‹ Back to Blog

Link Building Cost: How Much Does It Cost to Build Links and Why?

Jeremy Ellens
Author

Even the most basic of SEO courses will tell you that there is no success without a strong backlink profile and that building links is a must for ruling the first page of Google. And if you don’t know how to build links yourself, you’re probably wondering if you can delegate it to someone else.

But how much does link building cost?

Today, we’ll explore the cost of link building. In this article, we’ll cover how to calculate the ROI of link building, the total costs of link building, and what to consider when outsourcing or building an in-house link building team.

Why Link Building Matters for SEO

You may be wondering if building links is something that you should spend time and marketing budget on. Rightfully so.

While Google’s algorithms keep changing and the requirements for ranking well are different with each month, one thing remains constant. Having lots of high-quality backlinks to a page is necessary if you want that page to rank anywhere close to the first page of Google.

Sure, there are other signals and metrics, starting with the quality of your content, the loading page speed, the formatting, the sitemap, and many others. However, a decent number of links can have an immense impact on your SEO performance as they’re still one of the strongest ranking factors.

Over the years, many Google employees (such as Andrey Lipattsev) have stated that links are one of the top 3 search ranking factors.

When it comes to factors that influence the price of building links, we’ve identified the 4 main ones.

Four Main Factors That Influence Link Building Cost

1. The Quality of Links

Even though they are harder to acquire, high-authority links (like those from TechCrunch or Forbes) can significantly boost your SEO.

On the other hand, low-quality links from spammy sites or directories like XYZ Blog might provide quick results but can harm your rankings over time, especially if Google penalizes your website.

2. Industry

To build links in more competitive industries, you will need to invest more. For instance, if you’re looking to rank a credit card comparison website, this might require a fullly developed content marketing strategy with influencer partnerships and paid links.

Here’s an indication of link building costs for some of the most common industries:

  • High-cost industries (up to $500 per high-quality link): Casino & gambling, Loans, Finance, Real estate
  • Moderate-cost industries: SaaS, Technology, Nutrition & food, Legal
  • Low-cost industries (under $200 per high-quality link): Hobby sites, Video games, Charities, Education, Childcare & helping causes

3. Outreach Method

Manual outreach, a link building tactic where you send personalized emails to handpicked websites, usually leads to better results as it’s more relevant. Using an automated outreach tool like Hunter.io can help you scale efforts by sending emails in bulk, but the lack of personalization and mass prospecting often lead to lower-quality links.

4. Local vs. Global Targeting

If you’re a local business, regional sites like local Chamber of Commerce pages or local news portals can be a cost-effective way to improve local SEO. On the other hand, global campaigns can target international sites like TechCrunch or Wired, which does bring broader exposure but also comes with more effort and resources needed.

Average Link Building Pricing

Link-building costs can vary widely depending on the quality and volume of links. To better manage your expenses, it’s helpful to determine a long-term cost per link as a benchmark.

Authority Hacker’s survey of 755 link builders has found that paid links cost $83 on average.

According to Ahrefs, a paid niche edit costs $361.44 on average, while a paid guest post costs significantly less, $77.80.

How to Budget for Link Building in 2025

Your link building budget will depend on your goals and resources and can significantly differ depending on whether you’re a small business or an enterprise.

It often comes down to balancing quality and affordability, but at the end of the day, it’s simple — the more high-quality links you have, the easier it will be for you to rank and the more organic traffic you’ll get from search engines such as Google.

SEO budget chart

For example, we have a SaaS client that spends $100,000/month on SEO and competes with some of the biggest companies in the world. Of that budget, 30% is spent on link building. If you want to rank for competitive keywords that drive revenue, you have to invest in link building.

Hidden Costs In Link Building

Time invested in blogger outreach

To execute a successful link-building strategy, you’ll need an experienced full-time link building manager to lead the process. In the US, hiring a qualified employee will typically range from $60,000-80,000 annually. You should be able to save some money by sourcing top talent from overseas, but it could still cost you around $30,000 per year.

Risk of penalties from low-quality links

Many vendors selling guest posts offer low-quality links from websites created purely for paid content. Thesea are often referred to as link farms.

If someone offers a high DA link for a low price, it’s likely coming from a repurposed site with fake SEO metrics and little real value. If you opt for buying links like this, vet the websites carefully to ensure they have genuine organic traffic and work only with trusted vendors.

Content creation for link placement

Successful link builders often depend on skilled third-party writers to secure placements on top-tier blogs like HubSpot. High-quality content is essential to meet editorial standards. An experienced US-based freelancer might charge $0.20 per word, making a 2,000-word guest post cost around $400.

What’s the ROI of link building?

Before understanding what your link budget should be, it’s important to understand what kind of link building ROI can you expect. After all, you want to make sure that investing in good links makes an impact on your bottom line.

