Outsource Backlink Building: What Smart Marketing Leaders In eLearning And HR Tech Are Doing Differently

What Is Outsourced Backlink Building?

Backlink building is a B2B SEO strategy most companies use to get their websites featured on other reputable publications. It is a process that takes time and deep knowledge to carry out successfully. Many businesses employ in-house SEO and link building experts who know exactly how to generate quality links using only white-hat tactics. Outsourced backlink building is a great option for those of you searching to improve your backlink profile without hiring new people. Basically, you avoid the lengthy process of building a viable strategy and trust an agency to acquire trustworthy links quickly and efficiently. These agencies handle your outreach efforts and secure high-quality placements while monitoring your website’s backlink strength.

Outsourcing link building is ideal for small and medium-sized companies that don’t have the resources or budget to hire in-house SEO experts. You don’t even have to worry about how many backlinks your website needs to rank highly in SERPs. Your external agency continuously audits your website and identifies new opportunities.

In This Guide, You Will Find…

How Does Backlink Building Help SEO?

When 32.9% of consumers discover new products and services through online searches, it’s obvious why you need to craft meticulous SEO strategies. One of the most important ingredients for success in an SEO recipe is link building. Many marketers are still confused about how it works. This makes outsourcing link building the best option to enhance visibility and delegate all the responsibility to experts in the field. Here are a few benefits you will enjoy if you start following a successful link building strategy.

When 65% of marketers deem link building and backlinks demanding and challenging, it’s evident why an expert agency might be your best option. These agencies employ seasoned SEO professionals who know how to simplify the whole process. You don’t have to spend any time trying to figure out all the complexities. Instead, you free up time to focus on other valuable tasks and projects.

When you outsource backlink building, you let experts in the field curate your linking campaigns. These people not only know which tactics to use and which to avoid. They also have a vast network of contacts that allows them to find ideal links for your website. This is exactly the case with eLearning Industry’s link building services that focus on companies in the eLearning and HR fields. Once your 1000+ word article is ready, our specialized account manager starts working on getting that article on DA 40+, 50+ sites.

We will analyze the full cost of hiring in-house link-building pros vs. outsourcing to link building services a bit later. For now, imagine how much money it would take to employ an in-house expert, who requires a salary, bonuses, training, and various benefits. Yes, that person would probably generate many backlinks for your company. However, the investment would be much larger than delegating the job to an external partner who doesn’t have to be active all year long.

When Should You Delegate Your Link Building?

1. You Are Ready To Scale

When your business grows, your backlink needs change, too. For example, 10–15 quality links per month may have been enough so far. However, you may need to double this number to accelerate business growth and move on to the next level of business. To acquire more than 15 links per month, you should outsource backlink building to an expert agency with a vast network of high DA sites. Before choosing your external collaborators, ensure they have relevant expertise in your niche and ask them about their methodology. You don’t want to work with generic link builders who may generate many backlinks, but in irrelevant publications.

2. You Have A Low Budget

Imagine this scenario. You hire an in-house team of two or three people. Paying for their salaries, training, and benefits is a considerable expense that you can avoid if you go through the link-building-outsourcing pathway. Not only that, but in-house teams require time to build an effective link building plan that aligns with your goals. They may also take months to create a big enough network of publications. On the other hand, agencies already have a wide pool of candidates to publish your content.

3. You Lack Resources

Even if you have a powerful SEO team, link building isn’t the only thing they have to do. They are also responsible for satisfying other on-page SEO factors and doing keyword research for your content needs. Asking them to take on an additional responsibility will take a lot of their time trying to identify high-quality links. On the other hand, when you outsource backlink building, you leverage experts in the field who already know which websites are trustworthy and which ones should be avoided.

4. You Are Niche-Specific

Many marketers think it’s a good solution to go online and buy backlinks in bulk, thinking it’s an easy way to increase their profile. Yet it isn’t, for two reasons. For starters, these links are often questionable, if not harmful to your domain authority, and secondly, they are probably not niche. On the contrary, niche-specific link building experts provide you with highly relevant backlinks. So, check reviews, testimonials, and case studies to ensure they have expertise in your industry.

5. You Need Quick Results

Let’s face it. Most marketers and business owners aren’t patient enough to wait for ages until in-house link building takes off and shows results. Backlink outsourcing allows your team members to focus on other business projects they had to balance alongside link building. Not only do these projects progress faster, but also your link building strategies are tackled swiftly by dedicated experts.

