Link Building Pricing in 2024: Everything You Need to Know

Link building is an essential part of any successful SEO strategy, and as we enter 2024, it’s becoming increasingly important to understand how pricing models are evolving in this industry.

The value of high quality backlinks from authoritative websites has never been higher, and businesses are constantly searching for ways to improve their link building game.

Depending on the route you decide to take with link building, it can range anywhere from  $2400/month to $18000/month. Although, there are pros and cons to each method you might use to acquire links.

In this article, we will delve into everything you need to know about link building pricing in 2024, including:

• The three approaches to link building and their cost
• Factors that affect link pricing
• Tips to ensure you’re getting the best value for your money.

Whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing professional, this article will provide you with the insights you need to navigate the complex world of link building pricing in 2024.

Link building cheat sheet

Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

Download for free

Should You Buy Backlinks?

Yes and no. Let me elaborate.

The purchase and sale of backlinks with the goal of manipulating search engine ranking are very much against Google’s guidelines.

These links fall under the “link spam” category, and are actively being combated against by Google.

In fact, Google even encourages users to report spammy content and paid link building:

However, this only applies to low-quality backlink building vendors and guest posts publishing service portals that straight up sell links.

As in, you pay them money, they put your link up on their site:

With that being said, links that are attracted organically aren’t considered “paid”, even though you’re technically still buying backlinks from an agency or a freelancer who acquired them for you.

The organic way to get backlinks is by reaching out to other site owners (typically through email) and asking them to link to you, usually with an extra incentive such as a social media share or newsletter mention.

Let’s see what Google has to say about organic link building.

Google’s Take on Link Building

The countless algorithm updates aimed to discourage and combat spammy link building practices (looking at you, Penguin) may have created an impression that Google hates link builders.

And yes, they have run some link building practices entirely to the ground.

Such as directory listings, forum links, duplicate links and PBNs.

But that’s a good thing, as the general overuse of these link building strategies has led to pages that really don’t deserve to rank high on search engine results pages occupy the top spots, while high quality content that didn’t do any link building at all or only focused on white-hat techniques was buried under several pages of results.

The implementation of these updates has only reinforced the importance of ethical link building, allowing good content (and honest content marketing teams) to break through the noise.

In fact, in one of his interviews, John Mueller, the Senior Search Analyst of Google, stated that the type of natural link building outreach that we outlined just above is perfectly fine.

So, if you still weren’t sure whether you should invest in link building and worried that Google might de-value the links you build, here’s your answer.

You definitely should.

Now, let’s break it down: what does it really take (financially) to build links in 2024?

Spoiler alert: the pricing may vary wildly depending on your approach.

In-House Link Building

The first (and in our opinion, the best) approach to link building is to do it in-house.

This involves having dedicated link building team members constantly producing high quality content, and conducting cold email outreach to the website owner to secure do follow link opportunities and niche edits over the course of several months or even years.

Pros

There are several advantages to doing link building in-house rather than outsourcing it to freelancers or specialist link building agencies.

First off, by managing link building internally, you have complete control over the entire process, from start to finish.

Not only are you able to ensure that the prospects your team is targeting are of high quality (and not PBNs or spammy “news” sites stuffed with irrelevant backlinks), you also have full visibility and control over how your brand is represented in the actual link building email pitches.

This is important, considering the sheer scale of outreach campaigns required to obtain high-quality backlinks at a steady pace.

Then, there are the link building costs.

Outsourcing link building can be expensive, especially if you hire an agency. And yes, hiring full-time employees and purchasing tools for them to be able to manage link building effectively can indeed seem quite costly, but it is still cheaper than fully outsourcing it to an agency – especially a good one.

By doing it in-house, you can:

• Save money on agency fees and reduce the overall cost of link building.
• Communicate more easily and effectively than with an outsourced team.
• Collaborate more closely and have more direct access to the team members who are working on your link building campaigns.
• Achieve a faster turnaround time than an outsourced link building campaign because an in-house team can work more quickly and efficiently, as they are dedicated to your company and its goals.
• Get more frequent and detailed updates since lot of agencies and freelancers only offer weekly or biweekly calls to catch up on progress.

There is also the simple factor that in-house employees have a much better understanding of your business than any other third party and can create a strategy that is specific to your industry and target audience.

