What to Look for in a Link Building Company?
Links have always formed the largest part of any good SEO strategy. And if you’re considering outsourcing link-building to a link-building agency, you need to be aware of all the red flags.
Any link-building agency that’s worth its salt will follow ethical white hat link-building methods in order to rank your website. So let’s cover some link-building criteria you ought to keep an eye on when researching a link-building company to hire.
Pricing doesn’t dictate the quality
Higher pricing doesn’t mean top quality, keep that in mind. Most link-building companies will charge you a high retainer for link-building services due to overhead costs around building a link.
However, a smaller, dedicated team with a big list of publisher contacts around the web, with an optimized publishing workflow, can cut down these costs and offer a more cost-effective retainer for you.
Link-building experience does
Experienced link builders know the difference between good links and bad links. And any experienced link builder will focus on their niche, adding topic relevance, and building authority and relationships with publishers.
Experienced link builders will let you know the exact date when your link will be published and will work with you and the content team to research and compose a piece that will fit the publisher.
Ask your link-building agency how their link builders approach link building. Check their work.
They offer link diversity and their own link portfolio shows it
Did you read the previous paragraph? A good link-building portfolio is diverse. It has backlinks from business directory listings, press releases, infographics, and guest post content.
Also, not all links are indexed as soon as they get published. It sometimes takes more than a month to get them indexed by Google. However, if a website is getting the same number of new backlinks, of the same type, the same number of them month-to-month, you get a pattern.
And a backlink portfolio pattern is noticeable and can get you “shadow penalized” by the algorithm.
They approach your link-building campaign as strategists
Your link-building agency will advise you on the best link-building strategy based on your website metrics and SEO goals for growth.
This may include a diverse link-building plan with a specific timeframe and milestones that complies with your SEO goals. They need to understand your business and if needed, advise on the target page content tweaks or to create other linkable assets.
All with the goal to achieve the maximum ROI on your SEO campaign.
And they have a great track record
Check their clients, and read through the case studies. But most importantly, check their backlink portfolio! Link portfolio is like an open book of all their work. If you find any suspicious links, ask them about them.
Run those websites using Ahrefs. It will show you their backlink portfolio and growth curves for domain rating, number of backlinks, and estimated organic traffic from the moment the website got indexed by Google. It speaks volumes and this data can’t be tampered with.
Lastly, they provide ongoing support and link health checks
A good link-building agency offers long-term support and provides regular health checks of your backlinks.
Why health checks? Because most companies that build links lose nearly 35% of the links built after a year. This is simply due to the nature of the publishers and publishing methods. Some publishers remove links from content to make room for new ones. This is a common practice.
However, if your link-building agency offers regular, quarterly backlink health checks, it means that they already have a method in place on how to ensure they are always live and their backlink loss for the same period of time doesn’t go above 5%.
