Agency VS Freelancer: Industry rates for a GOOD link builder
-
Hello Moz Community,
I am looking to hire a link builder for SEO purposes. What are the normal rates and what I should expect for my money? Can you guys please share your knowledge with me so I am better prepared when hiring the right person!
Bonus point for tips on what to look for when hiring someone and also best places to look for an SEO specialist!
I look forward to all your replies!
-
Thank you Marcus !
-
Hey. I have followed and read Eric's advice for years. He is an old hand. I am also unfortunately. His Link Moses newsletter is well worth the subscription fee. So much of this comes down to strategy and I am sure a consultation with Eric would give you enough direction for 12 months.
Hope that helps.
-
I can completely relate. Do you have Skype please? I'd love to know your process as I feel I am exactly in the same boat!
-
Hey Marcus,
I couldn't have hoped for a better reply. You really have helped me out a ton here! I will 100% talk to Eric Ward - have you used his services?
L
-
Hey
I think there are only like a handful of really good, all round link builders out there. Sure, some folks may get good at building links in a specific niche or sector but it can be tough to know every potential avenue.
Another problem we tend to see at the agency I run in the UK is that folks want absolutes:
- we want 10 x links from DA 30 domains per month for £1000 (or whatever)
But, the best link building is often a form of digital PR. So it can be a bit lumpy. Certainly, you can go out and find 10 sites that accept guest posts and hit the proposed metric, but are you getting any real big wins like that? How valuable are those links that are just so easy to get?
Likewise, you really want to get your strategy dialled in first. That is, have something that really deserves to be linked to. If you can create that linkable asset then it makes the link building process so much easier. If you don't have linkable assets then it could be that is the first step here so make sure the agency or freelancer can help in that regard (or go back to the drawing board).
There is a good overview here of how to start with the value for your link building efforts (by me - as a disclaimer).
:http://searchengineland.com/organic-traffic-link-building-small-businesses-269353
If you want the best check out Eric Ward:
http://www.ericward.com/evaluation.html
He can put you a strategy together and give you the direction. With the strategic elements in place you can then better understand what component parts you need to run that strategy. Not cheap but if you want to win big then... start with a solid strategy and layer your link building tactics over that.
So much of this depends on the current situation and marketplace. So you need some form of situation analysis. Are you in a crazy competitive space? Is the competition low end? The price you pay will need to consider the difficulty of the task at hand.
So... lots of moving parts but I certainly hope that helps.
Marcus
-
Very useful. Thanks for your input!
-
A lot of the time it's all about what you can do for them too; writing an article for a website on a subject and linking back to your own site as a form of payment (though you may actually ask for $$ too), especially early on in your 'outreach' campaign. Building a reputation is important.
Over time you may be asked for articles etc, or be able to show off your work in order to gain more exposure.
-
Thanks for the reply, fascinating for to me to read as I'm new to SEO and not heard of these commissioned articles. Is there a marketplace for these deals or is it all about the right contacts?
-
Sure.
In a broad sense, you get what you pay for. If you buy 10,000 links from fiver then expect it to be picked up almost instantly by Google and watch your rankings fall.
I know of people who commission articles for $300-500 and ask for a link back to a certain product or page as part of the deal, usually around 800-1000 words and on a reputable website, rather than some MIT personal student blog.
When it comes to link quality, it is usually the case that less links from high quality sources, over many links from low quality sources is best practise. However, building links naturally is a true recognition of quality.
-
I would still like to know what to expect from the industry in regards to this question but thank you for the reply!
-
I'd suggest doing the work yourself with the assistance of programs such as BuzzSumo.
Doing the work yourself will help keep you in touch with how your brand/business is being talked about in both social platforms and blogs, as well as everything in between.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best way to link to 1000 city landing pages from index page in a way that google follows/crawls these links (without building country pages)?
Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and city landing pages on our index page of the root domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country.
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page.