How To Prepare For Outsourcing Backlink Building

1. Prepare Your Website

Before you outsource SEO link building, you must do some tidying up and organizing around your website. On-page tactics like metadata, tags, headings, and alt text on images will prepare your website for welcoming those much-needed backlinks. Quality and expert content should always be at the top of your priorities before and after outsourcing your backlink needs. Valuable articles, infographics, guides, and eBooks position you as a thought leader in your field and generate credible backlinks naturally. Also, you can strengthen your internal linking and increase website clicks and traffic. Then, you should perform a technical SEO audit to see how quickly your pages load. In fact, websites that dropped their loading speed to one second noticed a 14% decrease in bounce rate.

On top of that, a technical audit will help you identify how mobile-friendly your website is and how many broken links need fixing. Ensure you have a sitemap and robots.txt file in place so Google can crawl your site. For broken links in particular, tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can also help you identify them. Lastly, check how optimized your content marketing strategy is. Perform competitor keyword research to identify what your competition does to remain at the top. If you’re not ranking in the top 100, it’s an indication you’re not doing things the right way. Link-building outsourcing won’t do much to help you if your content quality is low.

2. Set Your Goals

What do you want to achieve by acquiring authority backlinks for HR software? Is it better rankings, higher domain authority, or networking with industry leaders? It’s important to know this, as it will help your link building experts create an accurate strategy. For instance, if your main goal is to rank for specific keywords, you’ll have to conduct an SEO competitor analysis to see what others in your field are doing. This way, they may instruct you to create content around specific keywords. Due to the level of congestion the digital world is at right now, we firmly believe that it’s better to focus on low-competition, high-intent long-tail keywords and phrases. Yes, they probably receive way fewer searches and clicks, but most of them are highly targeted leads who are ready to purchase.

3. Choose The Right Partner

Choosing a link building specialist is a demanding process that requires meticulous research. You can’t just choose the cheapest option on the market. Sure, pricing is a crucial part of the equation, but there are other important factors you should take into consideration.

Let’s say you want to generate authority backlinks for your eLearning company and boost your Learning Management System (LMS). Shouldn’t you outsource backlink building to a partner with proven knowledge and expertise in this field? A partner like eLearning Industry that has created a wide network of publications, meaning your backlinks are highly targeted. Additionally, someone with the same niche as yours can understand your needs and challenges perfectly and can craft a strategy that is meant to meet your goals.

Do you think it’s a good idea to go on Fiverr or some other bulk-backlink-buying website and get your links practically for free? One quality backlink can cost $300+. When people on these websites offer 10 links for $100, something fishy is going on. Why can they get them to you for so cheap while credible agencies require much higher payment? It’s because getting quality backlinks is not a walk in the park. Cheap links are probably worthless on websites that have no relevance to your niche or organic traffic. It’s easy to check the domain authority of these links before giving away your money.

To improve SEO through link building, you must ensure that your agency’s tactics are ethical and transparent. They should be okay to answer questions like, “Which tactics do you use while trying to generate backlinks?” and “Can you share a list of sites you often work with?” Additionally, ask them when they typically charge their clients. Is it before they start working on a project or after they show results? Make sure they engage strictly in white-hat link building and steer away from black-hat tactics. Google has very firm policies against spammy links and unethical link building techniques.

So, when you ask them how they get their links and which websites they work with, do your own research. Check website rankings and whether these sites offer opportunities for link placement and guest posting. If you see any signs of selling links, stay away from that agency.

A big part of transparency is a healthy and detailed level of communication. It’s not only about showering you with wonderful link building ideas but also reporting back to you regarding the results of their work. When you outsource backlink building, you can’t monitor the situation firsthand. So, before choosing an agency, ask them how often they provide reports and what exactly they include in those. For instance, it’s not only about the number of backlinks they generate but also about the impact they have on your SEO performance, including traffic. If you are not satisfied with the frequency, you can move on to the next potential suitor.

Now that you have a pretty good idea of what it takes to acquire high-quality backlinks, it’s time to watch out for all the possible red flags. Let’s start with agencies that promise speedy deliveries of links. While we’d love it if backlink building worked that way, it doesn’t. It’s like a marathon requiring a lot of patience and determination. If someone claims they can get you a link in a couple of days, just keep walking. Additionally, you don’t want to hear anyone promising that they can get you to the top spot or top 10 places on Google within a month. No Search Engine Optimization specialist can guarantee something like this, no matter how talented they are.

Lastly, check for shady behavior. Are they unwilling to provide you with case studies and offer you a list of websites they work with? It’s probably because they have something to hide.

• Case Studies And Testimonials

Online reputation management is usually very important for link-building agencies and other companies to maintain a positive reputation. Go online and do thorough research by reading customer reviews. You can also go on social media and use hashtags to search for a company. For instance, clients tend to go on Reddit to discuss their experiences with companies and raise complaints. That’s not enough, though. Before you outsource backlink building, request case studies from agencies to check how their strategies translate into actions. This way, you can see which other companies they’ve worked with and even contact them for clarification.

