Outsource Link Building - Needs, Benefits, and How-to [Templates Included]

If you’re running an SEO agency with growing link building needs, you’re facing some crucial decisions. Taking on more SEO clients is vital to growth, but ramping up more backlinks to improve clients’ website rankings comes with major financial and operational responsibilities.

Outsourcing link building is a strategic decision and process that allows businesses and SEO agencies (like you) to scale, allocate resources effectively, and focus on core operations. 

With growing demands, checklists, and to-dos in every SEO campaign, most companies lack the in-house expertise, time, or tools to execute a successful link building campaign.

The central question we’ve always been asked is, “When and when not to outsource link building”? Let’s answer that right here. 

When and When Not to Outsource Link Building?

You outsource link building when:

• Your team lacks specialized knowledge in link prospecting, link qualification, outreach, and producing both product-led and content-led assets. 
• You need to scale link-building efforts without hiring and training an in-house team (or dedicating some SEO specialists to link acquisition). 
• You want to focus on growing your business (client acquisition, service delivery, client satisfaction, etc..) while a link-building agency handles the backlinks part. 

It is not ideal to outsource link building when: 

• You haven’t built your website’s initial and proper SEO foundation (technical SEO, on-page SEO, site architecture, content, etc.). You can’t rely solely on link building to rank your clients’ websites. 
• You prefer a lower cost per link with full control over link sources and outreach strategies.
• You’re serving $1,500/month client retainers with fewer budgets allotted for link building (this kind of budget constraint makes outsourcing impractical). 

Benefits and Downsides of Outsourcing Link Building

If you’re thinking of outsourcing link building, consider both its benefits and downsides. 

Link building is worthwhile, whether in-house or outsourced to a trusted link-building agency, if you balance them and discern the right option based on your current situation and context. 

Benefits of Outsourcing Link Building

Expertise, Experience, and Efficiency

This is the primary reason why SEO agencies and businesses want to outsource link-building work to someone else. More often than not, if the in-house team doesn’t have the built-in processes and experience required to acquire backlinks for clients—it consumes more time than they would think of if they did link-building in-house.

Speaking of experience, observing nuances in link building for each niche market takes months and years. If you’re an SEO agency, building links for vet clinics isn’t as easy as building links for a fintech website. The challenges within each market require expertise to overcome even just the initial roadblocks. 

Another example is doing competitor backlink analysis. An SEO beginner in link building would have focused more on link metrics when analyzing competitors’ links. 

However, that approach is just an initial activity for a link-building expert. He or she delves deeply into the types of links competitors built and assesses probable reasons for linking—which is more advanced. To reach that certain level of mastery, several hours of scanning backlink reports are required (and that’s what makes them “experts” in the process).

Scalability 

When discussing scalability, marketers only focus on the number of links. Of course, link building agencies can build more links in less time than an in-house team.

However, that’s only one part of scalability. Link-building agencies’ biggest advantage is expanding linkable markets by conducting more outreach campaigns, giving the client’s brand more reach it deserves. 

Given their years in the SEO game, they have lists of tens of thousands of webmasters and journalists. With relationships they’ve built, it’s easier for them to nudge link requests, get more positive responses for expert commentaries in digital PR, or have more straightforward link inclusion on a resource page. 

Topping it off, as you scale link-building projects with an agency, you also get cost efficiency when adding more projects. That’s where discounts (or more links in exchange for referrals come in). 

In general, relationships with link-building agencies don’t have to be stiff—it can be dynamic and mutually benefit both parties. 

Preference For Link Types 

Outsourcing link building allows you to choose specific link types you want to integrate into your site’s backlink profile. 

Different agencies have several packages and options according to the types of links that you’re getting as a client. From niche edits to guest posting links, go way up to top-tier publications backlinks using digital PR.

Pro Insight: This link type preference is more strategic and beneficial than choosing links based on specific Ahrefs’ Domain Ratings (e.g., DR30 to 50, DR50 to 90). It’s now easy to purchase links from generic link vendors, so the best approach is to get backlinks from agencies that consider link types. 

Downsides of Outsourcing Link Building

Outsourcing link building also has its fair share of downsides that businesses must be fully aware of. 

Higher Costs 

This is the first on the list, and agencies and brands must consider their budget before onboarding a new link-building partner. 

For instance, if you’re an early-stage startup and still testing product-market fit (in other words, you haven’t had enough recurring customers to sustain your business), outsourcing link building (even outsourcing SEO at large) is not the best move. 

However, as you soon get more funding to test and invest in a solid marketing channel, you can now outsource SEO. This is based on my observations working with several startups (both funded and bootstrapped). 

Quality Control

You’ll only see the quality of links at the time of reporting, which means you don’t have full control over the outcome. 

Pro Tip: Start with a trial version or 3-month link-building project before investing long-term (more than a year) with your link-building agency. You have to test and see the actual live links they’ve acquired so you can rest assured of the quality before throwing more bucks into your investment. 

Dependency on External Partners

This isn’t very relevant to in-house SEO teams. But for SEO agencies that provide regular client reports, it’s important to have a good monitoring process with your preferred link-building vendor so you can sustainably see the outcome and, therefore, help you deliver regular backlink reports for clients.

This is to avoid any delays in backlink deliverables and to adjust strategies based on actual performance and your SEO recommendations with your clients. 

For example, if you change a strategy, let’s say you want to build backlinks to a new landing page (product/service feature), you could quickly and flexibly do it only if you have a good link building partner who’s willing to change the strategy as the need arises. 

That dependency on external partners is crucial when outsourcing link building projects.

Preparing Your Website for Link Building

As I mentioned earlier, your website must be optimized well to maximize the impact of backlinks. 

