Finding the Right Partner to Outsource Link Building

It’s not always what you know; sometimes it’s who you know that really makes a difference. Humans are social animals. Networking, making connections, and teaming up is hard coded into our DNA.So we actively seek out connections, and those connections can end up benefiting us. Think about anyone you know who got a job through networking. It mattered that they knew their stuff, but it also mattered that they knew someone in the industry.

As such, we sometimes — consciously or otherwise — evaluate one another based on our associations. Some people have great connections, and we might end up thinking a little more highly of them. Those with bad connections and unruly relatives… we’ve met those people and maybe we judge them a little too.

The same thing can happen to our websites. Our connections can get us further, and having bad connections brings unwanted consequences. How do we make connections online? Consider backlinks. Backlinks are how we show who we know in the SEO world. The quality of our backlinks matter, so who we have finding and caring for our backlinks matters too. 

Let’s look at what backlinks are, what it means to outsource backlinks, the benefits of outsourcing, and tips for choosing the best link building partner. 

What Are Backlinks?

A backlink (or inbound link) from a respected site is like an endorsement, telling Google that the site is vouched for, and may deserve a higher ranking in the SERP. This endorsement goes further if Google can see that this site is authoritative. Essentially, if you have a high quality website linking to yours, you’re telling Google that you’re a legitimate site that could be ranked higher. 

Of course, it takes more than just a single vote of confidence to sway the Google algorithm, which is why successful sites maintain entire profiles of relevant, authoritative backlinks. You need a large collection of these great links to really boost your own ranking. Your collection of backlinks is called your backlink profile. 

These links may occur naturally, as websites generate new content and include hyperlinks to other sites. So if you’re willing to wait a long time and put in a little effort, you’ll get a decent backlink profile. Eventually. But if you’re just getting started out, or if you’re having trouble making your high-quality content more visible, you might end up waiting a long time for good backlinks. After all, in the ever-expanding ocean of the internet, your little island can be easy to overlook. This becomes especially true if you’re not willing or able to put in the time and effort it takes to get some good website’s attention.

Getting authoritative sites to link to your content demands time, attention to detail, and an in-depth understanding of the SEO landscape. In most instances, backlinks will slowly gather to your site over time. But if you want to kickstart your backlink profile, it’s going to take a lot of elbow grease to get that going. Most new sites and SEOs don’t wait years to get their pages working—it’s not great for business, after all—so they want a good way to get their profiles started. I’ll look into one of those ways. 

That being said, if you are intentionally trying to rank for a specific keyword and you want to make sure the backlink part of your SEO strategy is locked in, you’ll need to be more intentional with how you’re setting yourself up for success when it comes to the types and amount of backlinks going to your site. In other words, you’ll likely need professional link builders.

Professional link builders are one effective way to get your backlinks built and get effective links without having to spend years waiting for links or putting in 10,000 hours. When you hire a link building company or agency, you’re outsourcing your link building. 

What Does It Mean to Outsource Link Building Services

Done right, link building can help you prove your site’s relevance and value, reaching higher search rankings and enjoying increased organic traffic and conversions in the process. But — done right — it’s also a full-time job. It legitimately takes hours upon hours regularly to build high quality links. If you’re busy running a business or have additional responsibilities besides link building, you’re not going to have the time necessary to build the best links.

Before I keep digging into outsourcing links, it’s important to stop and discuss quality vs. quantity of links. Quantity definitely matters. If your backlink profile has three links, it’s not going to do much for you. But it’s worth mentioning that when it comes to links, quantity isn’t nearly as valuable as quality. Want to go out and buy up a thousand low-quality links from sub-par sites? More power to you, but that SEO needle probably isn’t going to budge. If it does, it’s hard to say how long that growth will last — Google has gotten really good lately at sniffing out in-organic spikes in new backlinks and ultimately devalues the ability those links have in ranking your site higher.

Basically, you can get as many low-quality links as you want, but that’s not going to do much for you. Quality links are going to go much further and push your site to new heights.

A few links from authoritative pages with relevant content can make a world of difference in your search rankings. It’s all about knowing what makes good links, and how to get them.

Few businesses have the resources or time to manually build and track the kinds of links that make a difference. After all, everyone at your business or organization probably has a full-time job to take care of already. Even your SEO experts will have their hands full with all the other facets of managing SEO. So what can you do if you don’t have the in-house power?

To improve backlink profiles and help give their sites the visibility they deserve (without having to hire and train entire in-house departments), businesses across all industries outsource their link building services. This is especially true if the goal is to rank for competitive keywords in your industry. To rank for competitive keywords, you need SEO experts who know exactly how to get you the most powerful links around. Those links will then boost your site and provide you with lasting growth that can help you secure those coveted spots on Google.

When you choose to outsource link building services, you hire a specialist agency to handle your link-building strategy. So, while you run your business, your partner makes sure that the right links are in place to help you realize your dream.They’re the ones who have to put in all the elbow grease to get your website’s backlink profile moving. The good news is that these agencies hire backlink experts. These experts know the industry secrets. Plus it’s their full-time job to build your backlink profile up, so they have the time to dedicate to it.

