How much is a fair amount to pay for link building services?

[Luia]

It would be useful to get some feedback from those paying for SME/SMB website link building services re how much is a fair amount to pay and what you are getting for this.

[firstconversion]

Depends on what you need....

Need some low quality spam, $5 will do it. Need high quality links, start at $1000 a day and go way higher

[eyepaq]

With the new "trend" in guest post type of link building, link building companies are going with fees around 100-300 usd per post (with 1-2 links within). That depends a lot on the quality but this is what some of my accounts are paying for link building sessions.

However, go only with companies that have a very good reputation.

(although even iacquire.com had a good reputation and it didn't turn out that good). Just be really carful and have a valid, dilute link profile.

As Stephan said, $1000 a day is not unusual but again, no matter how much you pay just be carful.

[Luia]

No interest in spam and think $30k a month for link building is a little excessive for most SMB's.

Perhaps there are others with experience of more moderately priced white hat link building services.  For example - anyone had any experience of Page One Power?  they pop up fairly frequently on the SES speakers circuit and have 40 hour link building packages from $2500 per month - any feedback on these guys or anyone else would be good to hear.

[wilreynolds]

Hey there, best of luck in your search for a firm to help you with link building.  I can't tell you who to pick, but for a small to medium sized business 2500 a month is MORE than fair, but you should be able to nab a pretty strong link builder.

A couple of tips for you as you seek out the right firm:

• Make sure they are truthful about who is building your links, check out profiles of their team on Linkedin (don't tell them you are going to do this).
• A TRUE link builder will ask you a lot of questions about what makes your business unique, what innovative things you have done, who is going to write your copy, etc.  They should be asking you to build assets that will naturally attract links.
• They should try to build relationships with trade pubs, find out what kind of content those pubs and bloggers are seeking and have you create it
• Don't think that if you pay someone 2500/mo that they can get you the best type and highest quality links w/o your involvement.  I think that is what gets a lot of linkbuilders into trouble in the first place, building links on any old site to just "get links"

[kellymandingo]

I dont think there is a right or wrong answer, except don't do the spam

Some of the best links i ever had i got from a 1 man band and cost me $400 for around 100 links, there were some great gems in there, I have also paid a well established company 10X that fee and got not much more than spam.

• Personally I would go with a bit of a mixture, try some guest blogging, really don't have to be actual blogs but you could approach company's for a link in return for some great content
• You could hire a virtual assistant for $400 per month but do vet anything they will do for you before they do it
• You could submit some great articles or content to your own site and hope they will get linked to

Again all depends on your niche and is such a hard question to ask, if your in the insurance market then 4-5k per month if your a local business then no more than 1k even less

[Joe.Robison]

It's definitely a tricky question to answer, and there are a few ways of going about it.

I'm a big fan of Page One Power and they do charge by hour blocks, which you've mentioned. The reason Jon Ball says they do this is because every site is different and they can't charge by the link because of that. A link is not a link.

On the flip side:

• One of the most well known internet marketing firms that employees high profile SEO speakers charges $500 per link.
• A UK link building agency that is medium-well known was charging around $125 a link in 2012
• A large multi-media agency based in California I know of was charging $750 a link on old domains in deep pages for their clients

In my opinion the most transparent way all around is to do it in the hour-block method that Page One Power does it because all links are not created equal. In this method the link builder should report to the client at the end of the month how efficiently they spent the clients money in the 20 hours dedicated to link building that month. This method could cause initial strain in the client-consultant relationship however because the client might look at the consultant's rate (say it's $100 an hour) and compare them to other consultants.

Another method is to charge by the link. The problem with this is all links are not created equal. The consultant is not incentivized in the short term to spend 5 hours to earn one extremely valuable link if they're not going to be paid any more than if they spent one hour building that link.

A hybrid method could be to charge the client based on where the link was placed, but evaluating the price of each placed link every month is a lot of work and a lot of discussion.

In 2014, creating super high quality content should be talked about in the same sentence as building links since they go hand in hand. So that brings us to another method, where a block of say 20 hours a month for a small-medium business is set aside to spend on content and links. Some months 70% of that 20 hours is spent on building that content piece, but then for the next 2 months 70% of the time is spend promoting that content piece. This is how I would prefer to work, and it's a win-win both ways. The SEO consultant is both incentivized to create good content and promote it at the same time. The client is ensured that their money is being spent wisely and for the right reason.

I like talking about prices, it's something we need more guidance on in this industry.

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