Finally, an in-house team is accountable directly to your company, which can help ensure that they are working effectively and meeting your expectations.

This can also result in a higher level of link transparency, as you have more insight into the link building process and can track progress more closely.

Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it?

We firmly believe that in-house link building is THE way to go about acquiring high quality backlinks.

However, just like everything else in life, there are several disadvantages to dedicating (or hiring) in-house team members for link building.

Cons

First things first, unless you have an experienced in-house team with knowledge of link building best practices, you may not be able to achieve the same results as a specialized agency or freelancer.

You may also need to invest time and money in training your team to develop the necessary skills.

An in-house team may have limited resources compared to an outsourced team, which can result in a slower or less effective link building campaign.

To support your efforts, you will need to invest in additional tools, which we will get into a little bit further below.

If your in-house team is not well-versed in SEO best practices, they may inadvertently violate search engines guidelines. While incurring penalties that can harm your website’s ranking is rare, you’re still risking wasting time and resources.

Let’s sum up some other disadvantages of managing link building fully in-house:

• Outsourced teams often have experience working with a range of industries and can bring fresh perspectives to your campaign.
• An in-house team may have limited creativity and may struggle to generate new and diverse link building ideas.
• , if you decide to delegate link building to team members who have other work tasks instead of hiring full-time link builders, they will have to balance link building with other responsibilities, which can result in a heavier workload and reduced efficiency.

This can also lead to burnout and turnover, which can further disrupt your link building campaign.

So, the perfect in-house team either manages link building full-time, or has a workload balance that allows them to perform both tasks without sacrificing quality.

This leads us to the next point.

Team

First things first, in order to start link building, not only do you need to already have some content on your website, but you also need to consistently publish new blog posts that target new keywords.

For this, you’re going to need a content manager, preferably supported by at least one writer.

In this section, we’ll be looking at the average salaries across the United States to give you an idea of how much budget you should set aside for link building.

Of course, you can also achieve great success with link building by hiring remote team members from other countries, but salaries can vary greatly depending on which parts of the world you’re looking at.

And you need to remember: with remote team members, you get what you pay for.

Anyway, back to content managers.

According to Glassdoor, the average American content manager makes right around $65,000.

If you’re a smaller company (0-20 employees), and your goals for content production are reasonably low (1-2 blog posts per week), the content manager can double as the content writer.

However, if you are looking to scale up your content production, you’re definitely going to need at least one writer.

Here, you’re looking at at least another $46,000 yearly.

Now, to the actual link builder. Their title may sound different in different companies, but at their core, they’re an Outreach Specialist.

This is the actual person that will be finding link building prospects, and sending them emails with link pitches.

The average Outreach Specialist receives around $42,000 in the USA.

This is also a position that is commonly outsourced overseas because of its monotonous and somewhat menial nature.

While writing a good email pitch undoubtedly takes a bit of skill and knowledge, sending hundreds of them per day can get old fast.

If you’re looking to hire remote members from Eastern Europe, India, or even Asia, you can find outreach specialists for just over $1000-$1200/month.

Of course, the greater the scale you want to build links at, the more outreach specialists you’re going to need, but a reasonable weekly result from a single full-time link builder is 15-20 high-quality backlinks.

This is also the level that we ourselves were able to reach with internal link builders, as well as our partner company, Visme.

To sum it up, for a small company, a Content Manager and an Outreach Specialist will be able to manage content creation and link building quite effectively, and as your business grows, so does your need in manpower.

After all, link building is a highly time-intensive process, even with the best tools to speed it up.

Speaking about tools, let’s move to the next section.

Tools

The biggest challenge to link building, regardless of the approach you take, is its heavy reliance on cold email outreach to get in touch with other webmasters and secure link building opportunities.

More specifically, automating the process of finding contact emails to reach out, and, of course, writing and sending the email pitches themselves.

Doing all of this manually takes an amount of time which is unreasonable from a business standpoint.

For this reason, any business that’s serious about its link building efforts needs a tool that helps streamline the entire process.

Respona is an example of one such link building tool.

It was developed specifically for link builders and comes with all of the necessary features to prepare and launch a link building outreach campaign.

