Ranking high in the SERPs is crucial today. Digital marketing agencies often choose link building to boost website traffic and lead generation. Businesses frequently face the challenge of developing internal marketing teams or finding a competent digital agency to handle link-building projects effectively. If this sounds familiar and you’re unsure how to proceed, don’t worry. In this article, we will discuss:
- Reasons for outsourcing link building, especially for agencies
- How to find the right link-building agency for your needs
- Dos and don’ts of outsourcing link building
Understanding these aspects can help you make informed decisions about your link-building strategy. You’ll also need to know the best timing for outsourcing your link-building projects.
When’s the right time to outsource your link building projects?
There are many reasons why a business might want to outsource link-building campaigns. We’ll focus on the most common and practical ones.
Let’s give them a quick look.
1) You don’t have the resources to handle link building internally
Link building consumes time and drains resources. Creating content and boosting your backlink profile are essential tasks, whether forming an internal team for SEO and content distribution or hiring an agency for SEO link-building services.
Each option has pros and cons, but we believe outsourcing to a content creation agency is better. It provides a smooth shift towards more content marketing strategies.
Without enough experience and knowledge, though, even the best plans can falter.
2) You lack enough experience and knowledge with link building
Digital marketing is a vast field, with link-building being a major component. Admitting gaps in knowledge shows strength.
I mean, there’s a lot involved in link-building:
- deciding between guest blogging, contextual edits, local or national backlinks, and press releases
- You need to identify the best sites with relevant content that might link to your material
- choose the right outreach contact
- write a pitch that engages site owners/admins
- creating SEO-optimized content that drives traffic and increases authority through relevance.
- Know the right tools for each part of the process.
- And more…
These aspects highlight the knowledge and effort required for a successful outreach campaign. You’ll also find ways to increase your link-building reach as you tackle these.
3) You want to increase your current link building reach
Let’s say you aim to increase your monthly placements from 10 to 40 or add guest blogging to your link-building efforts when you’re just meeting your targets with contextual edits. This can be stressful and time-consuming for any marketer. The best move is often to outsource link-building to a reliable and skilled agency.
Expanding your reach without the right tools can be challenging.
4) You don’t have access to the right tools
A link-building agency excels at managing multiple campaigns because it has the best tools available. Handling just one or two campaigns means these blogger outreach and SEO tools can be costly. For an agency, though, these tools streamline the process, delivering results faster and giving you a higher ROI than going solo.
When your current efforts seem stagnant, it’s often due to not having the right tools at hand. Now, let’s consider another common issue:
5) Your current link-building efforts don’t seem to be working
You think you’re doing everything right. Still, you’re not getting any replies from the sites you’re interested in. Or you manage to get a placement, but the results stay the same, and your rankings aren’t improving as expected. It’s tough to accept, but you might be making mistakes.
Consulting a link-building expert to outsource some projects can help identify what’s blocking your progress and reduce your workload.
To improve, consider the benefits of finding the right link-building agency to offer the expertise you need to succeed.
Finding the right link building agency
Plenty of marketing agencies are out there, ranging in the tens of thousands. Finding the right partner can be a challenging task. You want to establish a standard to filter out digital marketing agencies that don’t meet your needs early in the process. Here are the key things to remember when choosing the best agencies to outsource link building.
1) Assess the quality of their previous work
Start by focusing on the quality of the agency’s past work. Any reputable agency will gladly show you samples or case studies from their previous link-building campaigns. Look for someone with experience in your niche, but even if they don’t have it, you can still check the quality of their work in other areas.
Pay attention to two key aspects:
- Authority, relevance, referring domains, and traffic of the site where the posts are placed
- Quality of the content
If either falls short, move on to an agency worth your time. After evaluating their past work, you’ll also want to explore how they handle your projects and their willingness to adapt.
2) Ask about their process and flexibility
This means asking for a detailed plan on how their link-building process works:
- Do they provide you with a detailed campaign setup process?
- Do they offer a way for you to track your campaign’s progress?
- Do they conduct a thorough inspection of every website considered for their campaign?
- Do they have the option to personalize their pitches to meet your needs?
- Do they offer pre-approval of sites, anchor texts, and written content?
These are the questions you most commonly should ask. However, if you have any additional requirements, be sure to discuss them early on as well.
3) Ask for a detailed description of their pricing and look for hidden fees
Set your campaign budget before searching for agencies to outsource link building. Determine your monthly budget and evaluate what campaigns you can afford based on average link pricing. Remember, a guest post usually costs differently from a contextual edit or a press release.
Check each agency’s pricing and offers in detail. Whether you want guest blogging or contextual edits, prices often scale with domain strength—the higher the authority, the more expensive it is to place a link or guest post, and the higher the value from that placement.
So, carefully review their pricing scale and estimate the number of placements (and their authority) you can achieve within your budget.
