One of the biggest issues with SEO is how to effective scale your link building activities while still ensuring the work is done on time and within budget. Outsourcing part of the project both internally, to SEO agency or to a specialist link building partner are all often part of the daily task of a marketing manager. Everyone has to look at outsourcing part of their link building at some point no matter how big or effective the agency is at doing SEO as no-one can be good at everything just like no website can be #1 for every term in Google. There are more and more platforms that allow marketers to more easily scale their link building and SEO activities but there is still no silver bullet, only more measurable offerings.

How to effective check site quality?
One of the biggest mistakes in link building is to acquire a link for the sake of acquiring a link, it’s not a numbers game it’s a quality focus.  This beginner mistake of just getting links for the sake of links can be avoiding if enough time is allocated to a project and client’s are resonable about expectations on velocity of link acquisitions. Growing your backlink profile too fast with low quality links can hurt your long term aspirations but also mean that quick wins are the only type of deliverable you will receive. One of the many tools to quickly sort the crap links from the quality partnerships is to perform a quick ranking check to analyze the value of a URL but also how strongly that URL is already ranked within Google. This gets complicated when you are dealing with multiple languages as what might be a high score in a French website might not be applicable when comparing against a English website, cross language link building is always difficult.  It can be very easy to pick up cheap and low quality links from foreign websites but the quality factors are often missing and you don’t have any real control over what other types of sites they might link to or what content they might be hosting.

There are also a number of tools like SEMRush that allow you to get a quick report on a competitor like Amazon.com, and you can see an overview of their organic keywords, any paid campaigns running along with estimates on how much you have to spend to get the same number of visitors, who are their competitors and even potential buyers/sellers of ads for monetisation/partnerships.  You can also look to platforms like RavenTools, OpenSiteExplorer or MajesticSEO to gauge the quality of a website but this can be very time consuming if done manually for each and every link your plan on acquiring.

To buy or lease backlinks?
One of the big issues with AdWords is that many clients see it as an open cheque book they are always paying every month, but SEO done badly or in competitive industries can be just as expensive. Leasing backlinks can be a compounding problem as your need to keep pay more each month as you grow your backlink portfolio as you continue to play catchup with your competitors. A far better solution is to buy back links as part of a longer term agreement or partnership between your sites. If you swap your backlinks in and out each month this can potentially send signals to Google that something might be up with your link building process and will likely flag your website for an inspection by their quality team.

A far better strategy is to look at long term partnerships or one off agreements that mean you are not renting links for short-term gain but rather looking at a long term partnership with relevant websites and directories.  You can certainly look at following Google/Bing guidelines when acquiring links and a number of websites will ensure any sponsored/promoted links are nofollowed to reduce the influence on rankings, you should always be looking to acquire links that drive actual real traffic and visitors.  Focusing purely on links from an SEO perspective can be short sighted so focus on what might be more expensive and better quality links can ensure that you get sales/visitors from the link not just a bump in your rankings. If you are acquiring links you want to ensure they are on quality websites will continue to drive visitors for a long period of time.

Again you can look at SEM Rush reports to get a gauge on how much you should be allocating for a link building campaign and think long term not short term and use a platform like Scribe to measure and improve your website content to get the biggest bang for your buck. Look at established competitors they focus on long term and don’t lease backlinks for a few months, they look at securing these links forever if they can.

What is the biggest failure in link building?
One of the biggest failures in link building is not matching the client’s budget and resources to the task ahead. You need to consider outsourcing link building if you don’t have the internal expertise or experience doing it for a large scale project. You need to take a whole bunch of external factors into consideration before jumping into the deep-end if you want your link building activities to succeed. A large reason for a failure in link building is tied to a poorly structured link building campaign and a failure to match the link building activities to relevant content within your website. There is no valid reason why you should be building links for “example topic” if there is not real content within your website that match to that link, it only wastes effort and annoys any visitors that visit your site via that referral link.

If you are trying to go head to head with a online travel site like Expedia, you need to evaluate the task and match the end game to the budget. Expedia is already one of the biggest online travel websites but is also one of the biggest spenders when it comes to SEO with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent each each which has allowed them to build up around 2.64 million backlinks.

What are your options for outsourcing link building?

You have a number of options that you have options to outsource some or all of the task to buy back links to your marketing agency but make sure you avoid using any automated software or spammers that email your from Gmail addresses offering links from just $49/month….

How much should I spend on SEO?
There are a few ways you can calculate how much you should look at spending on your SEO activities to match or exceed your competitors, and platforms like SEMRush do help you estimate some of the cost if you were to buy that traffic. How much you should spend on Link building can be an easier task to calculate but can also result many times in a “how long is a piece of string” as some industries/verticals are very competitive.