.

Option 1: Create an in house link building operation

The first choice is to manage every aspect of link creation internally.

If your business does not already have one, this entails creating a link building team or having members of your current team develop and build links themselves.

If you want to pursue the in-house route, you should be informed of all the requirements for carrying out the entire procedure, as well as the associated expenses.

Personnel

First and foremost, you must recruit the appropriate personnel.

Hiring a link builder alone can be fairly limited depending on the needs; thus, a link building operation will require the correct team to support it.

The following are typical positions for the key hires for your in-house team:

• Outreach Specialist: In charge of contacting websites via email or LinkedIn in order to obtain a link.
• Content Writer: In charge of writing guest posts for a specific website.
• Content Marketing Manager: In charge of managing the whole process.

All of these will require salaries, the cost of which can vary significantly.

Although people are an important resource, it is also important to discuss the tools that can make the procedure faster and more efficient.

Tools

People who work in the area of link building — and, to be more specific, SEO in general – rely largely on the correct tools to help them get their job done.

This implies that, unlike outsourcing, when developing links in-house, you must consider the expense of employing such tools, which are typically, but not always, subscription-based.

Notably, the following are some of the most visible technologies in a link building team’s tech stack:

• Ahrefs: SEO tool for monitoring organic traffic, useful metrics such as the DR, doing backlink audits, and more (starts at $95 per month).
• Snov.io: Email finder tool for locating a link prospect’s email address (pricing starts at $39 per month for 1,000 credits).
• Mailshake: Email outreach solution for personalizing and tracking cold outreach campaigns (starts at $58 per month).
• Oxylabs: Search engine scraper (starts at $99 per month, plus proxy charges).
• Data input and research by hand: Prices vary depending on your talents and procedure, but a fair starting point would be $300.

Furthermore, the pricing shown above does not include content production, which will incur additional charges for tools such as Clearscope, Surfer SEO, or MarketMuse, depending on the quality of the job you desire to do.

So, how much does the tech stack of a link builder cost?

The minimal monthly cost for a well-rounded link building tech stack, in our opinion, is about $600.

In general, the two most significant resources to consider when evaluating the expenses of an in-house link building software team are people and technologies.

Option 2: Hire freelancers

In general, link building can be achieved by collaborating with freelancers.

This implies that instead of hiring a full-time staff, a company may work with an independent contractor to locate and contact relevant link building vendors and possibilities.

This choice, like all others, offers advantages and disadvantages.

On the bright side, hiring a freelancer provides the following advantages:

• Less expensive than employing a full-service SEO firm or recruiting an in-house team.
• They are more adaptable since they can operate on a project-by-project basis.
• Some may specialize in certain elements of link building (for example, broken link development) or even in specific verticals (for example, the medical industry) and have knowledge in those areas.

The disadvantages, on the other hand, are as follows:

• The quality of the job might vary greatly depending on the individual freelancer, and it may be more difficult to guarantee that the work is completed to the same standards as a more established SEO business.
• Because a freelancer may have other jobs to prioritize, there is generally less consistency.
• You may have less control over their work, making it more difficult to verify that they exclusively use white-hat practices.

When it comes to cost, freelancers can accommodate nearly any budget. While pricing with freelancers is fairly variable, you should be mindful that a low price frequently reflects a bad quality of service as well.

It is not uncommon for websites to spend a significant amount of time and money attempting to recover from low-quality connections that did more harm than good.

In conclusion, if you have a limited budget, working with freelancers may be a viable alternative, as long as you conduct comprehensive research to find the suitable one(s).

Option 3: Collaborate with a link building agency

Working with a professional link building agency is typically the ideal link building approach because it is both less expensive than developing an in-house team and produces better outcomes than freelancers.

The price of link building from an SEO agency can be lower than you might expect!

Furthermore, this type of outsourced link building campaign requires less time investment because you will not have to hire people individually, as in the in-house option.

This is because a link building company will already have a team of skilled experts as well as the tools to execute link building campaigns effectively, which means you will not have to invest in a link building tech stack as well.

Another advantage of using agency link building to acquire links is that they frequently already have a network of contacts with industry websites, bloggers, influencers, and others, making the link building process go more smoothly.

A good quality agency will give frequent progress updates on your link building initiatives, as well as devoted account management.

This can include frequent campaign progress reports, such as bi-weekly calls, as well as any suggestions for improvement.

How can I buy backlinks in a secure and ethical manner?

While purchasing backlinks can be an efficient approach that enables you to generate links and boost your website’s rating, it is critical to do it in a safe and ethical manner. Here are some pointers to help you acquire backlinks correctly:

Research your options: Before acquiring a backlink, conduct research on the website from whom you are obtaining it. Check their website’s rankings and backlink profile to guarantee you are buying backlinks from a credible source.

