Content marketing performance without any promotion is pretty much guaranteed to be poor, you need to be proactive and smart if you want to deliver your amazing content to new audiences. It isn’t easy, but outsourcing link building can help.
Did you know that link building is one of the most effective content promotion strategies?
However, doing link building in-house for fast-growing companies is a challenge because they already have plenty of work to do. Link building is time-consuming and requires a lot of different processes to implement, so outsourcing link building has become popular.
- How do you find the right agency to outsource link building?
- How to manage the budget and timeline?
- How to avoid amateurs and scammers who are going to deliver useless backlinks at a high price?
All answers are in this article.
Preparation for link building outsourcing
If you believe in unicorns, you should also believe that you will just hire a link building agency or freelancer and you’ll get results without any effort from your side.
Sorry. Not gonna happen.
Study the basics of Link building
Before you search for link-building agencies and ask them about their pricing options, you need to get an understanding of link building basics. Read more here:
- What is PBN?
- What are DR and DA?
- What organic traffic should websites have?
- How can you be charged – per hour or per backlink?
- How many backlinks do you need to acquire to see the first results?
For more general information on link building, read this in-depth guide.
Evaluate your content
A successful link building campaign doesn’t exist without linkable content on your website.
Homepage and services pages will limit your link building campaign.
You first need to have content worth linking to, only then start thinking about link building campaigns.
Some examples of linkable assets:
- Case studies
- Original research and studies
- Free tools
- List of best tools or services
- Statistics
Manage your expectations
Link building is a marathon, not a sprint. Especially if your website backlink portfolio is small.
If a link building agency promises amazing results in 2 months, it is a warning for you.
Together with your link building partner you need to figure out the performance metrics of link building campaigns.
DR or DA is important. But more important is the content of the website. Just imagine that your business is Chat for ecommerce. Do you need backlinks from websites about travel and cars? No. Do you need backlinks only from newsportals? No.
The success of link building campaigns is not the number of new backlinks, it is a targeted organic traffic growth and positions in SERP.
How to find the wrong link building partner?
Many agencies or SEO freelancers sell backlinks from low-quality websites. First, this is against Google’s guidelines and you can get a penalty. Second, you need backlinks from websites in your niche.
Even some famous SEO gurus are selling crap for customers who don’t have an understanding of the quality of backlinks.
That is sad.
What type of link builder is a bad choice?
- People from LinkedIn with the description “SEO, Freelance Writer, Link Builder/Guest Post”. They will send a big Excel document with many websites where they can deliver backlinks. I’ve received hundreds of such proposals. Exactly 100% of these proposals are useless.
- Full-service Digital Marketing Agencies. For a high-quality link building campaign, experienced people, frameworks, and dedication are needed. An agency that offers landing page design, email marketing campaigns, PPC, and SEO will only deliver basic results for you – find a more focused solution.
- Link building agencies that don’t ask questions about your link building campaign goals, anchor text strategy, backlinks diversification.
A good link building partner cares about your goals.
The biggest marketing challenge is always time. If you cannot devote enough time to run a quality campaign, you’re going to burn hours and the overall performance of the campaign will be poor.
Outsourcing your link building will save your time for other important activities.
Another important advantage of finding an experienced link builder is that you will get access to their expertise. They can help you to evaluate exactly how many backlinks you need to get for specific keywords to rank in top positions, they can help with anchor strategy, and much more.
Also, if link building is a new activity for your company, it will be cheaper in the beginning to outsource. When you start to see results and are sure that link building is actually delivering business growth, then you can think about building an in-house team
If you already know that link building is what you need, outsourcing can help to scale it.
When it is time to outsource link building?
Link building is a part of SEO and Content strategy. If you still don’t know which content can deliver leads or which content you need to create to satisfy search intent, don’t spend any money on link building.
For a successful link building campaign you need to have:
- Optimized and linkable content
- Evaluation of competition for specific keywords. Only then you can prioritize for what content you need to build backlinks.
- Understanding of Link quality metrics
- Anchor text strategy.
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