What if you invest thousands of dollars each month in content marketing, yet your domain authority (DR) stands at a mere 10 and your content is barely ranking in the top 50?
This means – you are letting your precious dollars go down the drain.
Publishing value-adding and authoritative content pieces are one thing. But if you are investing thousands of dollars in producing and publishing them on your website, you need to make sure that it’s getting distributed smartly and being put in front of your audience.
And that’s what getting links from other relevant sites will help you with.
As stated by Google, one of the top three factors their search engine algorithm considers while determining search engine rankings is backlinks.
This means – the higher the number of high-quality backlinks your web pages get, the better your rankings will be on Google search engine result pages.
And while building links is critical, there’s just one BIG problem.
It’s not easy.
Getting other websites, especially ones with a high domain ranking, to link back to your content or web pages is no piece of cake.
Link building is a strategic process: from conducting a thorough competitive analysis and identifying the websites they are getting backlinks from to email outreach and rolling out guest posts.
In fact, it’s a dedicated full-time job. And if you want to achieve great results, you’ll need a strategic link-building professional or digital marketing agency with the required experience and expertise in your team.
Hiring a full-time link-building professional will require you to invest anywhere between $70,000 and $200,000 each year.
And if you run an SMB and don’t really have the budget for it, hiring a full-time white hat link-building professional isn’t a feasible option.
This is where outsource link building comes in.
When you hire a link-building professional or digital marketing agency with years of experience in the industry offering reliable link building services, you’ll be tapping not only into their experience and expertise but also into their extensive network.
This will, in turn, help you get high-quality backlinks faster and at a budget-friendly price.
Outsource link building is beneficial. And before I tell you the 3 big benefits of doing so, let’s first address the elephant in the room.
Is Buying Links Against Google
Guidelines?
Now you may be thinking about whether buying links violates Google guidelines.
Let’s take a look at what Google has to say on link schemes:
“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”
And as David from Ahrefs points out, the keyword here is may.
It May be considered part of a link scheme.
So while it can be part of a grey area, you only violate Google guidelines when the links you are getting are low quality and the content of the anchor text and article linked is irrelevant.
As stated in Google guidelines:
“The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community.
Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.”
Creating good content pays off.
And in a perfect world, creating dazzling content should naturally get lots of high-quality links.
But they don’t. In fact, 90.63% of all pages never get any organic traffic from Google.
Why?
Because they don’t have backlinks pointing to it.
That’s why the only way to get organic traffic and get your content out there is to outsource link building to professionals.
Now that that’s out of the way allow me to put in front of you the three BIG benefits of doing so.
The 3 Big Benefits of Outsourcing Your Link Building Operations
Following are the benefits of outsourcing your link building efforts:
- Helps Achieve Outstanding Results at a Faster Pace
- Helps Save Your Top Dollars
- Helps Achieve High-Quality Backlinks
Let’s touch down on each of these one by one.
1. Helps Achieve Outstanding Results at a Faster Pace
Getting backlinks from high authority sites like Forbes and Entrepreneur may take you months. And while you can use HARO to get backlinks from DR70+ sites, it’s opportunistic in nature.
You could pitch to 100 websites yet get a response from none. Imagine the number of emails they’d be getting each day – from people or businesses asking for backlinks.
In fact – the average email response rate stands at a mere 5%, depending on the industry and purpose of the campaign. While this number is disappointing, you can increase your reply rate by following the five simple steps I’ve clearly explained in my email outreach guide.
While my email outreach guide will help you increase your response rate, the entire end-to-end process will require you to invest dozens of hours each week.
When you outsource link building operations to a professional or link-building agency, you won’t have to worry about building relationships and expanding your network right from scratch.
Link building professionals have dedicated processes and systems in place that they use to help their clients achieve great results. This means – you won’t have to worry about building your own processes and systems right from scratch.
But – while outsourcing your operations, make sure that you are reaching out to professionals offering White Hat SEO services – as working with professionals or agencies who practice Black Hat SEO may get you in trouble.
At the same time, they would love nothing more than to tap into their network to help you get quality links.
2. Helps Save Top Dollars
The average annual salary of white hat link building professionals stands around $50-74k USD. That’s an insanely high amount if you are in the early stages of your business.
Not having top dollars to invest shouldn’t stop you from getting high-quality backlinks. By outsourcing your link building operations to a professional or link building agency, you won’t have to worry about engaging with an in-house link builder – unless you are ready.
And even if you are ready to hire a full-time employee, it will probably take some time to see results.