It includes:

• An automated search engine for prospecting (and backlink extracting)
• An email finder and verifier
• AI-powered article summarizer and auto-populating variables for personalization
• Campaign and email sequence templates
• Email health reports and a shared Inbox tab for all connected accounts
• A shared inbox to centralize managing conversations
• And more

Please visit Respona’s pricing page.

Next up, you’re going to need tools to track and measure the impact of your link building campaigns.

Google Analytics is free, so we won’t talk about it here.

A popular choice for this is Semrush.

It’s an all-in-one SEO tool with over 55 tools and reports to measure and improve just about any aspect of your website.

Of course, one of these tools is their backlink monitor.

It’s not just useful for seeing the links your team obtained, but also for link building prospecting – by checking on your competitors’ backlinks.

And, of course, by comparing your organic traffic and referring domain/backlink charts over time, you can get a pretty solid idea of whether your link building campaigns are actually making a tangible difference for your business.

It also has a keyword tracker and explorer perfect for discovering new keywords to target on your blog.

Pricing: $119.95-$449.95/month.

Now, these are just two choices for link building tools. Some other prominent software includes Hunter.io, Ahrefs, Linkody, etc.

Respona and Semrush are just the two tools that we use in-house, so they are our top picks.

However, as we mentioned previously, link building can not exist without a steady stream of content production, which warrants the use of several other tools.

More specifically, tools for content optimization, and, if you’re using WordPress, importing it to the CMS.

For content optimization, we recommend MarketMuse.

It works by analyzing the top 10 results for your chosen target keyword, and suggesting other relevant keywords and phrases that should be implemented throughout your content to maximize your chances of ranking in the top as well.

Of course, a perfect MarketMuse score doesn’t automatically warrant #1 ranking, but content optimization is a vital step in the production process if you want it to actually rank.

Pricing: $149/month.

Once your content is ready, actually importing it into WordPress (if that’s your CMS) can be quite a pain.

For quick and painless import, we use Wordable, and recommend it as well.

Wordable actually offers 5 free imports per month, so if your content production is at a scale of 1 blog post per week or less, you don’t even need to pay for it.

If you’re looking to export more than 5 articles, however, you will be looking at at least a $50/month subscription.

Now, let’s do some quick maths.

Total Price

The minimum total price of link building in-house for an American-based company will be around $112,000 yearly or $9,333 monthly.

This is if your team:

• Includes one content manager and one outreach specialist
• Uses the standard plan of each tool mentioned above

Of course, bigger teams will be looking at bigger sums, and full remote teams will be looking at much less spend.

But, to keep it simple, let’s just focus on America.

Freelancer Link Building

The next popular choice for building backlinks is to hire a freelancer.

These are easily found on different platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, and can charge anywhere from $10 to several hundred for their work.

Naturally, the quality of this work reflects this price.

Let’s start with the pros of hiring independent freelancers to help your company with link building.

Pros

Freelancers often charge lower rates than agencies since they don’t have the overhead link building costs associated with maintaining a physical office or a team of employees.

They can also be hired for short-term or long-term projects, depending on the needs of your company. This allows for greater flexibility in terms of budget and workload.

Freelancers often specialize in specific areas, such as guest posts writing or broken link building, and have a deep understanding of the latest trends and best practices in their field. Of course, this excludes the $10 offers.

This expertise can be beneficial to your company’s link building strategy.

You can also expect more direct communication and faster response times than you would get from a larger agency and work one-on-one to create a personalized link building strategy that meets your company’s specific needs.

Last but not least, freelancers are often motivated to produce high-quality work because their reputation and future business opportunities depend on it.

This means you can expect a higher level of attention to detail and dedication to delivering results. Again, this does not necessarily apply to the $5-10 listings.

Cons

While hiring a freelancer to do natural link building for your company can have its advantages, there are also very considerable drawbacks to keep in mind:

• Freelancers may not have access to the same resources and tools as larger agencies, which can limit their ability to scale campaigns or execute complex link building strategies.
• Link building tools are typically made for B2B, and their pricing reflects that. So, individual link builders may not be willing to spend such chunks of their income on software.
• Freelancers also typically manage more than a single project at a time. This could impact their ability to meet deadlines or provide consistent communication.
• Even the cream-of-the-crop freelancers do not have the same level of accountability as larger agencies and in-house employees, which could make it more difficult to resolve issues or disputes if problems arise.
• There is always scam potential.
• Depending on the freelancer’s workload or level of experience, there may be a risk of inconsistent quality or approach to link building, which could impact the overall effectiveness of your campaign.
• Freelancers usually have a more broad skillset and can lack specialized expertise, which is especially important in the SEO field.

