How Much Does Link Building Cost in 2024?

The digital landscape is constantly changing and evolving, as are the marketing efforts that companies undertake to make them and their websites more prominent online. Today, your internet marketing strategy might be based around several elements, like content or social media, and tomorrow you might shift to something else, such as pay-per-click advertising. If you don’t keep up, you’re likely to fall behind and suffer a loss of customers and earnings.  

One thing that has not changed in digital marketing in recent times, remaining relevant, constant and powerful, is link building. Having a quality website with solid metrics linking to your site is a sure-fire way of getting ahead online, because Google will view your website as worthy of returning higher up in its search results. It’s essentially passing authority from one website to another, and it’s why companies everywhere and of all sizes run link building campaigns.

In 2024, getting links from good sites is a multifaceted task that requires a number of skills so you can identify the right sites, create content and build relationships with publishers. It’s not a quick fix but a long-term strategy designed to get you results online, and so it takes time, effort and money. We’re going to show you what link building costs there are as we look at how they’re worked out, pricing based on link value and industry sector and the other, various aspects that make up the expense.

How Is the Cost of Link Building Determined?

There are no exact, or fixed, link building costs, because a number of factors determine the price and it depends on what you need. So it can be low, high or somewhere in between. These are aspects that determine how much you’ll pay:

It Matters How Many Links You Need

As with anything, the more of something you want, the greater the price will be. If your website has a low backlink profile, with not many links from other sites, you’ll likely want to build it up, and as quickly as possible. But getting a lot of links in a short amount of time could do you more harm than good, because Google might think you’ve been busy buying up tons of links to try improve your rankings – that’s not the way to go about it, and you could be landed with a penalty, as Google pushes you down its search results instead. So quality over quantity is important. You can still target as many backlinks as possible, but do it over an extended period and then you won’t risk being penalised.

The Sector in Which You Operate

Competition is not the same in every industry, and so this is a factor in determining what the link building costs will be. Some sectors, like e-commerce, finance and technology, have a high amount of competition online, meaning if you want to achieve higher visibility in them, you’ll need a robust link building strategy and one that takes a more sophisticated approach. It requires more time and effort in attempting to get backlinks from high-quality, authoritative sites in your sector, perhaps including writing thought leadership pieces for sites, so that you achieve higher rankings and more organic traffic – and that drives up the costs. 

The Standards of Links

If you’re aiming for links from good sites, they’re likely to cost more; lower-quality sites are easier to get, and therefore cost less. For top-tier media, you’ll have to put substantial effort into researching and making your pitch, potentially creating highly professional content – an article, infographic, video or all three in one package even. But if you succeed in snaring just one link from a prominent website, it will certainly be with the effort and give you way more website authority, in Google’s eyes, than a bunch of low-quality backlinks that might do little or nothing for you, or even harm your site.

Pricing Scale for Link Building

Delving deeper into link building costs to consider when you’re putting a strategy and campaign together to improve your website’s visibility and a variety of factors go into the scale of pricing you can expect to pay. It’s all centred around the value of a link, which may be determined by:

• Domain Authority (DA): This standard metric, developed by Moz (another is Domain Rating, from Ahrefs), is calculated based on the backlinks a website has and how good they are. If they’re quality sites and there’s a reasonable amount of them, you can expect the DA to be high. Top score is 100%. 

• Relevance: How relevant the target website is to your industry, and also the topic; if there’s little in common, you won’t get much value from the backlink, and Google might even ignore it.

• Traffic: Some sites have a high level of traffic while others have little and may have none at all. The more traffic – people visiting a site – the more popular it is, and therefore will cost more to get a link from.

These and more, including the location of your link on a page (in the body of content, not in the footer or elsewhere) affect the link building pricing scale. So if it’s on the lower end, you might want to check what you’re getting, as it might not give your website the boost you’re looking for, and you want value from your SEO efforts.