It’s true that getting backlinks and seeing results takes time. However, you add more time to that by hiring an employee. That’s because building the right processes and systems required to get high-quality backlinks takes time, effort, and money.
At the same time, building links involves crafting click-worthy pitches, blogger outreach, producing high-quality guest posts, as well as value-adding infographics, and more – which will require the link-building professional to invest additional time and effort.
Of the 9 hours, if your full-time link building professional spends 4 hours writing an article each day, they’d not have much time to focus on other processes.
Not only that, but the monthly software subscriptions required for link building also quickly add up.
Only then, will you be able to see the results of your in-house link builder.
But only if they have the right skills.
Any link building strategy needs to tie into the bigger picture of SEO. If your hire doesn’t have the technical expertise and business acumen to strategise the varying aspects of what it takes to rank content, then the effort is all for nothing.
In fact, having limited in house skills is one of the most challenging obstacles to Enterprise SEO success.
So that means you’re either going to need to hire a full-stack link building specialist (which is going to cost you), or hire many different specialists (which, yes, will also cost you).
When you outsource link-building efforts, you don’t necessarily need to pay for the hours but for the results.
From tapping into their network, producing high-quality content, leveraging their in-house expertise, and conducting link-building campaigns – outsourcing link building will help you save a lot of money without sacrificing results.
3. Helps Achieve High-Quality Backlinks
The quality of backlinks can make or break your website. Google seriously takes into consideration the quality factor while determining search engine rankings.
There’s a huge difference between getting a link back from a DR70 or DR90+ website – which are high authority sites and one from DR2 or DR3 website.
Literally, anyone can get countless low-quality, spammy links with ease.
But the same is not the case with DR70+ websites. It’s a big challenge, and companies need to have a strategic link-building process in place to get quality links.
At the same time, it’s important to note that low-quality backlinks can harm your website. And if Google detects that you are using any black-hat shady tactics to get spammy links and get your website rankings up, they may end up blacklisting your website.
Working with a highly experienced link-building professional or digital marketing agency will help you ensure that you get top-quality backlinks from relevant sites, helping you position yourself as credible and authoritative in Google’s eyes.
How much do link-building services cost?
A backlink from any link building agency can range anywhere from $50-$1500+.
And if you think that cheaper is better – think again.
Remember when I said that the quality of backlinks could make or break your website? Well, not many people know that and take up offers to pay $50 for links.
I get spammed with these cheap link farms promising links from high-domain authority sites.
All. The. Time.
It’s a huge red flag when they don’t address you by your name – and so grossly insulting when one moment they’re calling you dear, then next it’s sir.
Jests aside, you have to think about it like this – if they are offering you, a random stranger whose name they didn’t even bother to address, cheap links to supposed high-quality sites – then they’re offering it to everyone.
How great will the site be if everyone is getting a link from them?
💬 The bottom line: don’t settle for link building agencies that offer a cheap link building project or service.
While you may get be a tempting offer from some cheap link-building agencies – they’re cheap for a reason. They’re low-quality, cheap links that will link to any site for a small price and won’t move the needle.
In an Ahrefs study done in 2018, they emailed sites how much they charged for a link outright. Here are the results:
As you can see, there is a correlation between costs and DR. Which makes sense, as the more authoritative a site is, the more valuable the link.
So for sites that are DR60+, you can expect to pay an average of $600+.
💡 Pro tip: While DR is a good way to first gauge the quality of a site, it is not the only thing you should consider. You should take into account:
– The number of outgoing backlinks they have (generally the higher, the diminishing returns).
– The type of sites they are linking to (you should generally steer away from sites that link out to casino, adult content, and essay sites)
– The traffic (if you care for referral traffic).
High-Quality links are what sets you apart in Google’s eyes
Most businesses ignore how essential backlinks are and end up regretting it later – which shouldn’t be the case.
Backlinks are the real deal for improving your website’s rankings. However, they play into a larger role in your SEO strategy and all components need to be carefully considered when starting link building campaigns.
The secret to rank at the top of Google for relevant keywords is out in the open – Google itself has revealed it. So it makes sense to invest your top dollars in link building.
And while you may want to build your team from the ground up, it’s a lot of grinding to do and great if you have the time and resources to invest in it.
However, that isn’t feasible for most companies. That’s why outsourcing link building is a great option for those looking to have a robust strategy in place that ensures high-quality backlinks that will actually move the needle.
Good Luck!
Jessica