If the vendor has a high-quality backlink profile for their own website, they will be more likely to give you the same.

Avoid purchasing mass or low-quality links: While it may be tempting to purchase a large number of backlinks at once, doing so might affect your website’s rating in the long term. Instead, concentrate on purchasing high-quality backlinks from respected websites in your area.

Use anchor text with caution: The text that displays as a hyperlink to your website is known as anchor text. When purchasing backlinks, employ anchor text that is related to your content rather than the money keyword anchor text.

A broad anchor text profile can eventually boost your website’s trustworthiness and search engine results.

Review your backlink profile: It is critical to frequently examine your backlinks profile to ensure that you are not purchasing low-quality or spammy backlinks.

Monitor the quality of your backlinks using a backlink checker tool and eliminate any low-quality connections. You can make use of Ahrefs or Semrush.

Avoid Buying Bulk Backlinks from Fiverr: It is critical to avoid purchasing bulk backlinks from Fiverr since they are frequently low-quality and spammy, which might impair your website’s SEO.

Instead, concentrate on purchasing high-quality in-content backlinks from trusted sites to raise your search engine results and online presence.

Don’t direct all of your links to landing pages: It is critical not to direct all of your backlinks to landing pages. Instead, vary your link development technique by connecting to other sites on your website. This can help to boost your website’s overall authority and rating.

Following these guidelines, you may buy backlinks in a secure and ethical manner to raise your website’s rating and SEO efforts.

To prevent penalties from search engines like Google, approach backlink purchasing with caution and only engage with trusted providers.

Link Building Pricing: What is the Cost of link building?

Link building is an essential service for any digital and major content marketing agencies. However, recognizing excellent value for money in the specialist link building agencies for development would need some work.

So, what do you think is a reasonable price for link building services? Well, there is not a simple answer to this one.

As a result, you must be aware of key elements that substantially influence the appropriate pricing point for link development.

The cost of link creation might range from $100 to $20,000 per month, depending on the quality and volume desired.

The easiest approach to calculate the long-term expenses of link development is to establish a pricing point per connection.

Understanding the DR and DA dependent pricing model

While cost per link is one model to consider, various companies that offer link building tools may price the service based on DR (domain rating) or DA (domain authority).

We can’t call this a flawless approach because they are third-party measurements that do not adequately judge the real quality of a website.

However, in addition to other indicators, such as organic traffic, these ratings are commonly used as a benchmark system to determine the quality of a website.

One of the most extensively used metrics in the realm of link building is the Domain Rating (DR).

It is a statistic that compares the strength of a target website’s backlink profile to the others on a scale of 100.

This is due to the fact that the greater the DR of a website, the stronger the backlink from it will be (however, other factors should also be considered). We define “stronger” as greater link equity being transmitted to the connected websites.

Keep in mind, however, that the equity is distributed evenly amongst the sites to which a source domain refers. This indicates that a website with a DR of 12 with connections to two sites has a greater effect than a DR-70 domain with 100 links.

As a result, link builders pay close attention to a website’s DR, and it is frequently the first measure they consider when evaluating a link potential.

Although it is natural to believe that the more backlinks, the better, the more authoritative and relevant a referring website is, the more important it tends to be. That is the AR metric.

So, what exactly does it mean for a referring domain to be authoritative?

A website should ideally aspire to be viewed as a trustworthy and reliable source by search engine algorithms.

Authoritative websites are ones that have a high level of trust and reliability, placing high in the search engine rankings, and buying links from very authoritative websites will tend to have a much higher link cost for your link building team.

The rough range of link building pricing options under this approach might range from $80 to $600+, depending on the quality of the links.

There is not a huge amount of difference between the two models here, but this approach can have different costs from priced per link approaches to that of outsource link building.

Factors Affecting the Cost of Link Building

Several different factors can affect the cost of link building services. If you are new to the link building game, this can seem overwhelming.

So let us take a look at some of the most important factors that can affect link building costs so you can work out how best to obtain cheap link building for quality links that will not harm your site’s reputation.

Approach

First and foremost, it is the strategy for link building that is most important.

As previously noted, the cost of hiring a freelancer, an in-house team, or a full-service agency can range from a little over two thousand dollars per month to well over ten thousand.

But we are not just talking about who will be creating links for you; we are also talking about how they will do it.

“The right” technique to acquire links is time and money-consuming (creating email outreach campaigns to contact webmasters and encourage them to include your link).