Components of Link Building Costs

Getting a link from a website is not as easy, or cheap, as you might think. There are several link building costs that agencies and also companies with in-house teams typically have to take into account. They include:

1. Outreach Employees

• Salaries are among the biggest overheads for any company, running into the hundreds of thousands for teams in various departments. To run a proper and ongoing link building campaign, you need outreach staff – people who research websites and make sure their metrics are good, and who will then contact the site’s owners or editors and discuss content placements. This can often be a tricky process, because site owners may have specific requirements, and the bigger and better the site is, it’s typically harder to place content on it.

• Outreach employees will usually require some form of ongoing training, so that they’re up to date with the skills required to do their work effectively. It’s all the more important given the constant changes taking place on the internet and Google algorithm updates that can affect sites – and the backlinks on them.

• Overheads and benefits are also part of link building costs, because unless your teams are remote, you’ll need office space to house them, and that’s not cheap. Either way, you’ll have to provide benefits like holidays and, possibly, dental and health insurance too. 

2. Technology & Tools

• In order to do their work, link building teams need access to the best tools they can get. We mentioned Ahrefs earlier, but that’s just one of several – or even many – you might need to get the job done. Semrush is another popular SEO tool that lets you analyse sites’ metrics and links, and you might need an email outreach tool like Mailshake and also CRM software so you can keep track of everything. These tools, based in the cloud, offer various plans, but for business pricing you could be looking at several hundred pounds a month, or thousands if you pay annually.

3. Content Creation

• You almost certainly will need to create content for your link building campaigns, and quality is what matters, if you want to get published in the best sites and get good-quality links that Google will like. So you’ll need to hire experienced and professional content writers, or an agency that can provide what you want. Consider graphic designers too, as you might have to create infographics and other visual material that will give you an edge when trying to get your content, and links, published on sites.

In-house vs Buying Backlinks

If you have the resources – time, money and expert personnel – you can do your own link building. Or, like many companies that simply have none of that to spare, you can outsource the task to a specialist link building agency that has everything in place to get you the backlinks you need. Here are the pros and cons of each approach:

In-House Link Building

Pros:

1. Total Control: There are no external people involved in your link building campaigns, so you control the entire process and know what’s going on at all times. You can therefore be sure that your campaigns, and the backlinks you get, are in line with your brand image.

2. Skills Development. As your in-house campaigns develop, the team working on them will become ever-more skilled in SEO and getting you better backlinks to boost your website and your company’s online presence.

Cons:

1. It’s Expensive. You’ll need a substantial budget to hire people, space and everything else required to have your own team, including subscribing to all the essential tools and technology. 

2. Lengthy Set-up. It’s likely to be a slow start, building an in-house team to handle your link building. They’ll need to build relationships with publishers and get content agreed and placed, which all takes a lot of time, and there could be costly errors along the way, given that it’s a new process.

Buying Backlinks

Pros:

1. It’s quick, easy and cheaper. Just tell the link building agency what you want and they’ll do it all for you, as quickly as possible. No need to hire expensive staff or budget for other such overheads.

2. Expertise and connections. When you outsource your link-building requirements, you get the expertise you may not otherwise have, including for content creation, and the agency will have long-established relationships with websites, for ease of content and link placement.

Cons:

1. Risk of penalties. If link building by an agency is not done right, it could result in penalties from Google. This usually happens when the agency places backlinks on sites that are low in quality and not relevant, and does too much of it in a short period – making a spike in the number of links appear to Google like an attempt at manipulating rankings. So make sure to use a reputable link building agency that puts quality at the forefront of everything it does.

2. Little Control. You may have far less control over your link building campaign compared to if you were running it in-house. Although some link building agencies might give you sites to approve before they place content and your link on them (we do), others might not – and you might not like the result, especially if they’re questionable, irrelevant websites that have little or nothing to do with your industry. An SEO or link building agency might also place your links on private blog networks, or PBNs – groups of websites owned by one entity and with the sole purpose of boosting clients’ website rankings. This is a practice that also attracts negative attention from search engines.

Why Buy Backlinks from Vendors?

If you’re looking to get link building results without much trouble and a budget that doesn’t break the bank, buying links via an agency is generally the most worthwhile route to go. It eliminates the need to invest in recruitment of expert personnel and pay hefty salaries, as well as setting up a department or team and all the time and effort it involves.

