Wondering how much link building will cost in 2025? Should you hire an agency or build a team in-house? Are cheaper options worth the investment, or will they hurt your SEO efforts?
Let’s break down the costs and help you decide the best route for boosting your website’s authority. The average cost per link can vary widely based on factors like the type of link, the authority of the website, the difficulty of securing the link, and the service provider. This article will look at actual examples of the cost of link building by budget, research-backed insights from leading companies evaluating this topic, and the realities of running a campaign – whether outsourcing it or doing it in-house.
Link Building Costs – Real Life Examples
Let’s look at examples of link building services and the type and quality of the content that you can expect an agency of that caliber to place for it’s clients.
1. Low-Quality Links – $50-$200 per link
- Average Price: $50 – $200 per link
- Website: buzzle.com
- Site Description: Buzzle.com is a user-generated content site, offering articles in various niches but with lower domain authority.
- Type: Low-authority blogs, directories, or resource pages (DA: 30)
- Link Building Agency Example: The Hoth
- Agency Charges: Starting at $99 for a basic blog post
- Agency Description: The Hoth provides affordable link-building services, focusing on simpler, low-cost placements.
- For detailed pricing information take a look at The Hoth’s SEO Packages & Pricing to explore their various SEO services and associated costs.
2. Mid-Quality Links – $300-$600 per link
- Average Price: $300 – $600 per link
- Website: smashingmagazine.com
- Type: Industry-specific blogs, websites with moderate DA (DA: 60)
- Link Building Agency Example: Fat Joe
- Agency Charges: Around $440 per link for mid-tier placements
- Agency Description: Fat Joe specializes in delivering solid link-building strategies for clients looking for reliable placements at mid-tier prices.
- Site Description: Smashing Magazine is a respected resource for web developers and designers, with a solid DA and niche focus.
- For detailed information take a look at pricing on FatJoe’s pricing page.
3. High-Quality Links – $500-$2000 per link
- Average Price: $500 – $2,000+ per link
- Website: forbes.com
- Type: High-authority, mainstream publications (DA: 90+)
- Link Building Agency example: Siege Media
- Agency Charges: Starting at $1,500 for placements on high-authority sites like Forbes
- Agency Description: Siege Media offers premium link-building strategies focused on top-tier publications and long-term brand authority.
- Site Description: Forbes is a global media company with top-tier authority, catering to a broad audience with high credibility in business, tech, and finance.
- For detailed information take a look at Clutch.co for Siege Media page to get an idea of their pricing.
Research-Backed Insights
Now, let’s take a closer look at what the average spend on link building actually looks like. We’ve analyzed top link building studies from the top players in the field in 2025 to give you a clearer picture of how much businesses are investing in their link-building strategies.
Let’s dive in…
BuzzStream’s 2025 Link Building Pricing Report
- Average cost per link: $25 to $5,000 per link.
- Total campaign cost: Businesses often spend anywhere from $2,000 to $20,000 per month depending on the type and number of links they’re acquiring.
- Customer spending: Companies allocate varying budgets based on the quality and authority of the backlinks they target.
- Source: BuzzStream
Ahrefs’ Report on Backlink Acquisition
- Average cost per link: $381.74, excluding labor costs.
- Total campaign cost: Based on an average of 10 backlinks per month, businesses may spend $3,817 per month just on acquiring links, not including additional SEO services.
- Customer spending: Link acquisition via outreach, content marketing, and other strategies could push monthly costs to over $10,000 per month for larger campaigns.
- Source: Ahrefs
Outreach Monks’ Link Building Statistics
- Average cost per link: Can range from $50 to $1,500 per link depending on quality.
- Total campaign cost: Businesses generally spend $1,000 to $10,000+ per month on link building efforts, especially if they’re targeting higher-quality backlinks from authoritative websites.
- Customer spending: A significant number of businesses spend between $5,000 to $15,000 per month on link building when outsourcing to professionals.