While the act of writing and sending people emails to ask for backlinks is not challenging mechanically, it requires a deeper understanding of what is actually going on, and why they are doing this in the first place.

It’s important to carefully consider these potential drawbacks before deciding whether to hire a freelancer for your link building needs.

If you decide to work with a freelancer, it’s important to establish clear expectations and communication channels to ensure that the project runs smoothly and meets your goals.

You also need to establish an extensive screening process.

Ask for detailed CVs, have long meetings discussing the details of their previous work (and your future projects), and know who you’re hiring.

Price

Let’s take a look at the first page of link builders on the three top freelancer platforms: Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer.

On Upwork, the cheapest listing is at only $10/hr, while the most expensive one is at $150/hr.

Both have great ratings, as well as countless jobs and hours behind their back.

You can have success with both, but, as we already mentioned, you need to know who you’re hiring.

For example, this is part of a profile of the $150 listing:

Right there, this person is displaying extensive knowledge of SEO’s ins and outs.

That is not to say that people who offer a cheaper SEO service are less knowledgeable: a lot of it comes down to the country that a particular freelancer is living in.

Naturally, outsourcing to India is going to be a lot cheaper than France, or Canada.

But, again, you need to know who you’re hiring.

Next, let’s take a look at Fiverr – which is somewhat infamous for its low-quality link building and guest posting service listings.

Here, you really need to review each candidate in great depth to make sure that you’re getting what you’re looking for.

For example, take this listing (it’s one of the top results for “link building”):

It offers three choices Basic ($60), Standard ($110), and Premium ($160).

It even comes with a convincing portfolio with traffic charts from previous projects.

However, when you take a closer look at this profile as a whole, things start looking a little bit suspicious.

First of all, their pricing states that they will get you over 130 high authority links for only $60 over 10 days.

Even with a team of 10 full-time professionals building links at an average of 15-20 links per week, 130+ high-DA, natural links in only 10 days is a bit of a stretch.

Especially for just $60.

Let’s dig a little bit deeper.

This profile also has business card-style images where they explain a little bit more about their link building approach.

This explains why their link building services are so cheap. Web 2.0 are PBNs and user-generated content.

These links have zero SEO value.

Remember what I said previously about Fiverr link builders’ reputation? This is what I was talking about.

That isn’t to say there are no honest link builders on Fiverr – you just really need to know who you’re hiring.

The landscape on Freelancer is a little bit more tame:

Most listings here start at $5-$25/hr.

And this is more or less the real price of outsourcing link building to a freelancer.

Of course, you can’t expect much commitment from a $5/hour, but people who list themselves from $20/hour and higher typically have some experience.

It’s safe to say that for a good link builder with some experience, you’re looking at at least $20-25/hour.

If you’re looking to run link building for only a month, full-time, this equates to $20×120=$2400/month.

In this amount of time, if we average 15 links per week, you will be getting 60 links.

But again, we can’t stress enough the importance of vetting your freelancers to make sure they only employ white-hat strategies and don’t sell you PBN links under the guise of “20 years of experience in SEO”.

Agency Link Building

The final approach to link building you can take is to hire an agency to do it for you.

There are agencies that specialize solely in link building, and there are end to end service agencies that offer link building as just part of their package.

Regardless of which one you opt for, there are certain pros and cons in outsourcing to them.

Pros

A reputable link building agency will have a team of experienced professionals who have in-depth knowledge and expertise in link building.

They will have a strong understanding of search engines algorithms and the latest link building techniques, which means they can develop an effective and efficient strategy to improve your website’s ranking.

By outsourcing to a link building agency, you can:

• Save time and focus on other important aspects of your business since link building is such a time-consuming process that requires a lot of effort and attention to detail.
• Have access to a wide range of tools and resources that can help agencies perform their work more efficiently.
• Adapt to your changing requirements and provide the necessary resources and expertise to achieve your desired results.
• Outright get better results with agencies that have a proven track record.
• Avoid costly mistakes that could harm your website’s ranking if you’re not that experienced in SEO.