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later. In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option. Any recommendations on how best to implement?0 -
Link building
ok mozers i have a few questions. I am starting a new seo campaign and i want to target traffic for "how to make money on autopilot" Question 1. when it comes to link building i have seen some articles saying that i should not send all of my links to my landing page at once but to send links to my backlinks then index then using tiered link building. Is this a must or not? will i get penalized if i build 20 targeted links to my landing page in 1 day, lets say 20, pr7-9 domains? or should i tier it out and link maybe 5 pr9 domains to my landing page, then link 10 pr5 domains to each of those 5 pr9 domains and maybe link 20-pr1 domains to each of those tiered 2 pr5 domains? eq: Tier 1 = 5 PR-9 Tier 2 = 50 PR-5 Tier 3 = 1,000 PR-1 Question 2. Is their a certain amount of backlinks i need to use in order to out do my competitor? or does it just matter on the metrics of my backlinks? and when it comes to indexing these links do i need to index just the 5 pr9 links? or do i need to index all of them? or should i just index the landing page through google webmasters tools and hope it indexes all connecting pages? will doing any of these get my landing page indexed faster in order to rank faster? Question 3. Types of link building. Ok i am targeting guest blogs, wordpress sites, etc to put a link on. Should i focus on smm 'social media marketing' as well? or can i just focus on the traditional seo tactics first? Question 4. Keyword research. ok so my blog post is 'how to make money on autpilot' and from my keyword suggestion tools it picked up a list of keywords suggestions to target. Competition ranges from low to high, search volume ranges from 10 to 1900 visitors per month, after organizing the most relevant keywords to add to my campaign should i target each of the these keywords by creating a link building campaign for each one and target it to my landing page or use it as my 2nd or 3rd tier? those are the questions i really have for now. Here is my blog post http://www.vemomedia.com/how-to-make-money-on-autopilot/ Please feel me in on what i am needing to do in order to get some ranking and on how to run a link building campaign the correct way. Thanx in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djgbshows1 -
Link Spring Clean
Hey, Based on the most up to date thinking - what's the best way to approach a link spring clean? We've got a site with a large amount of links (a few of which look a bit spammy - SEO directories etc) Also, the brand changed it's name and URL a while back so there are directory/web citations using the old URL and sometimes the old name. The old URL is 301'd but I'm thinking (especially in terms of local SEO) these citations with differnt business names/numbers/web addresses could be particularly harmful? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia1 -
Domain Authority... http://www.domain.com/ vs. http://domain.com vs. http://domain.com/
Hey Guys, Looking at Page Authority for my Site and ranking them in Decending Order, I see these 3 http://www.domain.com/ | Authority 62 http://domain.com | Authority 52 http://domain.com/ | Authority 52 Since the first one listed has the highest Authority, should I be using a 301 redirects on the lower ranking variations (which I understand how works) or should I be using rel="canonical" (which I don't really understand how it works) Also, if this is a problem that I should address, should we see a significant boost if fixed? Thanks ahead of time for anyone who can help a lost sailor who doesn't know how to sail and probably shouldn't have left shore in the first place. Cheers ZP!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mr_Snack0 -
Different Hosting Accounts for Linking?
I have several different sites which link to each other (for valid reasons...sister companies etc). Would it be better if these were hosted from different web hosting firms? And if they are hosted by the same hosting company would it be better if they had different accounts and different IP addresses? Not sure I understand C blocks etc. Any tutorial on here about that? I wouls assume it would look better to Google if the links were not from the same IP address. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ebtec0 -
Purchased new site with good SERP ranks, do I operate and build links or redirect the TLD?
I recently purchased a blog within my product category - it has many first page rankings for difficult keywords within my niche. I am wondering if it makes more sense for for me to continue to operate this blog and build links to my site and blog (blog is in wordpress) or to export the XML feed and upload the content to my blog (new site also in wordpress), at which point I would do a 301 at the Top-Level domain. Any thoughts, ideas, or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NickEubanks0 -
Sitewide Vs HomePage Links For Network of Sites
I wanted to site wide link a few sites together as they are sort of in the same network of ownership and wanted some advice. 1X PR1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | upick-162391
2X PR2
2x PR3 Would it be best to just get home page links before the footer, the links will be within a paragraph of text OR Just site wide link them in the footer with a heading of "Our Shopping Network"0 -
How And/Or If To Prune Footer Links
Hi, I have a site with a site-wide footer that currently has 28 internal links.The footer terms are the terms the pages are focused on. This footer is on every page of the site (hundreds of pages). Some pages of my site have 10 or so additional links pointing to internal and external pages (besides the footer) and some pages (like the homepage) have about 50 links besides the footer. I'm going for a half dozen new terms with new pages that I would be adding to the site-wide footer. Do you think I should trim the existing footer before adding these new terms? I guess I would remove the terms that show no real hope of ever getting to page one... like pages stuck in the 40s. Or, pages I for whatever reason don't care much if they rank or not. Would trimming it to a smaller number do more to help the remaining linked pages/terms? What do you think? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010