You won’t be likely to get off to a slow start either, as an agency will have everything ready to go, and will deliver a diverse link profile from quality sites that will benefit your website and not attract suspicions and potential penalties from Google. This is a critical point because inexperienced teams might not know what to avoid when building a backlink profile and get links that could be problematic for your business.

Another benefit is the detailed reports that link building agencies usually provide to their clients, setting out what they have done and what the value of links are – something that can be difficult to work out yourself. And so even though you’ll have to pay link building costs to the agency, they’ll be lower than doing it all yourself and you’ll have a far better return on investment.

Real-World Examples: Case Studies on Buying Backlinks

Let’s take a look at some examples of buying backlinks, so you can see what you can get for your link building costs. These are some we recently ran:

International Software Company

We began a link building campaign for a well-known global software brand, focusing on their French market. Working with top-level French sites relevant to our client’s sector, we delivered a total of 525 backlinks during the course of the campaign.

This had the effect of increasing organic traffic to the client’s French website from 1.2 million visits to 1.9 million. At the same time, the client saw a marked rankings improvement for their selected keywords, which we used during our campaign, giving them greater visibility online, and therefore traffic growth.

We ran a similar campaign for the client’s German market and delivered 587 backlinks that boosted organic traffic from 1.1 million to 1.7 million.

Pizza Ovens and Accessories

A link building campaign we devised and executed for a company in Scotland specialising in outdoor pizza ovens brought in 160 links to their site. It gave them a substantial leap in their keyword positions and organic traffic jumped from 292,000 to 362,000 – again demonstrating the incredible power of backlinks to boost a company’s fortunes online.

Tradespeople Platform

A website that lets people quickly and easily find all kinds of tradespeople in the UK, from bathroom fitters to tree surgeons, wanted to make more progress on the internet and came to us looking to increase their backlink profile.

With our longstanding publisher relationships, we were able to speedily create content relevant to the client’s sector and containing a link to their site and place it on editorial-led sites. We provided the client with 302 backlinks achieved during the campaign and this then helped organic traffic to grow from 158,000 visits to 217,000 – another happy client.

What to Consider Before Buying Links or Building Links

Before you embark on a campaign and allocate a budget for link building costs, whether you’re intending to do it yourself or appoint an agency, keep these key considerations and best practices in mind so you don’t run into trouble later on.

• Read Google’s Guidelines: Go through Google Search Essentials (previously called Webmaster Guidelines) and get an understanding of what’s required with link building so you can steer clear of dubious tactics and focus on doing the right thing.

• Avoid “Black-Hat SEO”: These are link building techniques that will certainly land you in hot water – links from PBNs and link farms as well as spammy sites with thin, low-quality content and directories. “White-hat SEO” – sticking to the rules and focusing on quality – is the only way to go.

• Quality Not Quantity: If you suddenly have dozens, or even hundreds, of backlinks to your site, in a few days, it will most likely set alarm bells ringing at Google – indicating that you may be on a link-buying spree. Just one backlink in a month, from a high-quality site, would do you far more good.

• Keep It Relevant: Make sure the sites you’re getting links from have something in common with your industry, as it helps search engines to find out what the links are about and the connection between sites. Getting links from a women’s fashion website when you’re a spare parts supplier is most likely not going to work, and Google will deem such links irrelevant.

• Diversify Your Backlink Profile: A mix of links shows search engines that your backlink profile is natural and you’re not trying to pull one over on Google. So try to ensure you have links from sites of varying metrics, including DA, as well as no-follow links to your website.

Link Building Costs in 2024: Wrapping It Up

As in previous years, link building is the foundation of any good SEO strategy and campaign in 2024, but getting it right is critical. No matter how much you’re allocating for link building costs – a few hundred pounds for a couple of links or many thousands to deliver backlinks over an extended period – you need to stick to best SEO practices so you get value in your links and your website and business doesn’t suffer.

And it’s important that companies understand that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to link building costs, due to the various factors that make them up. So determine what’s right for your business, or talk to an expert link building agency and get their advice on a campaign suitable for you. When it’s up and running and you’re getting quality links from respected sites, you can look forward to a boost in your online presence, increased traffic and, ultimately, more customers and higher revenue as a result.