While outsourcing link building to an SEO agency may seem expensive at first, it can actually be cost-effective in the long run. This is because you don’t have to spend time and money on hiring and training an in-house team or a freelancer.

Cons

The biggest downside to hiring an agency is the price: it can be higher than hiring a freelancer or doing it in-house (depending on who you’re hiring, and where in the world).

Additionally:

• Agencies usually have a larger overhead cost and charge a premium for their services.
• Depending on the agency of your choice, outsourcing can result in lower-quality work.
• Agencies may be managing multiple clients at the same time, and may not give your project the necessary attention it requires.
• Agencies themselves may also outsource the work to other countries where the quality of work may not meet your standards.
• Agencies may have different time zones or languages, which can cause delays or misunderstandings. This can result in a lack of clarity on the project goals, timelines, and deliverables, which is simply not an issue with an in-house team.
• You have less control over the process. While the agency is responsible for managing the project and you may not be able to oversee the work being done, which, in turn, can result in a lack of transparency and accountability.

If you’re not thorough with your screening, you may make the mistake of hiring an agency that uses black hat tactics to build links, which can have a negative impact on your website’s ranking and traffic.

Lastly, in business, relying on a third party is never a sound practice.

Outsourcing link building to an agency can create a dependency on them, making you reliant on them, which can be risky if they suddenly go out of business or are unable to meet your needs.

Price

Depending on the agency you choose, you will be looking at anywhere between $100-$1500 per single link.

Let’s take a closer look at three of the most trusted link building agencies: Linkbuilder.io, uSERP, and Stan Ventures.

These will represent three types of link building agencies: affordable, mid-range, and high-range.

At first glance, their most basic link building package may seem a bit pricey: $5999/month for 16 links, or $375 per link. However, when you’re talking about outsourcing link building to agencies, this price is actually very average.

But, unlike the shady offers from Fiverr, LinkBuilder.io guarantees high quality backlink acquisition: all of them will come from relevant websites, with an average Domain Rating of 50+. This is a high score, and these links are quite valuable.

Additionally, you will be getting extra services like target page planning, anchor text optimization, competitor backlink analysis, and keyword analysis.

Next up, we have uSERP.

As you can see, their Startup plan starts at $7,500/month for 6-8 backlinks, or $937,5 per link.

Yes, this is expensive.

But if you take a closer look, you will see that the links in question will only be coming from DR 60+ websites that receive 25,000 organic traffic each month, at the very least.

These are the absolute cream-of-the-crop backlinks that can be exceptionally difficult to obtain for in-house teams through cold blogger outreach and even more so for freelancers.

Additional services include strategy sessions, keyword and backlink gap analysis, on-page SEO optimization and internal link audits, local SEO, and constant support for your domain.

Is it worth the price? If you have the budget and no capacity to manage any of these things in house, then yes.

Last but not least, we have Stan Ventures – a link building company with pricing options for each point of the spectrum.

Their prices vary from $100+ per link to $300+ perlink.

All of these links are obtained organically, with the difference between them being the amount of organic traffic the linking websites generate monthly.

The cheapest links only have 1,000 or so organic traffic, while the expensive ones get over 20,000.

So, how much would it really cost to outsource link building to an agency?

There is no easy answer to this, but if we round things up to the average of $300 per link, and assume that your target would be to get 15 weekly links, you would be looking at $18,000/month.

If we look back at the cost of in-house and freelancer link building, this number may seem astronomical at first.

But this also factors in the cost of training, link building software, time saving, and actual outreach involved in the link building process.

If you have the budget, this is definitely the easiest way to generate links to your website.

Should you choose it over other options? It’s up to you (but we still recommend in-house link building).

Link Building Pricing Factors

The prices we outlined in the previous sections are very rounded up averages.

The price of link building can fluctuate greatly depending on several factors.

Let’s take a closer look at them.

Approach

First off, obviously, it’s the approach to link building that matters the most.

As we have discussed, depending on whether you’re looking to hire a freelancer, an in-house team, or a full-on agency, can change your link building bill from just over two thousand dollars a months to over a dozen (or even a couple of dozen).