- Source: Outreach Monks
uSERP’s State of Link Building Report
- Average cost per link: High-authority contextual backlinks cost between $700 to $2,000+ per link.
- Total campaign cost: Clients can spend around $7,000 to $20,000+ per month depending on the scale of their link-building campaign, especially when focusing on high-quality or niche-specific links.
- Customer spending: High-end link-building strategies, such as securing links from top-tier websites, can push monthly campaign costs into the $15,000 to $30,000+ range.
- Source: uSERP
Authority Hacker’s Link Building Survey
- Average cost per link: Prices for guest posts and high-authority links range from $200 to $1,200 per link.
- Total campaign cost: Depending on the number of links and campaign strategy, businesses typically spend $5,000 to $15,000 per month on link building. Larger enterprises may spend upwards of $50,000 per month if the strategy involves large-scale outreach or highly authoritative links.
- Customer spending: High-competition niches with significant budgets can expect to see monthly expenditures in the $20,000 to $50,000 range on link-building campaigns.
- Source: Authority Hacker
These studies show a wide range of costs depending on the quality of backlinks, campaign scale, and link-building strategy. Businesses looking for high-authority links or specialized niches can expect to pay higher monthly costs, but they also benefit from improved SEO and organic growth more quickly.
Next we turn to some real life examples of different businesses and how much they spend on campaigns.
Campaign Results to Expect for Every Budget
When it comes to link-building, your budget often determines the type of businesses you’ll work with and the results you can expect. Let’s break down how different budget ranges align with different business types.
Below are some hypothetical scenarios that give you a good picture of how much a typical campaign might cost.
Low-end Campaigns ($1,000 to $5,000 per month):
- Client: Brewed Awakening Coffee
- Client URL: https://www.brewedawakening.com
- Expected Links: 5 to 25 links per month
- Average Price per Link: $20 to $150
- Expected Value in Return: Increased local SEO visibility, higher local search rankings, and better brand recognition in the community.
- Client Expectation: Local SEO growth, increased local recognition, and a stronger online presence in community searches.
- Link Type: Local SEO links from directories, local news outlets, community websites, and small niche blogs.
- Reasoning: A local coffee shop would aim for high-quality but low-cost local links to enhance its local presence and drive foot traffic or online orders. Content focus would expand to include general community relevance, strengthening their physical presence.
Mid-range Campaigns ($5,000 to $15,000 per month):
- Client: NerdWallet
- Client URL: https://www.nerdwallet.com
- Expected Links: 10 to 25 links per month
- Average Price per Link: $400
- Expected Value in Return: Boosted search rankings for financial products, enhanced brand authority in personal finance, and increased organic traffic.
- Client Expectation: Organic traffic increase, higher rankings in competitive markets (like personal finance), and improved industry authority.
- Link Type: High-quality links from financial blogs, industry-specific publications, and reputable finance-related websites.
- Reasoning: A personal finance site like NerdWallet would invest in premium backlinks from authoritative sources to improve rankings for competitive financial keywords and increase consumer trust.
High-end Campaigns ($20,000 to $50,000+ per month):
- Client: HubSpot
- Client URL: https://www.hubspot.com
- Expected Links: 20 to 50+ links per month
- Average Price per Link: $800 to $1,000
- Expected Value in Return: Significant increases in domain authority, access to high-quality industry links, and measurable increases in inbound leads. High-end links help build brand authority, trust, and recognition.
- Client Expectation: Long-term domain authority boost, high-quality leads, and industry recognition from authoritative sources.
- Link Type: Premium links from top-tier publications, influential blogs, and authoritative academic or research-based websites.
- Reasoning: High-end SaaS companies invest in premium, authoritative links to solidify their position as industry leaders, often looking for strategic partnerships and long-term SEO benefits.
