Link Building remains the most sought-after SEO technique to push rankings, authority, and traffic for a website, and that’s what makes SEO consultants, agencies, and businesses continuously look for ways to earn, build or buy links. Some even prefer to outsource their link building to agencies dealing in link arbitrage, which makes a case for me to discuss in this blog.
Many individuals and agencies who have been in the SEO industry for long enough have naturally established relations with hundreds or even thousands of bloggers who are open to lending out paid links out of their blogs. Simultaneously such agencies constantly run massive outreach to prospects to sell links by marking up, earning a decent cut, in the process.
Link Arbitrage or outsourcing link building might look like an effortless and straightforward option than creating and building links by yourself, but it has its own downside too. So before we delve into the basic filtration process to identify a reliable link-building partner, let’s look into the possible threats you might face from a random email in your inbox selling backlink packages. But, first, you need to be aware as it could be:
- A potential trap to hack sensitive information by making you click over it.
- You might end up buying low-quality, mindless links from shady sellers that potentially ruin your website’s reputation in the long run.
The recent Google update has resulted in an arbitrary fall in the page rankings for websites with maximum outsourced links.
Buying outsourced links might look tempting, but to increase your website’s organic reach and traffic, it takes much more than just links in today’s context. So does that mean you should stop buying links or outsource link building? Here’s a small piece of my mind for your link-building journey.
So Should You Buy Links?
If you’re planning to buy links just for the heck of it, I’d recommend not to waste your money with random sellers. Building links is a subtle process to push relevancy and authority to a given website, page, or a keyword; the life cycle stage of a website and the timing of building a particular set of links play an important role to fetch the desired results from a link building campaign and hence having a clear understanding of your off-page needs at a given time is crucial to get a return on every dollar spent on link building. I’ve explained this phenomenon in my free Ebook – Structured Approach to Link Building. Our team at RankJacker follows the exact process to build links for our clients and our own projects.
Once you’re clear about what type of links you need to build, depending upon the stage your website is in, and what anchors you need to choose, you can very conveniently outsource your link building and still have control over it. If your links are purchased from a genuine agency or individual who has access to a decent set of websites filtered on account of backlinks quality, metrics, and traffic and maintains niche, industry, or content relevancy, you can rest assured that the links will pay off in terms of traffic, rankings and authority.
To avoid being the victim, even while outsourcing the links, keep your priorities clear in your mind.
A quality link-building process means creating a content resource that provides your website with rightful exposure to potential audiences to pump up your reach. Thus one needs to make sure what all niches would cover your target audience and freeze those niches with the seller.
The backlink is a vote of confidence that ensures your website is a trustworthy and reputable source. Thus make sure to suggest appropriate website metrics like RDs, Domain Rank, or Page Rank for filtration to maintain quality.
The main goal of outsourcing the backlinks is to boost the website’s visibility and ranking ability on search engines. Still, it would be naive to choose anchors for link building based on KW search volume alone; rather, one should focus on relevant KWs with proximity to top positions or Page 1 on google searches to ensure you get the desired push from every link built with the purpose.
Link Building is an extremely labor, time, and investment-intensive job, and it involves persistent organization and execution. In addition, you want to make every $$ spent on Link Building. Thus it requires you to be very clear regarding the current KW Positions, Traffic Stats, and the expected outcome of your link-building campaign.
Some Other Things To Consider
With 10s of outreach emails/messages landing in your inbox, it’s just natural for anybody to give in to such requests at times. However, to make sure you don’t fall into the trap of spammers, here are my personal tips to further scrutinize the sellers before engaging with them:
- Type of an email: Was the initial personalized?
One of the simplest methods to identify a potential service provider is to look at the initials. If the email starts with “Dear Sir/ Ma’am”, you can instantly let it go. It is a mass-generated email from an agency or an individual doing hit and trial with email data scraped from the web. Rather look for a personalized element that relates to your business needs, Website niche, link types, or from a content perspective; if you find any of these elements in the email, it’s a go-ahead to check the offer in detail and further drill down on quality, process and pricing of the links, the idea is to avoid buying links out of impulse and instead give it a thorough look before making up your mind, a genuine seller will have enough essential materiel to satisfy your queries and even add up to your knowledge for requirements.
- What Are They Selling?
Look for the service instead of just links; if they only sell links mentioning domain metrics or many link types as a package, you can ignore them. But if they’re out there to address a particular concern, you know it just by scratching the surface a little.
- Make An Informed Buying Decision
I’d caution you to buy on instinct, right from your inbox. Then, you can respond to engage with them. First, try to understand their knowledge, skill, and the web properties they promise to buy links from. Next, discuss your project and seek their suggestions; you can easily validate if your conversation makes sense or not. Finally, let them show their mettle by asking for their insights about your link requirements and what they have to offer.
- Verify their Claims
Last but not least, verify their claims for authenticity and reliability. Ask for references to cross-check, reviews, testimonials, or case studies, whatever you can lay your hands on. Look for any examples of past performance that affected significant improvements to know if they will match your level of expectations.
