(without regretting it in 3 months)

Here are the 7 Insider Tips on How to Outsource Off-Page SEO to a Link Building Service.

Tip 1: Know Thyself

What sort of business are you in?
What’s your niche? Brand?

Your reply would determine the link building strategy (and service) that will be ideal for you.

Here are some examples.

Ecommerce. You will benefit from building content for every step in your potential clients’ purchasing path.

This will include a lot of informational content.
That means that most of your links can be generated via:

• Resource pages
• Shotgun-style outreach

Affiliate/Lead Generation. Very similar to Ecommerce websites - you need informational content for every step on their path.

You will then build links using:

• Resource pages
• Shotgun outreach

You can also employ:

• Infographic link building
• Link roundups
• Broken link building

Personal Brand. Anybody with their face on their product/service will find proper (non-spammy) guest posting a lot more beneficial.

I recommend you find 100 top websites you’d want a link from and then work to get them all.

It will help to grow your personal brand while building relations with other people - you never know where the opportunity can come from!

Business examples:

• Lawyers
• Dentists
• Chiropractors

Tip 2: Know your links

A link is a link...NOT!

Getting links from agencies is like shopping on a market - you can get screwed.
That’s why you need to know what a good link looks like.

One of the ways you could tell that is by checking its DA.
However there are 3 problems with DA that we see at Linkshero.

Check out this video that I recorded to learn more (it’s very important).

Once you know what a good link looks like, you can’t be fooled!

Tip 3: Know their process

How does your agency/freelancer build links?
What kind of strategies or tactics do they use?

These are the questions you need to ask them because they will determine how safe their service is in the long-run.

Here is what our process looks like - check it out.

Tip 4: Set your expectations

Any proper white hat link builder knows that this is a somewhat predictable process but guaranteeing great results within a certain time frame is very difficult.

This happens because proper link building (where you don’t pay for links, use PBNs or any other smack) relies on something that’s intrinsically unpredictable - communication with humans.

We send a certain number of emails on a daily basis and we do have some conversion rate estimates (i.e. we know more or less how many of those will eventually convert) but there are other things at play:

• Conversion rates can be lower than we anticipate, so we’ll need to send more emails (and that will take more time)
• The page we are building links to may be not that great for actually attracting links (e.g. the topic may be uninteresting or the content itself might need to be improved)
• Before links go Live they are Agreed upon; sometimes webmasters take a long time before they actually add our link to the page - we continuously monitor these links before they go live.

As you can see there are enough reasons for things to not work as planned as long as the work is being done.

Tip 5: Know their plan

You know their process and have some smart expectations but what does their working plan look like?

We like scheduling a plan for the entire month.

Mind you, it won’t always be exactly right as we go but this allows us to have a roadmap of what we are doing. And when.

This is hugely important for both, ourselves and our clients.

Here is what our sample plan looks like.

Tip 6: Set communication rules

Link building, unlike PPC, takes time and there really isn’t much to report on a daily basis.

So, once you get a working plan from them (with some deadlines), schedule your first meeting.

I recommend you keep an eye on what’s happening for a week or two (just to make sure that there are no misunderstandings, questions or concerns).

After that - you can schedule a weekly reporting slot.

You can get on a call, discuss progress and get comments on any results (or lack of them).

Here are some questions you could ask:

• How many websites did you reach out to over the course of the previous week?
• What’s the sentiment like? How do people reply?
• Do you think we could create another piece of content?

The first question will show you what their workflow was like. A very conservative estimate would equal to 1 backlink for 100 opportunities contacted (that’s for resource pages or shotgun-type outreach; guest posts are usually at 10-20% or more).

The 2nd question basically shows two things.

1. How well they can write their emails.
2. How well your content is perceived.

The 3rd question is any link builder’s dream.
It means you are assuming some of the responsibility for the success of the campaign (as you should be) because sometimes content just flops and we just need something else to build links to.

Tip 7: Consider building your own link building team

A proper outreach-based agency/service will charge you quite a lot of money.

Different services use different pricing strategies but here are some examples with some references:

• $50-$200+ hourly rate. Remember that it may take from 5 to 10 hours to secure one single backlink.
• $150-$600+ per link. Depending on the service, their experience and name in the industry, you can pay them based on the “per link basis”.

You can then imagine that spending between $2500-$5000 per 10 backlinks per month is pretty ordinary.

This is when you may consider building and managing your own in-house team.

It will not suit everyone (as there is a lot of training and people management involved) but it’s certainly a consideration.