Link building has been a reliable SEO practice for years, but as the digital landscape becomes more complex, so does search engine optimization. As such, many companies find it makes more sense to outsource link building than to untangle the many mysteries of good SEO all on their own.
SEO Then and Now
Link building used to be a simple endeavor: you placed your link wherever you could, as often as possible. Search engines assumed that the more you were linked, the more reputable you must be, and they ranked sites accordingly.
However, algorithms have become far more complex, requiring a link-building strategy that analyzes every aspect of a potential partnership. For example, link builders need to research successful keywords, find quality websites for their placement, reach out to these partners and present their case, and create custom content that naturally includes the link without seeming spammy.
Google’s algorithms ruthlessly search out low-quality content and demote it, meaning you need specialists familiar with creating natural-sounding content that incorporates your link.
Modern SEO is simply too complicated for the average website owner to manage on top of their own responsibilities as a business owner. As such, outsourcing link building offers a better return on investment than trying to manage everything on your own.
What Makes a Good Link?
Link builders consider a variety of factors to identify a good link. The first element is the domain authority of the linking partner. The higher their own DA, the more benefit you’ll get from that link.
A good link is also highly relevant to your specific niche. If you’re a water restoration company but the partner site is a veterinary trade journal, you’ve wasted your money, as no one will click through to your link.
Different types of sites also offer different benefits. A highly respected trade journal for your industry will offer better returns than a niche blog that occasionally covers content in your niche. This can seem very complicated, but an experienced link-building agency can investigate all of this on your behalf.
If you are new to link building and thinking of going it alone, I would take some time to read the Link Building Guide so that you have a good idea of the basics of what makes a link worth getting.
Relevancy Isn’t Just About Picking the Right Site
With link building, you have to not only create content that brings useful and helpful information to a particular topic but, you also have to take into consideration selecting anchor texts that naturally fit the subject matter of the embedded link.
You want the anchors or the surrounding text to paint a picture for the user of where they’ll be directed to when they click the link. At the same time, you need to avoid making Google think you are trying to manipulate them with repetitive anchor text choices.
The biggest thing to understand about link building is that it’s a sales-oriented type of communication. To succeed, you must create value for the site you are contacting in exchange for the value they give you.
By outsourcing link building, you gain access to skilled professionals proficient in this type of communication. They can craft content that subtly incorporates your link without sounding forced or robotic, and which also offers value to readers rather than seeming like a sales pitch. Another benefit is that they’ll find the right keywords and anchor text for your needs, a process that can take a lot of research and practice.
Are You Ready to Start Building Links?
So, that was quite a bit of information about link building, and the crazy thing is, that’s just a small portion. There’s so much more to link building that hasn’t even been discussed.
You need to know the different types of anchor texts and how to create a winning anchor text profile, you need to know the basics of link building, and you need to get acquainted with tactics like broken link building, guest posting, resource page link building, and more.
The point is that you’re a business owner and unless you have an impeccable working knowledge of link building, you’re not likely to have the time or energy to put into learning about the ins and outs of link building… That reason alone is why so many business owners outsource their link-building needs.
Take a look at how your business can benefit.
9 Reasons to Consider Outsourcing Your Link Building
Many businesses outsource link-building campaigns simply for convenience’s sake, but there are many other reasons why link-building agencies offer advantages over an in-house approach. From keeping up-to-date with shifting search engine algorithms to offering personalized advice, the right link-building agency can get results beyond what your in-house link builder can manage on their own.
1. You Don’t Have to Keep Up With the Changes
Link-building efforts are a constant race against Google’s changing algorithms, which can change over 500 times a year. What worked just a few days ago now may harm your link-building efforts.
In only the first half of 2024, Google rolled out updates almost every month, including May’s landmark inclusion of an AI search summary named Gemini. Since then, Google has worked to eliminate spam, remove deepfakes, and demote low-value SEO content.
It’s almost impossible for website owners to keep current with these constant changes while also running their business. However, link-building specialists focus exclusively on following these changes to ensure they are using the most successful SEO strategy at any given time.
When you outsource your link-building, you don’t need to worry about these trends; instead, you can worry about your bottom line. A reputable agency will adapt its link-building strategy on your behalf.
2. It’s Convenient
Business owners wear multiple hats, such as managing employees, tracking market changes, developing new products, and performing outreach to potential clients.
Learning about SEO and link building takes time away from your essential business responsibilities, much less figuring out how to secure links from websites with high domain authority or tweaking your on-page SEO.