Before calculating the ROI of your link building efforts, you need to take a few factors into consideration:

  • What’s your customer lifetime value (LTV)?
  • How much potential traffic can you get from a keyword that you’re writing for?
  • How many backlinks are estimated to rank for that keyword in the top 10 search results?
  • What kind of conversion rate can you expect from ranking well for that keyword?

Let’s cover each of these in detail.

1. Find Your Customer LTV

If you want to know how much you can spend to acquire a customer, you must first know what your customer lifetime value (LTV) is. This is how much the typical customer spends over their entire lifetime with you, not just their first purchase. For example, if a customer spends $100/month and they typically last two years, then your customer LTV would equal $2,400.

Once you calculate the average cost of building links, you want to make sure that your cost of acquiring a customer from SEO is lower than their lifetime value.

2. Find Your Traffic Estimates

If you have a piece of content written around a certain keyword, for example ‘lead generation tools’, and you want it to rank well, you’ll need to build backlinks to that piece of content.

Before doing anything, you want to know how much extra traffic you can get by ranking on the first page for the keyword, rather than page 5.

In other words, how many more people will come to your blog page through search engine rankings if you build links to it.

You can’t and don’t have to wing this. SEO tools such as Ahrefs can show you estimates on how many people search for a given keyword every month.

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

From the screenshot above, you can see that this ‘lead generation tools’ has 900 searches per month in the United States and almost 5,000 searches globally. Considering additional keywords an article on the topic of ‘lead generation tools’ would also rank for, Ahrefs estimates you could get 1,800 visitors a month if you rank well.

3. Determine the Number of Backlinks Required to Rank in SERPs

How many backlinks does it take to move a piece of content to page 1 on Google? Ahrefs gives estimates on the number of backlinks required to rank in the top 10 for that keyword:

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

For this specific keyword, it’s going to take approximately 77 backlinks to rank in the top 10, provided that the quality of content is great and that your technical SEO is in order. However, you can rank with fewer backlinks and Ahrefs’ figure is mainly an estimate.

Also in Ahrefs, you can take a look at the competitors for a keyword and find out how strong their Domain Rating (DR) is and how many backlinks their pages each have. A higher DR will make it easier for that website to rank with less backlinks.

Ahrefs allows you to click into Backlinks and see if they’re good quality or spammy links. Moreover, you can determine the type of link building they used to achieve these results.

4. Determine Your Conversion Rates

The ultimate goal of most content is to lead to more sales or whatever other type of conversion you may have in mind. Booking a demo, subscribing to your newsletter, getting a free trial or something else.

However, not all content can convert the same number of visitors to customers. Depending on the stage of the sales funnel (top, middle or bottom), they will have different conversion rates. If you don’t know this information, you can look at some industry benchmarks.

The average conversion rate across industries is around 2%, but it’s a good rule of thumb to assume a 1-5% conversion rate from the pages you want to rank. This is the last piece of information you need for calculating the ROI of building links.

5. Calculate Your Estimated ROI

With all this information at hand, you can calculate the return on investment from link building.

This is what the formula looks like:

Calculate Your Estimated ROI

So from the examples above, you can calculate the Cost of Backlinks: 77 backlinks * $250 per link, equals $19,250.

With an estimated 1,800 visitors per month, 12 months of traffic, and an average 2% conversion rate, ranking for ‘lead generation tools’ might bring us 432 Estimated Yearly Customers.

With an LTV of $2,400 * 432 customers, our Customer Value would equal $1,036,800.

The total ROI is $1,036,800 customer value  / $19,250 cost of backlinks * 100. This is a 5,385% return on link building.

Using this example, it looks like there would be a strong ROI if you invested in SEO for this keyword.

If you don’t know your conversion numbers, you can replicate this process to model some different scenarios to get the ROI of building links.

Over time, the more quality backlinks your website has, the easier it should be to rank any page you create and SEO should become one of your cheapest channels in terms of customer acquisition costs.

In-house vs. outsourced link building in 2025

You should have a clearer idea about the value of backlinks at this point. Now you want to determine how to build links, and there are two common options: outsourcing to a link building agency offering link building packages or build links in-house.

Both have their pros and cons, so let’s look at each in detail so you can determine which option suits your business better.

In-house Link Building Cost

To understand how much it costs to build links in-house, we need to look at three separate periods of time in creating a link building team.

The hiring period, the training period, and the post-training period.

In-house link building costs

Here is a summary of the expenses you can expect and the cost per link based on our experience when building backlink teams.

  1. This does not include any paid link fees. If you pay websites a fee for links, Ahrefs estimates niche edit fees to cost on average an additional $360/link.
  2. This assumes you can find a part-time link building manager to manage your link builder(s).

Now let’s dive into how we arrived at those numbers.

The Hiring Period

The hiring period is a 1-2 month time period it takes to source, interview and hire new link builders. Depending on how much experience you have with digital marketing and SEO specifically, it can be more or less time-consuming than this.

