Why Quality Link Building Costs More

At Web.com Search Agency, we have multiple link building offerings designed to present a broad profile to search engines. Usually our link building is part of a custom SEO package designed for on-page search engine compliance and off-page link popularity. In general, our advanced SEO customers see how the pricing breaks out and wonder why links usually cost more than metatags and content writing. Here are some of the factors involved in better link popularity:

1. Research. We have teams in Scottsdale, Spokane, and Jacksonville that specialize in different aspects of linking. Usually the anchor text (the words or phrases that get linked) of the links determines your relevance on search engines, so we go out of our way to find the best possible keyword demand relative to your site content. This first step ensures that we can get external websites to reference you in the most accurate way possible.
2. Competitor Research. In most cases, the cost of linking is directly proportional to the number (and quality) of links that your competitors have for the same keywords. Competitive terms need more and better links, while niche and local terms need less. Our SEO Competition Report will help you see who the top competitors are. Note: some of your competitors may have thousands of links pointing at them. We have seen many cases where a few dozen links in the right area will move your site above such competitors in the search rankings.
3. Submission. We submit to “free” and “paid” directories. Even if you do DIY link submission, there are time and money factors involved. We submit to as many as 60 paid directories, and each submission involves finding the right category (or the best category they have for your site) and then navigating the payment process, which is different for every site. Our experience makes us a bit more efficient in getting through the payment and submission process, and saves you the frustration.
4. More research and communication. We have custom link building programs, which involve (1) finding relevant sites in your field and (2) communicating with site owners for a link to your site. Sometimes it is difficult to establish who is the owner of a site, or get in touch with the owner/webmaster/editor to get your link. It may take several hours to get a good custom link, but the quality of these sites is far higher than directories or most text links. In some cases, a competitor in your field may even be willing to link to you. While this usually is distasteful to most business owners, search engines consider this to be an endorsement from a highly relevant site. This may be the only time where your competition can be a partner in your success.
5. Execution and Placement. We get the link placed on the directory, list, or site in the best spot possible.
6. Maintenance and Verification. We continuously check site for relevance, PageRank, and link presence on our existing link inventory, and change out links on sites that don’t pass muster. We have proprietary tools for this part of the process, and this is done continuously. It would take the average person several hours every month just to make sure the links are still present, relevant, and on sites that have not been obviously penalized.

Naturally, there are multiple other factors involved in link building not discussed here. For instance, the beginning of the sales process involves a site audit to see what kind of SEO and link building that would work best for your site. We check current anchor text and link quality, then compare it with the optimization relevance of destination pages. We take the customer’s needs into account and use keyword research to identify opportunities before the contract is even signed. In this way, we can help customers get a realistic picture of the search marketplace, and show them how their competitors stack up in the world of links. By creating a realistic profile of how many links your site may need, Web.com Search Agency will help you become more competitive using relatively few targeted links vs. a large quantity of general ones.