Should you outsource link building? And is it possible to get truly high authority links that improve your domain authority by doing so? 

Yes, and yes. Outsourcing your link building is a great idea for many reasons. 

Let’s dive into those reasons and how you can start outsourcing your link building to speed up results, consistency, and scale your organic traffic.

1. Outsourcing Means Faster Time to Results

I’ve been doing SEO link building for half a decade. When I first started, it took months to build a single quality link from a site like Cisco or Shopify. 

I grinded for weeks on things like HARO and cold outreach. 

Now I can acquire 20 quality links in a matter of 3-4 days. 

Outsourcing your backlink strategy and acquisition means faster time to results. Because figuring out link building from scratch isn’t a fast process. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.  

People get 121 emails per day at work on average. And high authority websites get hundreds of link building emails daily. It’s a meme at this point about how much cold outreach is done for links.

You can’t just “send emails” and get links. Don’t believe me? Go email HubSpot and ask them for a link. Come back in a few days and email me (jeremy@userp.io). Let me know how it went 🙂 

When you hire a link building agency, like us here at uSERP, you get nearly instant time to results. 

Link building is all about building relationships at a large enough scale to create positive change for referral traffic, organic traffic, and rankings. 

3-4 relevant websites isn’t enough. 300-400 and growing by 30-40 monthly is. 

Outsourcing means you skip the years of brutal grinding to find a process that works, scales, and is cost effective, producing a tangible ROI.

2. Outsourcing Link Building is Cheaper

Want to keep link building efforts in house and still get fast time to results? You’ll need to hire a veteran link builder with 5+ years of relationships built up. Anyone else is a waste of time. 

And those folks? They cost a pretty penny. At least $74,000 per year: 

Outsourcing your link building services is almost always cheaper than doing link building tasks in-house. 

I know this because I’ve run the numbers countless times. Let me break it down for you. 

To acquire really good links worth spending time on, as in links from websites with real authority, real traffic, and that you recognize by name (like HubSpot, Forbes, Shopify, etc), you need good content. 

You’ll need to pitch them valuable pieces of content they can’t produce on their own. 

And if you try to reach out to them asking for a link insertion on existing content, they’ll either ignore you if they are feeling nice, or tell you to f*** off if they aren’t. 

You’ll also need a huge list of potential sites you can contribute to. Because these sites get pounded with hundreds of emails daily asking for links and guest posts. 

The market is saturated, crowded, and downright tired of crappy outreach emails. It’s a numbers game at this point. You need scale to win in link building. 

You can’t afford, literally, to spend a month acquiring one link while your competitor is outsourcing and getting 15 DR70+ links. You won’t win.

If you think you can just send a few emails and get top-tier links, think again. Everyone is vying for the same attention, with the same offer. Every. Damn. Day.

Meaning you need to spend more time per pitch. More time crafting a topic worth their time, not XX tips about marketing or some bullshit that nobody reads.  And time = money. 

That probably means an expensive SEO tool to conduct competitor research to find worthwhile topics your target site isn’t covering yet: 

So, let’s recap quickly. You’ll need (and later experience): 

• An expensive link building tool like Ahrefs or Semrush, costing thousands per year.

• Someone who can build a list of 500+ potential websites per week (takes a long time), find 500+ emails for those sites (using another tool that costs money). 
• Spending 15-30 minutes per site target to craft a pitch that they’ll read and respond to (read: more time, aka money)
• Once a site accepts (few will if you don’t have relationships already) you’ll then need to pay someone to write a 2,000-word long-form piece. 
• Don’t want to pay? Well, your full-time link builder will then have to spend 1-2 days writing this piece themselves, meaning zero other work done on all those other targets for outreach. 
• Okay, now you’ve spent a few hundred dollars paying someone to write the piece, or you let your link builder do it who you are paying a ton per year, meaning that piece costs you more than a few hundred dollars based on their compensation. 
• You submit that quality content to the target site, and you don’t hear back for two weeks even though you followed up a dozen times (read: more time, aka money spent). They finally had time to edit the piece and review it. They send it back to you with tons of changes. 
• You have to then send it back to your writer, who takes another two to three days to make the edits (because any truly authoritative site will edit the crap out of your piece) 
• The site finally thinks it’s good enough to publish. So naturally they make you wait another month until it goes live (yes, this is 99/100 sites).
• You’re two months deep into this single piece of content. It goes live and they’ve removed every link of yours except in the author bio (less valuable than in-content) because it’s too self-promotional. Yeah, it sucks. And it happens all the time.  
• In three months they decide to overhaul the company blog and they take your piece down for good or completely rework the content and put a new author as the byline. Yes, they can and will do this, because they now own the content. 

Get the picture yet? You just spent months of time and thousands upon thousands of dollars to acquire one mediocre byline link that almost always gets removed after a few months. 

Conversely, any good link building agency will land that same link in a few days because they have built the needed relationships to “skip the line” of people vying for attention. 