What Are the Benefits of Outsourcing Link Building?

So what do you get from outsourcing your link building? You might hesitate initially because hiring an agency will cost money. The good news is that it’s money well spent because of the big benefits you get from doing it. Outsourcing to the right link builders brings with it a range of benefits, including the following:

• Increased Affordability
  • Hiring an outside agency is typically significantly less expensive than having to recruit and/or train in-house specialists. That’s right. As I explained earlier, if you don’t hire an agency, you most likely don’t have the in-house power needed to effectively build links. To really create the links that will have an impact on your SEO, you would need to build an in-house team. That requires hiring or training new personnel. Hiring top experts will obviously cost more, and training takes money and effort too. So building your own team is costly. Compared to those costs, hiring an agency is affordable. And, because your contract with an agency will outline all of the costs and deliverables before you even get started, you won’t have to worry about surprise expenses pushing you over budget. You’ll know right up front what you’ll pay. 

• Faster Agency Spin-up Time (and Faster Results)
  • There is so much more to link building than sending emails. Simply learning the right way of doing things can take years (or more), and if you’re trying to divide your time between building links and handling whatever other tasks are on your plate, then it can all become a painfully slow process. By outsourcing your links to a trusted agency, you get to benefit from the relationships and processes they’ve already established. That means faster time to results (and a more direct path to ROI). The agency experts can start building your links as soon as your contract starts. You’re not waiting for them to learn the industry secrets either. Instead, they dive in immediately, which can help you start seeing results sooner. Quicker results are worth the money.

• Easier Link Management
  • If you decide to keep your link-building initiative in-house, then your people are going to have to be responsible for managing it. And links do require regular management to continue providing you with value. Links get removed, pages disappear, and partnerships fall through — when your link-building strategy depends on in-house teams, you’re the one left scrambling to set things right. It will take regular monitoring and managing to get those links up and running again. Or, you can hire an agency, and let them handle any issues that might arise while still delivering consistent, predictable results. The pros at the agency will regularly monitor your backlink profile, and they know what to do when something inevitably goes wrong. They’ll jump on it immediately and get you back in business quickly. 

• Improved Quality Control
  • As we said before, link building is about quality over quantity. There is no reliable shortcut to sharing in page authority, and spammy links and shady link building practices will only get your site buried further and further down the SERP. With a link building agency, you have a contract-backed lock on what kind of links are OK, and what ones are not. Simply tell the professionals what you want, and it’s their job to make sure it gets done. Plus the industry experts know all about how to get you and your team the highest quality links. Again, link building is so much more than sending a few emails and hoping you’ll end up with a link from Forbes. It takes years of practice to master. So your agency partners will avoid the bad links and be able to get you the better ones easier. 

Things to Consider When You Outsource Link Building

Those are the benefits you get from outsourcing your link building process. As you can see, hiring an agency is definitely worth the cost. The results are simply too high to ignore. But before you jump headfirst into hiring the first agency you see, let’s go over a few things to consider when you’re ready to get started with outsourcing. 

• Quality vs. Quantity 
  • As I mentioned earlier, the quality of your links is crucial. Getting the highest quality links is worth the hassle because of the huge impact it can have on your SEO and SERP rankings. There are multiple link building options out there at multiple different price points, and generally you’ll pay more for an agency to get you the best links around. That being said, keep this in mind: For the most part, it’s true that you get what you pay for. Putting more into your choice of agency and tier generally results in higher quality links. Ultimately, if you want to rank on Google you need quality links, not just lots of links. So before just randomly picking an agency, think about the level of quality that you want from your links and how important those valuable links are. 
• Cost
  • The reality of running a business is that you’re only going to have so much money to put into link building. After all, you have a lot to manage and pay for already. So before you get started, figure out the budget that you have and want to spend on link building. Remember that link building can go a long way in affecting your website and company, so keep that in mind as you plan out your budget. Then talk with a few agencies to figure out who will fit in your budget and work with your company the best. 
• Service
  • Organic link building and creating a healthy backlink profile takes time. This means that the agency you work with matters. You’re going to want to spend time researching the agency that can provide you with the service you need. Consider what you’re really looking for and what you’re willing to pay for that. 
  • BASE is an agency designed for a company new to backlinks or looking for flexibility. We understand how important link building is (and hire the best of the best), and that the amount of links you need fluctuates. That’s why we have no contracts and no order minimums so you can decide how many links you need for each domain authority. Basically, you call all the shots with BASE, and we help you get the backlinks you need to grow. 

How to Outsource Your Website

If you’re thinking that outsourcing your link building is a good fit for you and your business, what do you do? We’ll look at a few basic steps to get ready to outsource. 

