Link building is not necessarily an easy process.

While the idea of building links can seem straightforward at first, it requires a lot of time and effort – and can be a commitment that not all businesses are able to make, especially if they do not have any manpower to spare.

A managed link building service is a way to rectify this. By hanging off your link building to a third-party service, you can get the support of experienced link builders who can get the results you are looking for.

However, with so many link building service providers to choose from, it is not always easy to know which link building services are going to suit your needs.

What is Link Building?

Link building is exactly what it sounds like – building links between other sites and your own to receive some of their “link equity,” a measurement used by search engines to rank how trustworthy a site is.

Your backlink profile (the list of inbound links your site is receiving) is a huge part of how your site ranks on search engines.

A good backlink profile means that you will appear for relevant searches more often, but a bad one can drastically weaken your online presence.

Beyond that, link building also provides direct links from other people’s content to your own, which can mean more traffic and, therefore, more customers.

In simple terms, having more high-quality and relevant links pointed at your site means a range of overall improvements to how well your marketing can perform and how many users discover your site through organic searches.

What is Managed Link Building?

Managed link building services are third-party services that focus primarily on taking over your link building process, whether that is partial control to achieve a specific goal or outsourcing the entire process itself.

The idea behind link building services is the same as any other technical or expert service.

By handing off your link building to another party, your business is free to focus on other tasks, and you do not have to worry about wasting time, money, or manpower on building links.

This is especially important if nobody within your business has the expertise to approach link building techniques and strategies well or if you are part of a smaller business with only a few employees.

Why Use Link Building Services?

While link building is quite a straightforward concept, there are a lot of factors that go into how well different link building strategies succeed.

By working with professionals, you get the full expertise they can offer without having to worry about making mistakes yourself.

Having experts on hand to take care of your link building campaign frees up resources for other tasks and ensures that your link building efforts are in the hands of a company or team that understands how to get great results.

The Advantages of a Link Building Service

Working with professional link building services provides more than just a way to get high-quality links easily.

In many cases, having dedicated link building services working with you can result in even better outcomes than doing the job yourself.

Link building is a very complex and deep field, so letting experts take charge can lead to excellent results for almost any business.

Fewer Wasted Resources

Getting high-quality backlinks is a tough task that can be quite draining if handled incorrectly, whether that is overpaying for paid links or having to send out review copies of a product in return for positive press.

In fully managed link building campaigns, the experts in charge will often understand how to get the best results possible at the least cost to your business.

This might not matter for a single link placement, but it really matters if you are building dozens of them a week.

This also saves important resources – time, money, manpower, or even tangible things like promotional products – for when they are needed most.

Greater Success

Unless your business already has link building experts within it, then it is very likely that professional SEO link building services are going to get better overall results than attempting to do it yourself.

No matter the link building strategy you are trying to work with, having experienced professionals taking charge is the easiest way to get incredible results.

They might even be able to suggest new strategies or options that would lead to even better outcomes than your initial plan.

While there is nothing wrong with having a less-experienced employee handle your SEO, businesses that want the highest possible tiers of link success may want to rely on a professional SEO service instead.

Fewer Mistakes

In general, professionals will make fewer mistakes than people who are still learning the field. If minimizing risk is your goal, turning to the best link building services you can find is a smart idea.

A good SEO agency will have enough experience to plan ahead and will be able to prevent problems before they occur.

For example, they might have backup plans for situations where already-built links are suddenly broken and will know link sellers that they can actually rely on.

This means fewer errors overall, leading to smoother link building services and a much lower chance of anything that could harm your overall marketing or ranking potential.

For example, a professional link building service is much less likely to build negative SEO links or use keywords that end up pushing them into the wrong kinds of search rankings.

More Options

Proper link building services can provide more options for growing your link profile and your overall rankings as a whole.

Whether it is the specific way that the link building company is going to take over or just options focused on how they build links in general, you still have the final say in what happens to your marketing. This means that you can adapt their methods to suit your needs.

Working with professionals like this can give you access to a huge range of link building methods that your existing employees would not be capable of carrying out.

They also often have business connections that can help a website owner secure even better linking options.

Which Link Building Services Are The Best?

It is important to remember that link building providers do not always have to take over the entire project. Many link building services are focused on specific parts of building high-quality links, usually to compensate for something the company itself can’t do.

This means that there are a lot of individual link building service options worth considering, especially if your business can only manage part of its larger link building goals.

Straightforward Link Building Services

Sometimes, you simply need a way to get high quality backlinks for any general link building strategy.

Working with professional link builders makes it easy to outsource the process of hunting down good links, even if you are still taking charge of things like guest posting.