And when that link is removed, a good agency will replace it on their dime before you even realize it’s been removed. 

Outsourcing your link building effectively removes all of the risk, time, and sunk costs you’ll experience for guaranteed placement results. 

Outsourcing your link building always ends up cheaper in the end.

3. Outsourcing Provides Consistency and Predictability 

Picture this: you just hired an in-house link builder to focus entirely on building great links (not spammy links or easy profile-page links) to your company site. 

You also hooked them up with a virtual assistant to find, scrape, and organize emails for outreach targets to relevant websites.

And you also got them connected with a writer who you pay to write content pieces that will be submitted to target publications to acquire inbound links.

Great, you’ve got the dream setup and all of your link building tasks under one roof. 

The problem? There’s going to be zero consistency nor predictability. 

How do I know? I’ve been building links for half a decade in the most competitive spaces. And my agency and team build links for countless brands every single month. 

Some months are better than others. Links get removed. You submit pieces only to see that all of your links aren’t there anymore. Meaning you are losing money on half the pieces you submit, doubling the internal cost of a single link. 

Consistency is key in link building. You can’t just do blogger outreach, land 2 authority backlinks from good sites, and then put your feet on the desk and call it a month. 

And when you are directly paying all of these people for deliverables, you begin to realize that nothing is guaranteed when done in-house. Just because you paid someone to “build links” doesn’t mean they can predictably do it. 

90% of link building is out of your control because it depends on another site being willing to link to you and not remove that link.

With any reputable marketing agency, results should be guaranteed regarding live links. For example, at uSERP we replace any links that get removed, on our dime. That means we take the sunk cost, not you. 

When you hire in-house, you take the cost burden when links get removed. You front-load thousands on employees and content marketing with no guarantee of a live link. 

When months go by and you’ve submitted 20 pieces of content costing you $500 per piece, including project management and time, yet see no live links, you are in for trouble. To be specific, $10,000 worth of trouble in a single month, not including salaries or hourly wages. 

Want predictability and consistency with less stress? Use a good link building agency. 

4. Link Building is a Full Time Job

No, a single SEO can’t do all aspects of SEO and drive huge results. SEO is far too dynamic. 

On-page, technical, off-page, Python, site architecture. The facets of SEO are complex and deep. 

Link building takes tons of time, as you know by now. It’s truly a full-time job that even a single person will struggle to manage without a writer and a virtual assistant doing email scraping. 

If you only hired a single link builder in-house, here’s what their work would include in a good link building strategy: 

• Build lists of 500+ sites per month (minimum) 
• Find the right contact at that site (not just any random contact or you’ll never get a response)
• Find emails for those 500 people
• Spend 15-30 mins coming up with good topics for each site
• Schedule and send email campaigns 
• Write any pieces that are accepted
• Edits on those pieces 
• Keep building lists and emails 
• Run reports daily to see which links went live or were removed
• Follow up with removed links and find a way to get them added back
• Conduct analysis on site to determine which pages links should point to 
• Okay. I think you get the point!

See the problem? That’s too much work for one person. And this is just one major link building tactic in a myriad of methodologies, from fixing a broken link to guest blogging and more.

Link building is a full time job. You can’t expect to hire a cheap person to do this, let alone succeed at it. And if you hire someone expensive, they’re still just one person.

When you hire an agency, you get an entire team running your project at the same price, if not cheaper than a good SEO. And the results are guaranteed. 

How to Outsource Link Building 

When outsourcing links, you want to work with a reputable link building company / agency that builds and earns white hat links. When you buy backlinks, you are really buying expertise and connections, not the actual links themselves.

Unfortunately, regarding this space, the vast majority of providers don’t offer high quality backlinks.

A great way to assess providers is to look at their backlink profile on a tool like Ahrefs: 

Do you recognize the sites here? Are they high domain authority and high quality? 

If so, that’s a great sign that they practice what they preach. 

If you are looking to outsource, here are a few great link building companies to pick from.

1.  uSERP

uSERP earns backlinks and brand mentions for clients like monday.com, Robinhood, Freshworks, and countless others. 

Working in spaces like software, SaaS, tech, finance, education, and lifestyle, the team are SEO experts and acquire some of the highest authority links on the web.

Book a chat to see if you are a good fit for uSERP.

2.  Codeless

Codeless is an agency specializing in content production. They’re marketers who also get writing, a hard combination to come by. 

Not only do they write great content; they do what they write about, too. Meaning they have the topical authority and expertise needed to fuel rankings and earn links.

Codeless offers some fantastic combined content marketing and PR link building packages. 

Codeless is our “Sister” agency, and we have been both customers of them and now partners. We’ve partnered with them on a ton of projects and share many of the same processes and an aligned vision.

Conclusion

Outsourcing link building can bring you faster time to results; it’s often much cheaper, provides consistency in results, and removes the need to hire and manage a full team. 

Ready to outsource your links and scale organic traffic? 
Reach out to us and let’s book a call together.