But we’re not only talking about who is going to be building links for you, but how they’re doing it.

“The right” way to build backlinks is time and cost-intensive (setting up cold email outreach campaigns to contact webmasters and ask them to add your link).

Because of that, you may choose to cut some corners.

There are countless link building groups and communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, or even Slack, which you can become a part of for free and quickly generate a decent amount of links.

However, while allowing you to quickly get into link building for little to no link cost, these communities are typically populated by a very small pool of people (usually the same link builders are members of multiple communities), so in the long run, it’s not a viable strategy.

You may also choose to contact websites that openly sell links at a cheap price, bringing your total link building cost down tenfold.

However, you should be aware that while you may sometimes get away with purchasing a link or two, ultimately, these have the potential to get devalued by the Google algorithm at any point, completely wasting your money and time spent on securing them.

Domain Rating/Domain Authority

Domain Rating and Domain Authority are metrics that are commonly used by SEOs and link builders to determine the “strength” of any particular domain.

Older, more respected, and authoritative domains have a higher Domain Rating value.

Conversely, backlinks from these websites are also much harder to obtain than from lower-DR ones.

A healthy backlink profile consists of backlinks from every point on the spectrum, but, obviously, high-DR backlinks are much more sought after, and, as a result, more expensive to get, regardless of your link building approach.

Most agencies have a DA dependent pricing model, which means, they’re going to charge you way more for high-authority backlinks, and if you choose to build links in-house, you may have to trade quantity for link quality.

By that, we mean that you will need extra time to craft hyper-personalized pitches and work out mutually beneficial collaborations (such as including your prospects in your own listicle posts or helping them out with some content) to secure a DR 70+ link placement, as opposed to the relative ease of building lower-quality links.

This additional time and work spent on these links translate into their cost, whether you outsource building these links or do it in-house.

Volume

Next up, your target link volume can also dramatically affect your monthly spending on link building.

As a good rule of thumb, your newly acquired links should always outnumber your lost ones.

Links can decay for any number of reasons: pages being updated, content being moved, or even entire domains expiring.

To mitigate that, a good number to strive for is at least 10 new backlinks acquire every week for a small company.

Larger companies with more extensive link profiles (and more intense link decay as a result) may need more than that.

As a result, link building can take up dramatically more resources (both human and financial) to keep up.

Niche

Finally, not all niches are created equal.

Ours (SaaS, SEO link building, email outreach) has no shortage of link building prospects, so we’re easily able to scale up our link building according to our needs.

Smaller niches (like coworking management) simply do not have this privilege.

There simply aren’t that many sites that they can use as solid link building prospects, which has a strong correlation with the effort or budget required to build links in them.

Link building cheat sheet

Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

Download for free

Now Over to You

So, to sum it up, here are the average monthly prices for building 15 good-quality backlinks per week:

• In house costs: $9,333
• Outsourcing to a freelancer: $2400
• Agency: $18,000

Which approach is best? Ultimately, it comes down to your budget and in-house capacities.

We think that the best way to build links is to manage it completely internally, having complete control over the entire process.

This is why we have developed Respona – to help companies streamline their internally-managed link building.

Don’t hesitate to start your 14-day free trial if you’re looking for help creating and managing link building outreach campaigns.

FAQ

What’s the average cost of a single high-quality link?

Agencies that charge on a link-by-link basis typically ask for anywhere between $100 and $1000 dollars for a link, depending on the linking domain’s authority and monthly organic traffic.

How to choose a freelancer to outsource link building to?

look for experience and expertise in your industry, good communication skills, and a proven track record of success.

Additionally, talk to them about their approach to link building and make sure they don’t dabble in any shady or outdated practices.

How to make sure an agency only employs white hat link building strategies?

Ask them to provide a detailed link building plan, request regular progress reports, and monitor their link building tactics to ensure they follow ethical and legitimate practices.

Why is in-house link building the best option?

In-house link building is often the best option because it allows for better control, management, and integration of link building with other marketing strategies, resulting in a more cohesive and effective approach.

Is link building worth it?

Yes, but only if carried out consistently over months or even years.

Dishing out a few thousand on a bunch of links might be helpful short-term, but if you don’t keep up the momentum, the value of these links will decay over time.