We’ll get into some more details in a bit.

The Hiring Period

Job Advertising

Our hiring ratio is about 1 out of every 100-200 applicants for link building positions.

Hiring a link builder

To get that many applicants for a link building position, you’re going to need a service that will help promote your job post to make a great hire. There are many comparable services you can use to source applicants like LinkedIn, Indeed, etc. However, for this example, we used LinkedIn.

LinkedIn uses a pay-per-click (PPC) model to get applicants for your openings. We typically receive about 100 applicants a month for our job postings, but PPC costs will vary depending on the region. We arrived at $390 in LinkedIn advertising costs by using a budget of $6.50/day for two months.

Human Resources

Someone needs to review those 100 monthly candidates. This includes reviewing their resumes, job application responses, their writing samples, and their link building tests. Based on our experience, this takes about 10 hours a month.

We usually have about eight candidates that make it past this step and go to interviews. Our first interview is to understand job fit based on their experience and job history. The second interview is to figure out how good of a culture fit they are. Based on our experience, this takes another 10 hours a month.

For the candidates that make it past those interviews, we do reference checks, which take about 2 hours a month.

So in total, you or an HR person averaging $29/hour, will spend about 22 hours a month in the hiring process. In two months, that equates to $1,276 in human resources costs.

Personality Testing

After reference checks, we use a personality test called Kolbe to understand if a candidate’s natural way of working fits well with the requirements of a job. There are many personality tests out there and we think that when it comes to the pricing, they are all pretty similar.

To successfully use Kolbe, we start with buying a Kolbe Range of Success test, which is a one-time payment of $360. With this range, the link building manager answers some questions describing what they think someone needs to be successful.

Then you’ll pay $55/candidate for candidates to take a Kolbe A test. If you have 8 candidates who take this test, that’s $440.

So between the Kolbe A tests and the Range of Success, you will spend $800 on personality testing.

The Training Period

We’ve found the training period for an experienced link builder to train and get someone new up to speed takes 3 months. During this time you should expect about 30 links from your link builder.

3 month training period for new hires

Glassdoor reports that an average link building specialist in the US earns $49,000/year. So during training, you will be paying the new link builder $4,083/month for 3 months.

In addition to paying the link builder, someone needs to train them. An experienced link builder with 4-6 years experience makes on average $58,245/year or $4,853/month, or $29/hour.

We estimate it takes about 3 hours/day for an experienced link builder to train someone new. With an average of 22 work days in a month and 3 months to ramp up, that equates to $1,914/month in management costs. This assumes you have someone on your team that can work part-time towards this training.

And finally, our link builders use Ahrefs ($199/month), Hunter ($49/month), and Clearscope ($170/month) to perform their job. That’s an additional $418/month in software tools.

That comes to a total of $19,245 and $641/link cost during the 3-month training period.

The Post-training Period

The post-training period is the period of time when a link builder should require minimal management and consistently generate about 15 links a month (depending on your link criteria).

Post-training period for new hires

A link manager can manage up to 8 link builders. So dividing the average manager salary of $4,853 by 8, you get $606/month in cost. This again assumes you can hire a manager part-time or have that expertise on your team already.

With those assumptions, it might cost you $340/link in house after 3 months.

Outsourced Link Building Cost

Agencies have different sets of criteria for charging for link building services. Most agencies charge on a performance basis per link. With this model, you don’t have to pay for any of the hiring or training period, time spent writing guest posts, time spent on outreach, communication with bloggers, etc.

If an agency builds links for you, you know exactly what you’re paying. If they don’t build links for you, you pay nothing.

Outsourced link building pricing is generally based on:

  • The domain rating or domain authority of the link (the strength of the website the link is coming from
  • The relevance of the link (how related the website is to a client’s niche or industry)
  • The traffic of the website/page the link is coming from
  • And any other custom link criteria you want to add, which can make link building more difficult (and more expensive)

In-house vs. Outsourced link building Cost: The Verdict

When it comes to the costs, it may seem like in-house has the upper hand here but that’s only on the surface. In reality, you’ll have to sink almost $2,500 into hiring a candidate. During the training period it could cost you $641/link. Then finally after a few months, you might get costs down to $340/link, but there are no guarantees.

With a link building company, you pay only for performance, with prices often being less than what you could spend in-house.

Our link building pricing at ReportCard starts at $125/link and goes up to $450/link on our link order plans, with minimal input on link criteria. On this plan, link costs average about $250/link.

For custom link building criteria, link building can take a lot more time. In this case you can expect rates to cost upwards of a thousand dollars for the most difficult links.

If you’re interested in custom link building campaigns, you can learn more about ReportCard’s offerings here.

We've helped our clients add $27,600,000+ in annual revenue.

Partner with ReportCard for proven link building services to grow your SEO channel.
img

Scale Your SEO Revenue

Build A+ Links with ReportCard and watch your traffic grow!

Get Started