Look out for hidden fees in their pricing descriptions, such as “consultation hours” or “project setup fees” and other activities unrelated to link building. While some requests may justify these fees, they should be clearly stated upfront and not surprise you in a monthly report.
As you compare pricing details, consider starting with short-term options like monthly subscriptions or one-time packages instead of jumping into long-term contracts. This approach helps you gauge the agency’s performance and flexibility before committing more deeply.
4) Go for monthly subscriptions or one-time packages first, not long-term contracts
You found what seems to be a great agency; their samples are impressive, and their communication is spot on. Yet, there’s still a chance you’re being misled:
- The samples might not reflect their usual work but are cherry-picked from their best.
- Their confident security might be overconfidence in handling your niche.
- Your account could become a low priority if they have too many big clients.
You can’t assess these risks without working with them first. Before diving into a long-term contract, you should test it with a short-term commitment. Remember, the real value of your investment often lies in the quality of the links, not just their cost.
5) Cheap links means zero value
Quality comes at a price, and here’s why. Writing and publishing quality content can range from $100 to $300, depending on the niche. This cost doesn’t include the time needed to:
- Set the target audience.
- Competitor backlink/keyword analysis.
- Find relevant blogs.
- Find the right contact and their information.
- Manage all aspects of the outreach process (initial pitch, negotiation, and follow-up discussions)
- Create or contribute valuable content to existing pages
A link-building campaign that results in quality content published under your name on relevant industry sites can’t be cheap. If someone offers you an impossible price per link, they are likely cutting corners, impacting your business.
To ensure you’re making the right choices and getting the most out of your investment, it’s helpful to know a few strategies that can enhance the success of your outsourced link-building project.
Tips to improve the odds of your outsourced link building project
No one wants to waste time and money on a project without results. Understanding what to expect and approaching outsourcing link-building with care is crucial. You need a partnership based on good collaboration. Your approach to the project, willingness to clarify confusions, communicate expectations, and offer guidance where needed will affect the outcome.
Let’s focus on reducing friction and boosting collaboration with tips from our experience handling many outsourced link-building campaigns
1) State your expectations early on
Before outreach starts, set your rules and communicate your expectations to speed up the process and ensure you and your agency are on the same page.
Do your best to define:
- The communication channel that suits you best
- Reporting frequency if your needs differ from what the agency lists on their product page
- Sites, anchors, or pitches you want to avoid
- Parts of the process you need to review before moving forward (sites, content, anchors, etc.)
- Whether you allow sponsored-tagged posts or link insertion within this campaign
- The results and turnover time you’re expecting
- Any special conditions or requests you might have
Most of the time, it’s OK if you miss something; just know that waiting for approval or specific orders on some aspects of the campaign may delay the project.
2) Be open to adjusting those expectations
Setting your expectations early helps you understand what the agency can deliver. You’ll see how they adapt to your needs. However, it’s not just the agency that should be flexible.
Expecting immediate results and calculating exact ROI in link-building is impractical. Beyond climbing the SERPs for your target keywords, backlinks build exposure, awareness, and brand trust—values that can’t be precisely measured. Additionally, it takes time for link-building efforts to boost your rankings. Evaluating the value based on a few test links won’t reflect the agency’s true potential. Instead, focus on the quality of their work and how well they integrate with your business.
When beginning a campaign, your involvement is crucial to its success.
3) Be sure to get involved at the beginning of the campaign
The early stages of a project are where the campaign is set up. The agency will handle most of the grunt work in those stages, such as:
- Researching your target audience
- Analyzing niche and keywords
- Setting up your project in their tools
- Finding good sites for link-building within your niche
- Developing effective anchor strategies and content ideas for your site
A dedicated person to provide constant and precise feedback helps the agency avoid many headaches. This is especially true at the beginning of a new project. Every agency will have questions about your site, niche, competitors, and your approach to SEO and link-building.
This is why we start our process with a strategy call and a short questionnaire for every new client. Effective link-building aims for a long-term approach and integration with a well-crafted SEO or content marketing strategy.
By getting started outsourcing your link building to our agency, you can leverage these initial steps to ensure a successful campaign.
Get started outsourcing your link building with Searcharoo.
The whole process of finding an agency to handle something as important as your link building might seem uncomfortable at first. Still, following our advice in this article, you’ll find the right partner quickly.
And suppose you’re looking to learn more about starting or scaling your link-building efforts through outsourcing. In that case, we recommend that you take a free strategy call with us. We pride ourselves on providing complete outreach link transparency, guaranteed metrics, and pre-approval for every link.
Not only that, we’ll analyze your site and niche, and together with you, we’ll work on effectively scaling your outreach link-building strategy in more detail. With Searcharoo, you are in good hands.
P.S. If you are an agency, many of the above will still apply, and we are already priced accordingly for agencies and P.R. companies. So feel free to contact a team member and chat through the commercials to see how we can help you or your client’s businesses grow.