This approach ensures you strengthen your SEO campaign and avoid pointing backlinks to weak pages (or pages that don’t convert). It’s best to start linking your initial set of links to pages that matter most to you in terms of achieving search traffic (and to your client, in terms of achieving their business goals and revenue). 

Here are a couple of tips to prepare your website for link building:

• Technical SEO – improve crawlability and performance by boosting page load times, cleaning up code, etc. 
• On-page SEO – optimize each web page’s content and HTML, including the target keyword in strategic places (title tags, header text, images, and more). 
• Content Creation: Develop and publish content assets relevant to your audience (e.g., landing page copy, blog articles, infographics, resource guides, etc.). 

The reality is building backlinks alone is not enough to guarantee SEO success. 

Take the first actions on the listed items earlier to get Google to crawl, index, and receive your pages well, making them deserving of ranking in Google’s SERPs for their target keywords. 

Then the content promotion part, including link building—which you can outsource if you prefer—will have more impact on the overall SEO performance of your website. 

Budgeting for Link Building

A critical part of your decision to outsource link building is your budget. 

Generally, you have two options: doing link development in-house or outsourcing it to a link-building agency.

Both come with a cost. 

That’s why we created an in-house VS agency calculator to help you determine the actual total costs and cost per link for each option. This will help you decide which one is more cost-efficient and worth your investment for your website in the long run. 

Choosing the Right Link-Building Partner

Once you decide to outsource link-building to an agency, choose the right link-building partner. 

You must find a link-building agency that provides individualized care and doesn’t treat your clients’ websites like statistics. Pick the wrong partner, and you’ll end up damaging your clients’ link profiles, and your clients will think you’re the one messing it up. 

Now, there are several ways to source link-building agencies. 

The best one is asking for recommendations from your SEO networks. Those you’ve known over the years and built trust in the quality of work are the ones you should highly consider. 

Given that you’re already familiar with the caliber of their service, you’re likely to end up with another good service from them for your current SEO campaign.

Be wary of link-building agencies, which you only see in any ads today. If you come across them, verify through their website and check their current and past clients and case studies – this would show if they can be trusted for results. 

Finally, once you have a list from different sources, it’s time to have a set of criteria to choose the best outsourced link-building partner. 

How to Outsource Link Building? 

Needless to say, not all link-building agencies are equal. Having a set of criteria to identify the best fit can help you increase your confidence in making the right decision. 

The number one mistake I’ve seen with agencies and businesses outsourcing link building is that they don’t have a set of criteria to base their decisions on, leading them mostly in making the wrong decision. 

To simplify things, I’ve created a spreadsheet to help you choose the best link-building agency.

Here’s a step-by-step process for filling out the spreadsheet (which is also included in the “Instructions Tab”). 

Step 1: Define Your Criteria

List down negotiable and non-negotiable criteria for your decision-making process in outsourcing link building. You can use the ECTEA model (Effectiveness, Cost, Time, Effort, Acceptance) to guide your criterion.

Step 2: Set Up the Decision-Making Analysis Sheet

In the Decision-Making tab, paste all your negotiable and non-negotiable criteria into separate columns.

Adjust columns and rows based on the number of criteria you have.

Step 3: Evaluate Link Building Agencies

Evaluate each link building agency based on your given criteria (both non-negotiable and negotiable). 

For non-negotiable criteria, mark “Yes” or “No” for each link-building agency.

Proceed only with agencies that meet all non-negotiable criteria (i.e., all “Yes” responses).

Step 4: Rank Agencies Based on Negotiable Criteria

1. For each negotiable criterion, mark “Yes” or “No” for every agency.
2. Assign a score from 1 to 5 (1 = lowest, 5 = highest) based on how well the agency meets the negotiable criteria.

Step 5: Calculate Weighted Ratings & Make The Best Decision

1. Compute the weighted rating by summing up the scores for each agency.
2. Consider the link-building agency with the highest overall rating.

This decision-making analysis template allows you to make a rational, objective decision based on your criteria. You can do it yourself or best with the team of stakeholders and decision-makers in your team in outsourcing link building.

Evaluating Link Building ROI

Link-building ROI warrants a new guide, which I’ll share soon. 

But in summary, if you want to see the value of your efforts, you should measure your link-building investment. 

Here are a couple of things our clients looked at (and highly consider) with their investment in our link-building agency:

Page-Level and Category-Level Performance: Measure link impact on individual pages of your target links, in terms of increase in rankings, organic traffic, and page’s traffic value. It’s easy to track this using Ahrefs or other link intelligence tools. 

ROI From Target Pages: If you select pages to build links to, you can track the return on investment you get from links that you outsource. 

First, determine your conversion rate, average order value, and lifetime customer value for that specific product/service. Set this benchmark based on the current conversion for that page from organic search – you can see it on Google Analytics. These value items will be your baseline in checking if there’s ROI from links. 

Share of Voice: Assess how much visibility your brand gains relative to competitors. SEMRush allows you to quickly see the share of voice—based on the competitors you input in the dashboard. 

Types of Link Building Services

Agencies have different link-building models to choose from:

Managed Link Building Plans

Agencies handle everything from strategy to execution, involving link-building strategy, prospecting, outreach, and reporting. This is a done-for-you service that takes your hands off everything related to link building.

Pay-Per-Link Pricing: 

This is arguably the best type of link-building service model. Given that you’ll only be paying for links you receive and have been reported by the agency, you only pay for actual results – not for monthly retainers with no guarantees of the number of links to be delivered. 

At SharpRocket, we operate on this pay-per-link pricing model. We want to serve our clients at the highest level and earn everything they pay us. 

If you need a few links to boost the rankings of your key pages or are looking for a reliable link-building partner to scale your link-building projects, contact us today for a discovery and strategy call.