Results Garnered From Different Budget-Specific Approaches
Understanding the costs associated with link building is essential, but it’s equally important to know what you can expect in return for your investment. Here’s a sampling of how companies’ expectations vary depending on their budget:
1. Low-End Budget ($1,000 to $5,000 per month)
- Link Cost: $100 to $300 per link
- Client: Local Plumbing Services
- Link Building Strategy:
- Focus on local SEO with affordable links from local directories and regional blog posts.
- Links from local business directories and related service websites.
- Results:
- Increased Traffic: 35% increase in organic traffic within 6 months.
- Improved Rankings: Improved rankings for local keywords like “plumbing services near me” and “best plumber [City Name]”.
- Expected Value: Client saw steady improvement in local rankings, driving more calls and inquiries from the local area. The low-end investment helped them establish a foothold in local search results and gain recognition in their market.
2. Mid-Range Budget ($5,000 to $15,000 per month)
- Link Cost: $400 to $800 per link
- Client: E-Commerce Health and Fitness Brand
- Link Building Strategy:
- A mix of guest posts, editorial links, and mentions in relevant fitness blogs. Focus on quality content and targeting health and fitness influencers.
- Results:
- Increased Traffic: 120% increase in organic traffic within 4 months.
- Improved Rankings: Rankings for highly competitive keywords like “buy fitness equipment online” improved from page 6 to page 2 in Google search results.
- Expected Value: The client saw more inbound sales through increased brand awareness and improved ranking for high-intent keywords. With this mid-range investment, they were able to outbid competitors for more valuable keywords in the fitness space.
3. High-End Budget ($20,000 to $50,000+ per month)
- Link Cost: $800 to $1,000+ per link
- Client: Tech Startup in the AI Industry
- Link Building Strategy:
- Premium links from authoritative tech websites, high-profile guest posts, and editorial mentions in top-tier AI publications. The strategy was aimed at building thought leadership in the AI and technology space.
- Results:
- Increased Traffic: 200% increase in organic traffic within 3 months.
- Improved Rankings: Improved rankings for highly competitive AI-related terms like “artificial intelligence applications” and “AI technology solutions,” moving from position 30 to position 10 for the key terms.
- Expected Value: The client experienced a massive spike in qualified traffic, building credibility in their niche and seeing increased inquiries for their AI solutions. The high-end budget enabled them to target authoritative sources that propelled their brand to the forefront of the AI industry.
By understanding the range of link-building strategies and budget allocation, businesses can make informed decisions about the level of investment needed to achieve their SEO goals.
Link Building Cost Broken Down By Type of Link
Pricing for different types of links such as guest posts and link insertions, varies widely based on factors like domain authority, traffic metrics of the domain, and niche relevance.
Let’s look at examples from real providers in the field as of March 2025 to illustrate the pricing ranges:
1. Guest Post Links
- Link Insert offers guest posts on websites with Domain Rating (DR) 40+ and 1,000+ monthly visitors at $140 per link.
linkinsert.com - Authority Builders provides guest posts starting at $80 per link, depending on the site’s domain authority, organic traffic, and niche.
authority.builders - Stellar SEO lists guest post placements ranging from $253 to $600 per link.
stellarseo.com - Loganix charges $200 per guest post placement.
onehourprofessor.com - Editorial.Link starts pricing at $1,750 for 5 links per month.
editorial.link
2. Link Insert (Link Placement)
- Link Insert offers link insertion services on DR 40+, 1,000+ traffic websites at $140 per link.
linkinsert.com - Outreach Monks notes that per-link costs can range from $100 to over $1,500, depending on the quality and niche of the publication.
outreachmonks.com - LinkBuilder.io does not publicly share its pricing but mentions that costs vary based on domain authority, niche relevance, etc.
linkbuilder.io - BuzzStream reports that links can cost anywhere from $25 to $5,000 each, influenced by factors like link quality and acquisition method.
buzzstream.com
3. Sponsored Posts
- The HOTH provides guest post services with pricing details available upon request, emphasizing high-quality content and genuine outreach.