It also has to be done on a per-link basis, which can be tedious even for large link building agencies.

As a result, you may decide to cut some corners and save money per link.

You should be aware, however, that while you may occasionally get away with acquiring a link or two, they have the potential to be devalued by the Google algorithm at any time, squandering your money and effort invested in getting them.

A low price per link is meaningless if that link disappears immediately!

Volume

After that, your desired link volume might have a significant impact on your monthly link building cost. As a general rule, your new links should always outweigh your lost ones.

Links can degrade for a variety of reasons, including page updates, content relocation, and even domain expiration.

To mitigate this, a small firm should aim for 10 new backlinks gained each week. Larger firms with more broad link profiles (and hence more extreme link decay) may require more.

As a result, link building might need significantly more human and financial resources to maintain for a larger firm. Think about how many backlinks you need to maintain!

Your price per link might be low, but you will have so many links to keep an eye on that your link building process might be a large undertaking.

Niche

Finally, not every niche is created equal. Larger niches have plenty of link building chances, so sites may quickly scale up their link building to meet their demands.

It is easy to set up guest posting on a popular topic, as there are plenty of sites that want a guest post that many people will read.

Smaller markets just do not have this luxury. Simply put, there are not that many sites that can be used as good link building possibilities, which has a direct association with the work or cash necessary to establish links in them.

Link building pricing for a small niche can be higher because there are simply fewer opportunities for building links to take advantage of.

FAQs

What is purchasing backlinks?

Purchasing backlinks is paying a website to provide you with a link from their site. It is a two-way street in which you pay them money in exchange for a referral link. This is a common but controversial approach to building links.

What are backlinks?

Backlinks, sometimes known as “inbound links,” are hyperlinks that connect one website to a page on another. They are seen as votes for a website, and several backlinks tend to increase a page’s search engine position.

What Is the Importance of Backlinks?

Backlinks act like votes, indicating that the material on your website is useful, reputable, and valuable. More votes (backlinks) from other websites raises your site’s rating.

What Kinds of Backlinks Are Important?

Backlinks are not all created equal, and high-quality ones are more useful. As a result, if you want your web pages and site to rank better in the SERPs, you must focus on building high-quality links.

My backlinks are dwindling. What can I do?

It is normal to lose certain links over time. However, you must continue to acquire new backlinks to compensate for those lost. Prioritize link quality over quantity when doing so.

I can’t view my backlinks in Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or other similar tools. Why?

Google Search Console only displays a sampling of your link profile. Third-party tools, such as Ahrefs, can only display you a portion of your link profile.

What is the difference between do-follow and no-follow backlinks?

Every backlink on a website is a ‘Do-follow’ link by default, which means it distributes authority to the connected domain.

However, some websites configure their backlinks to ‘no follow’ so that the domain authority is not shared with others.

Are Fiverr backlinks effective?

Fiverr is not a fantastic place to get links, so it is better to avoid buying paid links from people who claim to sell links there.

They may have a low link building cost per link, but it is not worth the risk when trying to build links. Guest posts are a much better option.

How many links per day are considered safe?

The number of links obtained per day does not matter too much when you are using organic link building methods. Only when creating artificial backlinks does link velocity actually matter.

The daily numbers do not matter as long as you get them through natural routes such as outreach and content marketing.

What is a Backlink Profile?

A backlink profile is a portfolio of links that your website has accumulated over time. It provides information on the websites that link to yours, and you may use it to locate fresh traffic and exposure possibilities, as well as to identify spammy links from irrelevant sources.

You may easily remove such links using Google’s free disavow tool.

How Can I Get a Backlink to My Website?

While backlinks are automatically obtained over time when other sites link to yours, you may also develop them using lawful tactics such as guest blogging on relevant sites, generating infographics, reaching out to influencers, and recovering broken links.

What is a Toxic Backlink?

While having high-quality backlinks might assist your website, having the wrong ones can be detrimental to your rankings. These unnatural connections are generated by low-quality or questionable sites and may be manipulated or constructed using black-hat techniques.

Toxic linkages should be avoided since they might do more harm than good in the long run.

How Do I Get Rid of Toxic Backlinks?

A backlink audit is an activity that assists you in identifying poisonous connections that may hurt your rankings or cause your site to be punished. It gives you the ability to eliminate these links and optimize your SEO strategy.

What exactly is the Penguin Algorithm?

Google’s search algorithms, which drive the website ranking system, are always developing. The Penguin algorithm is critical in identifying and punishing sites that utilize deceptive linking techniques.

The algorithm debuted in 2012 and has subsequently undergone several revisions and changes before becoming a part of the Core Algorithm in 2017.