Building high-quality links includes researching relevant sites, leveraging established relationships to gather inbound links, and tracking link-building activities to identify how search engine results pages are influenced by specific links.
This can be incredibly overwhelming, especially when you’re building your business. Outsourcing link-building allows you access to link-building expertise instead of trying to tackle everything yourself.
3. You’re Provided With Reliable Guidance and Effective Solutions
When site owners try to do their own link-building, they often have misconceptions about what makes a successful strategy, like believing that more links are always better. They also may not know how to track the success of their link-building strategy or how to troubleshoot when things go wrong.
By outsourcing link building, you have a trusted and reliable link-building expert backing your business to troubleshoot, refine, and adjust your campaign. For example, they may notice that certain keywords aren’t improving your link-building efforts, and they can refine your strategy to select better anchor text. They can also find bad links that are harming your SEO and remove them, allowing you to boost your link-building campaign with little effort.
Think of your link builder as someone who will assess what went wrong, find a resolution, and provide you with expert advice on how to adjust to SEO’s many changing conditions.
4. You Get Expert Service
Many link-building agencies have been in the business for half a decade or more, adjusting their techniques with every new SEO update. They have built their link-building service through trial and error, learning what works and what doesn’t so that they can provide the best value to their customers.
Additionally, they have established connections to reputable organizations and experience using SEO-specific tools, like Google Search Console or keyword analyzers, that take time to learn.
When you outsource link building, you benefit from their years of building relationships, learning which SEO efforts have the best return on investment, and how to identify quality backlinks. They’re going to be able to give you quality links that will produce better results.
5. Quality Links Improve the Credibility of Your Website
Credibility matters to both Google and your customers. Fortunately, the right link-building strategies can increase both simultaneously.
Have you ever been to a website with badges showing “as seen on” or “featured in” labels, showing some trusted sources that have mentioned them? If so, you have seen firsthand the result of a link-building or PR outreach campaign, which is just another form of link-building.
The links from those trusted or niche-specific websites will give your users instant trust and increase the trust Google places in your website, too.
As an example of how link-building can have a meaningful impact, we’ll provide an example of what happened when A-List Properties decided to outsource their link-building efforts to Stellar SEO. Namely, only 30 high-quality backlinks built to their website helped them recover from the HCU and boost their traffic to an all-time high.
The whopping 1,112.32% increase in traffic wouldn’t have been possible without strategically placed backlinks. None of the traffic-bringing pages have more than a 17% share of the total traffic, which means that carefully curated backlinks benefit the entire website, not only the pages they were built for.
6. Credible Links Can Boost Referral Traffic
Great link placement can impact your website in many ways. In addition to building trust with your customers and gaining credibility with Google, links can also generate referral traffic and leads.
For example, let’s say you are a wedding planner in Houston, Texas. If local sites or newspapers have “top 10” or “best of lists” and you can get your business included, you will likely see referral traffic and leads directly from these links, which can happen much faster than ranking for those same keywords.
Another example of how a proper link-building strategy can skyrocket your websites traffic comes from FindBusinesses4Sale who outsourced their link-building efforts to Stellar SEO in February 2023. After a year of strategic link-building efforts and 150 backlinks later, their traffic grew by 502.7%.
With the right strategy and team in place, a combination of link types can be used in order to combine trust, relevance, and direct referral traffic, all of which lead to more leads, calls, and income for your business.
7. You’re Saving Time
The old saying is “time is money,” and this couldn’t be truer when it comes to link building. As a business owner, you likely have many hats to wear, meaning you only have limited time to spend on each.
Link building is a time-consuming task, and even a single person working full time on building links may not have enough time to achieve the needed scale.
As an example of how helpful outsourcing link-building can be, consider how long it takes to find, vet, and secure one backlink. You’ll first need to research potential links and make a list. Let’s say you find a list of 20 that seem promising. You go through each one and research its authority and reputation on various sites like Moz, Semrush, and Ahrefs. This could take you an hour for each one, which is 20 hours you could have spent doing something else for your business.
Next, you need to craft an outreach email to each company explaining your value proposition, with examples of your own DA and reputation. Assuming they all agree, you must produce content tailored to each website. Every article will take you between 1 hour to 2 hours, which translates to anywhere from 20 hours to 40 hours.
Just building links has cost you an entire workweek, and this one batch of work will take between 8 and 10 weeks to show any results on search engines. It becomes quite clear how outsourced link-building can vastly simplify your life!