The above process can help you vet link sellers on several parameters, and if you’re able to get to the last point and pass on, you’re most likely in good company, and you can go ahead with your link-building needs. On the other hand, you can skip the whole process to save time and effort by choosing RankJacker Link Building Services, where we follow all the above norms to filter the websites, plan your link building, and make sure you’ve delivered what you’re promised of. You can also follow us on Facebook or connect with us on Linkedin.
When is outsourcing the perfect option for you?
As an owner of a link-building agency, I want to share my viewpoint on this.
A greater part of the clients approaches us as they do not have the requisite resources or time to set up a decent link-building process on their own. Their existing focus is more on other business targets while still understanding what value these links carry and some pages that are in the run to rank nicely on Google.
Our clients also understand how SEO works, and they are hunting for someone who can get them juicy links.
In a nutshell, our clients pay for our knowledge + experience.
Not only this, there are some more reasons as to why some companies select to outsource link building in comparison to hiring an in-house specialist.
- In case Hiring an Experienced link, builder turns out to be Expensive
Certainly, the recruitment costs are the first reason when it’s about outsourcing link building.
If we take the example of Glassdoor here: The average salary comes out to be around 30-40 K of a junior-level link builder. On the other hand, an experienced one will charge around 100K USD for a yearly salary as an estimation.
If you look at it the hourly way, then the lowest comes out to be $13, and for the high-end experienced link, the building specialist will be $16 an hour.
Apart from this, other points will need to be considered to require a separate budget.
Having access to the backlink tools also carry a cost such as Moz (starting $99/month), Ahrefs (costs $99/month), SEMrush (also $99/month), and Pitchbox (starting from $300/month)
So, an in-house link builder will turn out to be quite expensive. Rather giving an agency a try would be the right way to go.
- If you require getting links straight away.
Hiring an in-house builder or an agency – The basic difference is the speed with which the links are acquired. Since an agency comes with a world of experience, it has a tried and tested link-building strategy instead of the in-house link builder developing one.
And this is probably the biggest reason why clients choose fellow link-building agencies.
If you go for doing link building on your own, then expecting instant results for the same is not gonna work. It may take around 3-4 months to acquire at least 10-20 links a month.
It may also take some time to establish a connection in a significant way with other relevant sites and learn how to tone your ideas decently.
Even I can put this confidently for my agency that opening a new niche and starting link building always comes with many challenges.
- If you require help to train your team to build links the right way
Why do I prefer to outsource some tasks?
The exchange of experience + knowledge is the reason to outsource link building. However, sometimes I feel confident about things, and outsourcing seems a great option.
Especially when you do not have the required time & expertise for a particular task type, paying out for knowledge is an excellent way.
In-house training and educating others may involve more time than you think. Some unique approaches and strategies are also being shared by a few contractors pursuing other projects. And for building high-quality links, this is just like a breath of fresh air for us. You can always work as a receiver for acquiring such guidance.
Adjudge outsourcing as a great learning opportunity, and you can always follow the strategies that are working well rather than feeling the need for an agency to educate you.
- When your present link building efforts need to be scaled
It’s quite common that sometimes the brands feel that link building is a good strategy for them but do not know how to go about it. If you face this issue for your specific niche or industry, then an agency will help and guide you in the best possible way. They will help you select an appropriate angle and review your link-building needs with objectivity.
One more pain area that our clients ask for help with is to deal with some cumbersome targets. For example, a commercial page has difficulty building links organically. If you are facing real struggles to acquire links for some specific pages, then go ahead with your decision of outsourcing.
And you can outsource this to an agency, and they will do the work perfectly for you, eliminating all such difficulties.
Author Bio: Amit is an Entrepreneur, Online Marketer, and a Startup Enthusiast. He is a co-founder at Rank-Jacker, serving SEO Agencies worldwide with White Label SEO Services. He’s currently advising several businesses in the US with their ever-evolving processes to generate leads, convert clients, and ensure foolproof delivery of seamless services. Connect with him on Linkedin https://linkedin.com/in/amit-kumar-804b949/
Faq
- Is it bad to buy links? Not at all, but it’s important to understand your needs concerning relevancy, quality, and numbers before one sets out to buy links.
- What is the best link-building strategy? Unfortunately, there’s none, to name one. Link building is important to earn authority, but to single out a given strategy as best, would be an overstatement and carry the risk of falling in a spamming pattern and getting penalized in the process.
- How do you outsource link building? First, read the above article; that’s the best piece of advice I’ve on outsourcing link building.
- Is link building dead? Absolutely not, but it has undergone a drastic change and requires a lot of dynamism concerning its approach.
- Which backlink is least important? The ones which follow a particular spamming pattern and are identifiable too.
- Which types of links are the most valuable? The ones that can bring in relevant traffic with them or show they can lead relevant traffic in the future.
- How can I get free quality backlinks? There are many ways to build free quality backlinks. Still, the processes take too much time, effort, and resources to learn, implement, and generate results and are often unattractive compared to ROI.
- What kind of links improve SERP ranking the most? The ones that are built based on tactical intelligence.
- Is the dofollow link better than nofollow? I don’t think so.
- What is a good page rank? I don’t follow metrics in absolute terms, be it page rank, referring domains, or Domain authority.