•  Prep Your Site
  • Link building shouldn’t be the very first SEO tactic you’re working on. Before you outsource your link building, it’s good to make sure you have a solid foundation in place. That way when you do hire an agency, they’re able to help you see real results. Your links will power your website the way they should. So how do you know if you’re ready? 
    • You understand where link building fits into your overall strategy
      • You might be starting a new site
      • You’ve taken over a new site
    • Your SEO foundation is good enough that your content does rank (just not as well as you’d like)
      • If you’re on the first few pages of Google, you’ll likely see some great results from link building
    • You write just as good (if not better) content as your competitors, but they outrank you because they have more website authority
      • Backlinks can help build your authority and push you over the edge
    • The pages outranking you have more links (or better links)
• Learn More About Link Building
  • It can be helpful (before hiring someone) to develop a better understanding of link building—the benefits, the impact, and how it works. Understanding Link Building 101 can help you know how to communicate with your link building partner and help you understand what’s realistically possible. Here are three points of link building to get you started: 
    • Links with higher authority are worth more to Google. A link from The Harvard Business Review will be more impactful than a blogger from Minnesota’s site that was created four months ago. 
    • How relevant the links are to your site matters too. More relevant links have more juice. So if your company offers life insurance, a link from a high ranking insurance company will be worth more than a site about golf. 
    • Easy links aren’t worth as much. Social media links aren’t going to have a big impact. They’re too easy to get. The real winning links require work—and Google will reward you for that work. 
  • Plan Out Your Budget
    • Don’t walk into a conversation with an agency without an idea of what you actually want to spend. You know you’re ready to outsource when you’ve got the budget set outside to make your ranking dreams a reality. Do your research and see what’s reasonable for your industry, and then you’ll be ready to really work alongside your link building partner.

Tips on Choosing a Link Building Partner

If you’re looking for an agency to take over your link building, the good news is that there are a lot to choose from. Of course, that’s also the bad news, because many of those agencies kind of suck. Unfortunately, not all agencies are created equal, and you’ll be able to find a bad one around every corner. Don’t get sucked into long contracts with somebody that’s not going to get you the results you need. Instead of just looking for any agency, think about it as looking for your link building partner. You want to choose a team that will work well with you, work with what you have, and will get you to where you want to be (realistically).

So let’s look at some advice about how to choose the right link building partner for you. Here are a few tips to help you find the right link builders to boost your traffic.

1. Know Your Goals
   There’s more than one way to define successful SEO. Are you trying to increase organic traffic? Own valuable keyword searches? Establish yourself as an authority in your niche? All of the above? Before your agency can start helping you achieve your objectives, you need to have a clear idea of what those objectives are. Then, you can make sure that you and your agency are aligned and working together to make it happen. Essentially, you’ll want to choose an agency that does the kind of work you want. To do that, you have to know what work you truly want done and what results you actually care about seeing. 
2. Shop Around
   There’s a lot riding on your sites’ backlinks, and that means you’ll want to make sure that you’ve found the right agency before you make any commitments. As you evaluate your compare prices, services, and reputation. Also, it’s not always a good idea to just go with the cheapest option; if the price sounds too good for what’s being promised, then it probably is — or it’s built on the kind of shady, black-hat link building that could get you and your site into trouble. Ask other companies you trust to see who they’re using, or just starting looking up agencies. You’ll want to examine a whole list of options instead of just picking the top hit. After all, even great agencies might not align with your goals or budget.
3. Ask the Right Questions
   How can you determine whether a specific agency is a good fit? Talk to them. Discuss the specifics of the contract. Get confirmation about the kinds of links the agency works with, and how long they’re guaranteed to be live. Have your agency explain the tactics they use, and ask for examples of other businesses in your industry that they have worked. And, make sure that you have a dedicated point of contact, so that if any more questions arise after the contract goes into effect, you know whom you can go to for answers.
4. Watch Out for Red Flags
   Before you hand over the keys to your backlink profile, take a close look at how the agency operates. If they make unrealistic promises, guarantee impossibly fast results, or quote prices that are too good to be true, then they’re probably not playing by the rules (and you could be the one who ends up getting penalized). Don’t get sucked into a bad agency where your website could end up in a hole. The quick results aren’t worth the pain that would come when Google catches onto the sketchy tactics that agency used—and you’re the one left to clean up the mess and try to get your site on track again. Transparency is key; without it, you have no way of knowing what the agency is doing with your site. If an agency won’t disclose information to you, that might be a red flag to consider.
5. See what Metrics They’re Using
   If you can’t measure something, then you can’t improve it. Your link building agency needs to be clear with you on what kinds of metrics they use when deciding what types of partnerships they’ll work with. These SEO metrics will likely include things such as the site’s Domain Authority, Moz Spam score, Estimated Monthly Traffic levels, whether or not a link is indexed/followed, and more. Have your agency walk you through the metrics, and be sure that the contract includes some sort of reporting mechanism, so you can always be sure that everything is on track.

Hiring the Right Link Building Agency

So there you have it: a comprehensive look at what it takes to outsource your link building. There’s a lot to consider—budget, needs, goals, current rankings—which is why we want to point you in the direction of our link building agency, BASE. 

If you’re ready to outsource link building, then we can help. BASE link building services are built on dedication and a deep understanding of SEO. Our high-authority partnerships and experience working with industries of all kinds give us the insight and resources we need to build powerful backlink profiles. Give your site the connections it needs to stand out from the crowd; contact our team today, and get ready to be seen.