There is nothing wrong with deciding to work alongside a link building team that knows what they are doing, and they might even be able to get you links from major publications or other businesses within your industry.

This kind of straightforward service is easy enough to find. Of course, you always want to choose professionals who can guarantee relevant links from equally relevant sites.

Since all link building strategies need you to actually acquire links to set them in motion, these kinds of services are a great option for a business that is still adapting its strategies and goals on the fly.

Of course, different link building providers use different techniques. If you specifically want to avoid any that buy links, for example, then you would have to check that ahead of time.

Outreach Link Building Platforms

Outreach platforms are invaluable for getting a list of relevant websites that might serve as great linking opportunities.

This can be important for finding blogs, news sites, or any other website that holds some value that your own website could benefit from.

These are often essential tools for getting a quick breakdown of other websites in your target niche and market or who have some connection to your business already.

Using these services can be an ideal way to keep the momentum going for specific link building tactics, ensuring that you always have new sources of high-authority links to target.

Even when used standalone, a link building service like this (even if it is just a paid link outreach platform) can be invaluable to any business that has already used all of its obvious link opportunities.

Help A Reporter

Help A Reporter and similar platforms are ideal for presenting yourself as a resource for journalists to use, which can make them a prime link building service in the right contexts.

As long as you can create content that offers useful information, posting yourself on these platforms can make it a lot easier to find journalists and other sites that are willing to use you as a source of statistics or unique data.

While these platforms are never a guaranteed source of links, they do work well as a method of building links on editorial websites.

Of course, this requires site owners to create high-quality content that provides some core benefit or source of information to the journalists who see it, which means that it still takes effort to use it effectively.

Citation-Building Links Services

A lot of local businesses initially start out with mostly directory links.

These are not bad whatsoever and are often overlooked by business owners who assume that all link building needs to be from carefully crafted guest post content.

Getting your site (and a relevant link) inserted into a directory or similar list can be a good way to boost rankings through a very natural link placement.

While far from the best link building services in terms of actual effort and scope, any services that focus on citation links can still dramatically improve search engine rankings when done well.

Since relevant websites are a major Google ranking factor, appearing on directors based around your business’s specific niche or products can be surprisingly effective.

Guest Posting Services

There are many SEO specialists and agencies out there with a database of potential link building partners and other guest post opportunities, including some sites that they may return to regularly for more guest posts.

Overall, guest posts are a great source of quality links that allow you to have a large amount of control over your link’s surrounding content and context.

Using services focused on streamlining the guest post links process can make it much easier to build links that are both beneficial and natural-looking, especially if you choose the right guest posting opportunities for your industry or niche.

Niche Edits and Link Placements

Niche edits, also known as link placements, are a technique focused on inserting links into an existing piece of content.

This could be a form of broken link building, where you are replacing links that point towards missing sites or just offering updated information that makes your site more valuable as a resource.

Certain services exist to make this easier, and many SEO agencies specialize in identifying these potential niche edits before they can be captured by a competitor.

While only a small part of link building overall, they can be invaluable alongside other link building services, providing an alternate source of links that will not usually overlap with any other major service.

Skyscraper Link Building Services

An SEO agency focused on skyscraper link building services knows how to overtake competitors well, which can really help if you are constantly fighting against a specific competitor.

Skyscraper link building follows the idea of simply making something better than the current best piece of content for a certain keyword.

This is meant to be a more efficient way to gain links by outpacing your competitors, especially in business-to-business contexts.

These services have a specific goal in mind, which unusually means quite a specific set of link building activities compared to general-purpose link building.

However, the resulting high-quality links can be incredibly valuable, even if they are also usually quite costly to pursue.

How to Choose The Right Link Building Services

Link building as a whole is incredibly varied, and that means that no service will work perfectly for every single business.

You need to choose the right services for your business’s current situation, as well as the end goals that you have in mind.

This means understanding what you should be looking for and the kind of elements that are best avoided.

The best link building strategies for your business will depend on the kind of links you want to build, the amount of links that you need, and how much you are going to have to rely on third parties to do the work.

High Quality Links

You need good links for link building to be properly effective.

It does not matter how well a link building agency markets itself if it can’t actually give you worthwhile white-hat links to work with.

The main point behind most link building companies is to get their clients decent links, and any business that can’t do that is best avoided, especially if it seems like they may be resorting to scam or black-hat tactics.

Make sure you are looking at every link a new agency builds for you, and do not be afraid to back off if it seems like most of those links come from spam sites or a private blog network.

Link Service Options

While you can hire a link building agency to take over the majority of your link building, not everybody does.

Sometimes, you simply need specific link building “packages,” like guest post services or broken link building, to supplement what you are already doing.