rhinorank.io - Link Insert offers sponsored posts on DR 40+, 1,000+ traffic websites at $140 per post, including 800-1,000 words written by a human writer.
linkinsert.com - Loganix specializes in white-hat SEO link building, offering guest posting services at $200 per placement.
onehourprofessor.com - Authority Builders provides guest posts starting at $80 per link, depending on the site’s domain authority, organic traffic, and niche.
authority.builders - Editorial.Link starts pricing at $1,750 for 5 links per month, with costs varying based on link quality and domain authority.
editorial.link
4. Broken Link Building
- Link Insert offers link insertion services on DR 40+, 1,000+ traffic websites at $140 per link, ensuring contextual relevance.
linkinsert.com - Outreach Monks notes that per-link costs can range from $100 to over $1,500, depending on the quality and niche of the publication.
outreachmonks.com - LinkBuilder.io highlights that prices vary based on factors like domain authority and niche relevance.
linkbuilder.io - Editorial.Link starts pricing at $1,750 for 5 links per month, with costs varying based on link quality and domain authority.
editorial.link - BuzzStream reports that links can cost anywhere from $25 to $5,000 each, influenced by factors like link quality and acquisition method.
buzzstream.com
5. Resource Page Links
- Link Insert offers resource page link placements on DR 40+, 1,000+ traffic websites at $140 per link, ensuring contextual relevance.
linkinsert.com - Outreach Monks notes that per-link costs can range from $100 to over $1,500, depending on the quality and niche of the publication.
outreachmonks.com - LinkBuilder.io highlights that prices vary based on factors like domain authority and niche relevance.
linkbuilder.io - Editorial.Link starts pricing at $1,750 for 5 links per month, with costs varying based on link quality and domain authority.
editorial.link - BuzzStream reports that links can cost anywhere from $25 to $5,000 each, influenced by factors like link quality and acquisition method.
buzzstream.com
6. Directory Links
- Link Insert offers directory link placements on DR 40+, 1,000+ traffic websites at $140 per link, ensuring contextual relevance.
linkinsert.com - Outreach Monks notes that per-link costs can range from $100 to over $1,500, depending on the quality and niche of the publication.
outreachmonks.com - LinkBuilder.io highlights that prices vary based on quality of the publication.
Hopefully by now this breakdown of different types of link-building and how much each one costs will help you determine which approach suits your goals and budget.
ROI of Link Building
Now let’s look at the return on investment of link building. The examples below are hypothetical and show what clients might experience before and after a successful link-building campaign.
1. Organic Traffic Growth (Small Business Example):
- Example Client: Soko Glam
- Website: www.sokoglam.com
- Before Link Building: 50,000 monthly organic visits, $10,000 in monthly revenue from organic traffic.
- After Link Building: 70,000 monthly organic visits (40% increase), $14,000 in monthly revenue from organic traffic.
- Number of Links Acquired: 20 backlinks from beauty and skincare blogs.
- Duration: 6 months.
- Total Spend: Estimated $6,000 on link-building services.
- How It Happened: Soko Glam, an e-commerce site specializing in Korean beauty products, focused on acquiring backlinks from top beauty and skincare bloggers. The increase in traffic contributed to a higher conversion rate, driving sales and revenue growth.
2. Improved Search Rankings (Medium-Sized Business Example):
- Example Client: BarkBox
- Website: www.barkbox.com
- Before Link Building: Ranked on page 2 for “subscription box for dogs,” 400,000 organic visits per month.
- After Link Building: Ranked #1 for “subscription box for dogs,” 800,000+ organic visits per month.
- Number of Links Acquired: 100 backlinks from pet-related websites, blogs, and influencers.
- Duration: 8 months.
- Total Spend: Estimated $25,000 on content marketing and link-building services.
- How It Happened: BarkBox utilized guest posts, influencer collaborations, and sponsored content to acquire backlinks from authoritative pet websites. This strategy led to improved rankings and higher visibility, resulting in significant traffic growth and increased sales.