If link building is only one of your many duties as a business owner or even a member of the marketing team, you will soon become overwhelmed and discouraged. Instead, outsource link building to a reputable company that can build at scale using pre-established connections to good link opportunities.
8. It’s More Cost-Effective Than Hiring a Full In-House Team
It’s always nice to have organic traffic coming to your website but it’s those targeted customers you really want to visit your own site! But to attract the targeted customers you seek and the high-converting traffic you want, it will come at a cost… Can you guess which one is more cost-effective? If you guessed outsourcing, you guessed right on the money! Literally!
To build links in-house, you’ll need to pay a marketing manager, a content writer, a link builder, a social media manager, and a marketing data analyst. This core group alone has a combined salary of about $177,000 in an inexpensive market.
Even at $10,000 per month (the average industry-wide is $5,000 per month on link building) spent with a link-building agency, you would save about $57,000 per year.
But salaries aren’t the only cost of acquiring your in-house link-building team. You must also consider the cost of hiring and onboarding them. They can’t hit the ground running immediately, and you’ll have to pay them during the training process. The average cost-per-hire for the typical business is about $4,425. Assuming you go with the five-person team we mentioned above, that’s an additional $22,125 spent in just one month.
You could have spent only around $5,000 by outsourcing link-building – and achieved immediate productivity because the agency’s employees are already trained.
Each team member will need a computer, phone, and desk, all of which raise your overhead costs. This isn’t to mention the additional cost of health insurance, PTO, and other benefits, which can be thousands of dollars a month for a full team.
Most small businesses are on thin profit margins that can’t tolerate these additional expenses. When you outsource link building, you only pay for the services you need; you’re not paying the full salaries, overhead, and benefits for their employees.
The bottom line is that through link-building outsourcing, you enjoy more quality links for a lower cost than most in-house teams are capable of producing.
9. Increased Profitability
Link-building is one of the most important ranking factors in Google today. Better rankings mean more traffic to your website.
Link outreach to credible websites can get your brand mentioned on the type of sites that create instant trust with visitors to your website, which has been shown time and time again to boost conversion rates.
Link outreach can also get you mentioned on sites that send referral traffic, leading to quick leads and sales increases.
Let’s look at another case study to see how link-building services boost your bottom line. After working with a link-building agency, the company Mattress Nerd experienced a 243% increase in organic traffic from November to April. Assuming a conversion rate of 2% to 5%, that’s between 5% and 12% more conversions than they would have received otherwise. And given how much mattresses cost, that’s thousands of extra dollars in Mattress Nerd’s budget that they can reinvest in further outreach efforts.
Again, Mattress Nerd didn’t have to pay full salaries for link-building services as they would have if they had managed everything in-house. By using link-building outsourcing, they not only saved money on staffing costs, but increased their traffic more than may have been possible through a totally in-house approach.
The benefits are obvious: a link-building service gets better results at a lower cost, supercharging your profitability. When you combine those with the cost savings of an outsourced solution over a full in-house link-building team, it is easy to see where and how link-building can improve your business’s profitability, leading to a strong ROI.
Ultimately, outsourced link building is not the right fit in every scenario. However, working with an agency that specializes in link building is often the most efficient and effective method of improving your link profile.
How to Choose the Right Outsource Link-Building Partner?
To make link-building work for your company, you can’t just choose the first company that shows up on Google and hope for the best. Carefully investigate every link-building agency you consider and ask them about their experience, requesting examples of their previous work whenever possible.
Link-building campaigns work differently in every industry; what works for an interior designer will fall flat with a personal injury firm. When outsourcing link building, look at the agency’s previous clients. Many agencies will specialize in certain industries, and you should ask them where their experience lies before signing up.
Any company you outsource link building to should give you realistic expectations of how much growth you can achieve within a certain time frame. A reputable agency won’t promise overnight success; instead, they’ll explain how many links you will need to achieve a certain benchmark, as well as how long that might take. Their estimates should be based on their previous experience with businesses like yours.
When you outsource link building to Stellar SEO, we won’t promise you immediate results. The link-building process takes time and careful adjustments as the SEO landscape changes. Instead, we will offer you long-term, sustainable growth based on the best SEO and link-building practices.
Our link-building agency understands that every business has different priorities, so we avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. We tailor our approach to your specific link-building needs, using our experience with SEO and content creation to personalize our strategy.
If you’re ready to outsource link building to a reputable agency with proven results, contact Stellar SEO for a free demo.