Be sure to consider what kind of link building packages might be relevant to your needs and the kind of services that would make the most sense for your end goals.

Agency Expertise

Not all SEO agencies are focused on the same things.

For example, some may primarily focus on link building packages geared towards getting your website mentioned on blogs, but not major editorial sites.

Look at what different link building agencies offer before you decide to work with them, just so you know what they can actually provide.

Getting a link into a blog post takes different steps than trying to get into local directories.

While most agencies are going to at least be able to do most SEO strategies fairly well, you still want to play to their strengths when possible.

This becomes much more of an issue when dealing with larger-scope SEO agencies, which may only offer link building as one of dozens of services (alongside things like on-page optimization for search engines or handling public relations).

What to Avoid

While link building covers quite a wide range of different strategies, not all of them are good.

Some strategies and techniques can actually be a huge risk to your business, as will some of the third-party companies that you might come across.

It is important to remember that some services and specialists are simply going to be bad for your business. Avoiding them is important if you want to see SEO success.

Low-Quality Links

Any service that focuses on large amounts of poor-quality links is usually a bad idea.

While diverse links are not bad, bulk-building bad links does not equate to the same benefits as a good-quality service with fewer links.

Flooding either new or existing content with a lot of middling links can still provide benefits, but if the links are too bad or irrelevant, expect problems to arise.

Overly-Cheap Services

An affordable link building company is one thing, but incredibly cheap services either mean poor quality or black-hat methods.

While black-hat link building can have its uses in certain rare situations, you at least want to know that it is black hat.

Incredibly under-priced services may mean that a company is going to build links through very sketchy means and simply not tell you, which will eventually backfire on your business.

Authority-Focused Services

Services focused entirely on boosting authority can help search engine rankings but also tend to be riskier.

This is because authority can easily be raised by simply spamming bad links at a website, despite this not actually providing any SEO benefits – and even getting the site penalized by search engines in the future.

A proper link building agency will use domain authority as a metric, not as the main focus.

It is important to your search engine rankings but still requires proper SEO behind it to have any real benefit.

Negative SEO Links Services

Negative SEO is the practice of spamming bad links at competitors to weaken their sites, allowing you to rank above them.

While these are affordable and often easy to find, they are also horribly unethical and usually a waste of time.

Getting better-quality backlinks for your own site is a much better option than trying to drag down a competitor, especially since you are leaving room open for another company to swoop in ahead of you.

Relying on negative SEO can not only get you in trouble, but it means that you are not focusing on actually boosting organic traffic or trying to build high-quality links of your own.

Private Blog Networks

Private blog networks are networks of blog sites that all link to one another, creating artificial trust signals that can then be passed on to other sites for a price.

While they can work, a typical private blog network is also going to eventually be noticed by Google, and that will result in a penalty that will drag your SEO even further down.

These penalties can destroy a lot of the hard work that you have put into your SEO and rankings – often more than the PBN would have offered you in the first place.

These are generally best avoided since their quality service is all artificial – they do not actually lead to more organic traffic and only temporarily improve rankings at best.

Tiered Links

Tiered links are a kind of recursive link strategy that focuses on website owners boosting other sites that are linking back to them.

In theory, this turns the sources of their backlinks into high-quality websites by artificially improving them, but it can also backfire horribly.

Like private blog networks, this can get your site penalized and tends to be less effective than just looking for better links in general.

What Makes a Good SEO Service?

The best SEO services are the ones that can hit all of the right ranking factors in the right way – that means relevancy, quality, target audience, keyword choices, and even how many links you end up gaining.

However, this is going to be a completely different set of requirements for each business.

This means that, in reality, the best link building agencies are those that can adapt to suit what your website needs rather than following a general set of rules and goals.

Optimizing your website for search engines takes more than simply repeating the steps that worked for another business, and that means that you want proper SEO professionals working with you.

Whether you do not have the skills and manpower to handle SEO or just want to get a professional in charge of your link management goals, you want to look for agencies and specialists that can adapt to suit your requirements.

Final Thoughts

Link building is a massive field that can cover countless different techniques and project types, each of which can be further tweaked based on what the company actually needs.

While SEO as a whole can seem daunting at first, link building is one of the most vital elements you will need to consider when you are trying to bolster your search rankings.

Without good links, it becomes much harder to get your site in front of an audience that would care about it, and that makes good link building especially important.

If you are looking for the right SEO agency for this kind of work, take the time to look over your options and consider what your end goals actually are.

Like any kind of SEO, you need to put link building into the context of what you want your business to achieve in the future.

Without a specific direction in mind, it is easy to get wrapped up in the smaller details instead of the larger, more important ones: for example, what kind of link building you are looking for.