3. Lead Generation and Conversions (Small Business Example):
- Example Client: The Sill
- Website: www.thesill.com
- Before Link Building: 15,000 organic visits per month, $2,000 in monthly revenue from organic traffic.
- After Link Building: 30,000 organic visits per month (100% increase), $5,000 in monthly revenue from organic traffic.
- Number of Links Acquired: 25 backlinks from lifestyle and home décor websites.
- Duration: 5 months.
- Total Spend: Estimated $4,000 on link-building services.
- How It Happened: The Sill, an online plant retailer, used content marketing and outreach to acquire backlinks from home décor and lifestyle bloggers. This helped them improve their SEO, generate more traffic, and convert those visitors into customers, significantly boosting revenue.
4. Brand Visibility and Authority (Medium-Sized Business Example):
- Example Client: Glossier
- Website: www.glossier.com
- Before Link Building: 500,000 organic visits per month.
- After Link Building: 700,000+ organic visits per month (40% increase).
- Number of Links Acquired: 150 backlinks from beauty magazines, lifestyle influencers, and skincare experts.
- Duration: 6 months.
- Total Spend: Estimated $40,000 on content creation and link-building efforts.
- How It Happened: Glossier, a leading skincare and beauty brand, earned high-quality backlinks through collaborations with top beauty magazines, influencers, and guest posting. This helped increase their organic traffic and solidified their brand authority in the beauty industry.
5. Referral Traffic (Small Business Example):
- Example Client: Public Goods
- Website: www.publicgoods.com
- Before Link Building: 2,500 referral visits per month, $1,000 in monthly revenue from referral traffic.
- After Link Building: 8,000 referral visits per month (220% increase), $4,000 in monthly revenue from referral traffic.
- Number of Links Acquired: 35 backlinks from sustainable living and eco-friendly lifestyle websites.
- Duration: 4 months.
- Total Spend: Estimated $3,000 on link-building services.
- How It Happened: Public Goods, a sustainable goods company, utilized content marketing and outreach to acquire backlinks from eco-conscious bloggers and sustainable living websites. The increased referral traffic led to a significant boost in sales.
In general, the ROI for link-building is highly variable, depending on the industry, strategy, and quality of links acquired. However, these examples prove that link-building can have a substantial impact on both small and medium-sized businesses, helping them grow traffic, improve brand visibility, and increase revenue.
Set Achievable Goals To Realize Your Link Building Potential
Before understanding what your link building budget should be, it’s important to understand what kind of ROI you can 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.
From the screenshot above, you can see that the keyword ‘lead generation tools’ has 900 searches per month in the United States and almost 5,000 searches globally. Considering additional keywords that 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:
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; Ahrefs’ figure is mainly an estimate.
Using Ahrefs’ information, you can view the competition 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. If the DR is lower or similar to your own site, you know you’ll have a better chance at outranking them if your content and backlinks are slightly better.
Ahrefs allows you to click into Backlinks and see if they’re good quality or spammy links. This allows you to determine the type of link building that was used to achieve the 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 safe to aim for 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:
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.
Here is a summary of the expenses you can expect and the cost per link based on our experience when building backlink teams.
- 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.
- 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.
Job Advertising
Our hiring ratio is about 1 out of every 100-200 applicants for link building positions.
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.
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).
A link manager can typically 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.
Key Takeaways
- Good links come from relevant, high-authority sites with natural placement.
- Bad links come from spammy, low-quality, or manipulative sources that Google can easily detect.
- Buying cheap backlinks or using shady tactics can get your site penalized (or completely removed from Google’s index).
- Diversify your link profile with different anchor texts, sources, and link-building strategies.
- Considering the time and effort that goes into building relationships to gain your targeted breadth and depth of backlinks, outsourcing this task with professionals who already have longstanding relationships with higher authority sources is the way to go.