4. Choose The Right Strategy

When you outsource backlink building, you have the precious opportunity to tap into the experience of your partners. You don’t have to choose your SaaS link-building strategies all alone. Based on your goals, your agency can help you understand what will work better. One of the main strategies is broken link building. In this case, you browse other websites to find relevant broken links. You contact website owners, telling them that a specific link doesn’t work while offering them your backlink as a replacement. It’s a win-win situation. Next in line is digital PR link building. Digital PR for HR software and eLearning vendors is crucial to position yourself in front of the right eyes. You start by pitching your content to journalists and credible publications, earning top-quality backlinks and boosting exposure.

Moreover, you can focus on creating SEO-optimized content that attracts backlinks naturally. However, this strategy may bring results slowly. Finding unlinked mentions is another great way to receive contextual links. Did someone talk about you on their website but didn’t include a link? Simply ask them to include a backlink. Lastly, you can contact content syndication platforms and publish your content to other reputable publications. While there are free options, they do not guarantee great results. Usually, these platforms charge anywhere between $1,500 and $5,000 per campaign.

5. Identify Your Budget

As you can see so far, the link building benefits are many. However, the end result and the number of generated links depend on how much money you’re willing to spend. Also, it depends on the domain authority (DA) and domain rating (DR). For example, the average cost of a link on a DR 40 website is $300–350, while on a DR 60 site is $450+. When you sign up with link building experts, you probably have various packages. For example, a startup plan of 5 links per month may cost you $1,500, while a package for 20 links can be priced at $6,000. These prices can seriously go up depending on the quality of each publication. Don’t just limit yourself to the pricing plans you see on an agency’s website. Contact them and get a personalized quote.

During your research for outsourcing backlink building, make sure to avoid link farms. The cost is what should give them away. For example, if someone is offering a DA 60 link for $100, it should be a major warning sign. Why? Basically, you’ll probably buy a link to an empty and completely worthless website that generates no real traffic.

The Cost Of In-House Vs. Outsourced Link Building

The In-House Avenue

Let’s get to the burning matter of this topic now that you know how to get backlinks. If you decide to go with an in-house link building team, you must have a hefty budget. While smaller teams may be happy with 1–2 employees, this approach is nowhere near enough if you want to scale your business. Typically, in-house teams have a manager, an assistant, a blog writer, and link building software. A manager oversees the entire strategy and receives approximately $70K annually. An assistant is responsible for organizing outreach campaigns and ensuring links are successfully placed on websites. Their annual salary may be anywhere between $12K and $24K.

A B2B SEO strategy also requires an experienced content writer. You can either hire an in-house pro or use freelancers. Whatever you choose, expect to spend around $60K annually to create articles, guides, and eBooks. Lastly, you must purchase subscriptions to SEO-specific software like Ahrefs (at least $1K annually), which helps you identify credible websites, and Mailchimp (minimum $240 annually), which lets you automate emails. So, you should expect to pay at least $143K annually.

The Outsource Agency Avenue

The great thing about outsourcing backlink building is that you don’t have to commit for an entire year. You can choose one-time packages or monthly link building campaigns that you don’t necessarily need to renew. It all depends on your budget, the domain ranking, and referring domains. For example, 3 links on an RD 50–100 website might cost you $150+, while 3 links on an RD 100–200 website may be $200+. If you want to go even higher on the RD ladder, you can pick 3 links on a domain with 1000+ RD for $780+.

If you want to create a long-term partnership for your SaaS link building needs, you can collaborate with an agency on a monthly basis. You could find affordable and credible partners with packages starting from $600 per month. However, the average monthly cost is between $3,000 and $5,000. Once again, it all depends on the DA of websites and the number of links you need. So, a link building agency can cost between $24K and $60K.

Key Takeaway

With AI search optimization taking the digital world by storm, marketers and company leaders are wondering how they can maintain or improve their current ranking. Backlink building is still as important as ever. AI search engines use the strength of your backlink profile as an indicator, the same way Google does. When you outsource backlink building, you can focus on other areas of your SaaS growth strategy and let the experts take care of link building. You save on costs while leveraging the expert knowledge of your hired pros. This avenue is particularly useful when you are ready to scale your business but don’t have a massive budget.

Before hiring an agency, ensure your website is technically ready for new backlinks and that you have set clear goals. Based on them and on your budget, an agency will help you craft effective strategies. To find the perfect partner, arrange meetings and ask them clear questions about their tactics, communication methods, and reporting frequency. A good partner like eLearning Industry will never keep you in the dark or mislead you about the out-of-this-world link building benefits you should expect.