How Much Does Link Building Cost in the UK in 2025?

How Much Does Link Building Cost in the UK in 2025?

Link building pricing UK can range from £150 to over £950 per link, depending on the quality of the link, the authority of the referring domain, and the difficulty of your niche. A typical campaign budget runs between £500 and £15,000 per month. Lower budgets tend to focus on small placements, while higher budgets support larger-scale outreach, better-quality domains, and more supporting content.

What Determines the Cost of Link Building?

The cost of link building is not fixed. It depends on three major factors: 

• The number of links you want to build
• The quality of each link
• The difficulty of your industry or niche

Understanding these factors helps you plan your link building budget wisely, whether you’re managing SEO in-house, working with an agency, or pitching a link building campaign to decision-makers. 

Below, I break down how each of these elements affects link building pricing in 2025. 

The Number of Links You Want to Build

The more backlinks you want to build, the more budget you’ll need to allocate. Each link is acquired using resources, including time for content creation, outreach, and link prospecting, as well as budget and capabilities to write internal and external content assets to get the links.

Whether you’re running a small business campaign or a full-scale SEO operation, link volume is a direct cost multiplier. 

For internal teams, securing higher volumes of links often means getting additional budget approval from senior leadership (either the Head of SEO or even directly the company’s CEO), especially if monthly SEO costs are expected to grow significantly. 

For SEO agencies, higher link volumes often unlock better operational efficiency: 

Bulk Discounts 

Many link building agencies offer bulk discounts to clients who order a high volume of links. As the number of links increases, the cost per link often decreases, a typical strategy agencies use to encourage long-term partnerships and retain clients. 

It’s a win-win scenario: clients gain better pricing, while agencies benefit from predictable workloads and revenue, making scaling link acquisition more cost-effective over time. 

Streamlined Teams

When clients commit to larger link building campaigns, agencies can allocate full teams to the project, including dedicated outreach specialists, link builders, and content writers. With a good workforce focused on a single campaign, tasks are completed faster, quality is more consistent, and communication becomes more efficient. 

So, instead of juggling multiple small projects, the team follows a single strategy with clear goals, leading to faster turnaround times, smoother coordination, and fewer delays. This structure allows for a more streamlined workflow and helps agencies deliver better backlinks at scale. 

Link Metrics That Determine Quality

Better links cost more, given that they are hard to earn and carry more SEO value. These links come from legitimate websites with real credibility, organic traffic, and authority. 

Compare a low-quality link that costs £15 from a pure link directory (that offers zero SEO impact to your site) to a topically relevant editorial link that costs you £150  but passes more link juice, trust, and authority to your site. 

Here are the key factors that influence link quality and pricing:

1. Topical Relevance

A link from a high-quality website in your niche sends a stronger signal to Google than a general site. For instance, if you’re doing link building for SaaS, you should aim for links from tech or software publications, not lifestyle blogs. Another example is a UK-based legal firm that can benefit more from links on law-focused UK domains than international news outlets with no legal content (unless it’s a digital PR campaign).

2. Organic Traffic

A website’s organic traffic is a good measurement of link quality; as you can see, it gets traffic from search, which means it ranks for some of its pages. Check the site’s organic ranking keywords to see what phrases it ranks well for its web pages.

Some sites with high DR scores may have very low organic traffic, as they only rely on manipulative SEO tactics. So pay attention to these DR70+ sites with 50 monthly visitors; they are not worth your link investment.

3. Advanced Link Metrics

Our link building agency works with enterprise brands, and we often do more than just basic link vetting. 

Here are extra signals that helped us reveal deeper link quality.

Metric Category	What to Look For
Backlink Profile	Natural follow:nofollow ratio and backlinks from a wide range of referring domains.
IP & Subnet Diversity	Links should come from varied IPs—not clustered in one network (a sign of PBNs).
Traffic Source Geography	Sites with traffic from your target country (e.g., UK for UK-based businesses).
Content History	Consistent publication of original, valuable content—not just guest posts or link inserts.
Network Graph	Links to and from other reputable sites, not just commercial or affiliate-heavy pages.

4. Site Credibility Checks

Run a quick test to see the trustworthiness of a website. Few assessment checks:

• Does the website have an About page?
• Are the site owners or authors listed?
• Is there an editorial team or company behind the brand?
• Are there signs of user engagement (e.g., comments, social shares)?
• Does the content reflect real expertise?

You want to get links from websites that send search engines trust signals. These signals show that a site is real and credible and not part of a manipulative link scheme.

Industry-Specific Factors

The difficulty of your industry adds to the factors in link building pricing. Some niches find it harder to secure placements due to legal, editorial, or reputational constraints, which drives up the cost of link building.

Examples of these difficult niches:

• Finance and banking – regulated industry, most publishers enforce strict guidelines, and reject commercial links
• CBD & cannabis – legal status varies by country; many mainstream sites avoid these topics entirely. 
• Gambling & iGaming – high legal and advertising restrictions, limited publisher pool, and risk of spam classification 
• Legal – fewer relevant and authoritative legal blogs. Many require high editorial standards
• Crypto & Blockchain – considered volatile or scam-prone by many publishers, and fewer credible link sources 

In these industries, the likelihood of acquiring backlinks organically is lower, and it’s about overcoming editorial hurdles, compliance concerns, and reputation risks. 

You will need writers who understand the subject matter and can create content that meets legal and editorial standards. In finance or healthcare, for instance, outreach pitches go through multiple layers of review.

 

Beyond Link Value: Other Associated Benefits of Link Building

When calculating the ROI of link building, it’s easy to focus on a single number: the monetary value of one link based on traffic or rankings. While that metric is useful, it doesn’t capture the full impact of a successful link building campaign. 

Backlinks influence more than just keyword positions. They touch multiple areas of digital marketing, supporting brand growth, trust, traffic, and future SEO efforts. If you ignore these associated benefits, you could undervalue the real return on your link building investment. 

Here are some ways link building adds value beyond just direct SEO metrics. 

Brand Visibility and Authority

Links from reputable websites expose your brand to new audiences in your target market. For instance, when your brand is mentioned in a high-traffic industry publication or media outlet, it puts your name in front of readers who may not have discovered you otherwise.

Even if these readers don’t click the link, the brand impression sticks, and over time, the repeated exposure through multiple mentions helps position the business as a trusted voice in your space. 

Referral Traffic That Converts

Some links can help bring actual users. When a backlink appears on a contextually relevant blog post (e.g., product comparisons, expert lists, tutorials), users are more likely to click the link and more likely to convert into actual customers. 

Conversion-focused link building happens when one strategic link brings sustained referral traffic for months or years. 

Faster Indexation and Improved Crawlability

Backlinks act as discovery pathways for search engines. When your pages are linked from established domains, Google can find and crawl your content faster. This is helpful mainly for newly launched websites, large eCommerce brands with new product pages, and blogs publishing frequent content updates. 

The result is that your content appears in search results quicker, giving you a faster return on your content publishing efforts. 

Trust Signals and Social Proof

Being featured on credible sites can help increase your website’s trustworthiness for search engines and users. When potential customers see your brand mentioned in known industry publications and media coverage sites, it acts as social proof.

You can repurpose these mentions in your own brand assets: 

• Add publisher logos to your homepage or press kit (“As Seen On”).
• Mention features in your email campaigns or Ads.
• Use links in pitches to partners, clients, or investors (and to more link prospects to increase chances of more links). 

Builds Up Overall Domain Authority 

The value of a backlink continues to support your overall domain authority, helping future content rank faster, even if that content never earns its own backlinks. 

By domain authority in its own merit, the compounding effect helps you publish content that ranks with minimal promotion and compete on more competitive keywords over time.

Strategic POV From Competitors

Link building helps strategically differentiate your brand from others in your space. Building strong backlink relationships gives you a distinct edge in building thought leadership, expanding influence in key online communities, and relationships with publishers that may lead to future PR or partnerships. 

SharpRocket: Link Building Agency of Choice

SharpRocket offers UK businesses a strategic, data-driven approach to link building with a clear focus: quality over quantity. We help enterprise brands, eCommerce, and SaaS secure links from our content-driven link building campaigns.

If you’re ready to invest in link building that supports your brand for the long haul, we’re ready to help. Learn more about our link building services and book your free strategy call.