Should You Use An Agency For Link Building

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

ARTHUR: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SEO show. Um, my name is Arthur Fabik and I'm here with Michael Costin. I thought I'd do the intro this time just to mix it up a little bit. So close. He said, um, I know, I know. Do you want to try again? Nah, let's just keep going.

MICHAEL: Let's just keep going. I want everyone listening to come along for the ride with you as you work on your intros. One day you'll deliver one without stuffing up.

ARTHUR: I've done a few very, very good intros in the past, allegedly. I'll find them. I'll find all of them. Don't worry about that.

MICHAEL: Okay. If you can find them, we'll cut them all together. We'll do a little montage of them on our socials.

ARTHUR: We're not here to talk about my intro skills. We're here to talk about link building, your favorite topic.

MICHAEL: It is my favorite topic. Everyone in SEO loves link building.

ARTHUR: So I'm not surprised that you're very excited about this episode. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And the topic is, should you use an agency for link building? Don't know why I said it like that, but what is the answer to that question?

ARTHUR: Yes. I think so. Yes. But we'll break it down. Talk about the pros and cons. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And then maybe just chat about, yeah, we'll have a chat. What goes into it? Cause it's bloody time consuming is one thing. So I guess it depends how much time you have on your hands, but maybe let's, let's chuck around a few pros and cons of an agency using an agency for link building.

ARTHUR: Do you want to start with the pros or cons?

MICHAEL: Maybe we can go, let's start with the pro. We're positive around here. First pro that I have is that if you're using an agency and let's say you, let's say the campaign for 12 months, It's going to be consistent. You know, the work is going to be done month in month out without fail. And if it's not, you have someone who you can, you know, bust out if they're not doing it consistently and you're going to get results. Whereas if you're doing it yourself as a business owner, or if you task some random person on your team with doing it, they might have a little. Burst of motivation at the start, do a couple, and then it'll really fall away when they have other things to do.

ARTHUR: I always have this image in my head of a business owner going out there and hitting up sites asking for a link.

MICHAEL: I just can't imagine it ever happening. I'd be very interested to hear from business owners that do their own link building.

ARTHUR: So if you are a business owner that does their own link building, feel free to drop us a line on.

MICHAEL: Go to the FCO show.co and we'll bring you on the show and you can talk about how you do link building as a business owner with everything else you have on your plate. Cause that would be interesting. What are you doing? What types of links are you getting? What's your process? What's your strategy? Yeah. Because it's really time consuming with an agency. They're going to be working on it month in month out. You can be guaranteed of that. And if they don't, you have someone you can get annoyed at and rouse on until they do.

ARTHUR: I think more importantly, knowledge. Yes. So you would hope that an agency knows what they're doing. Um, I'm sure there's plenty of dodgy link building agencies out there in the world, but a good reputable agency should be able to, you know, help you move the needle and build links that are relevant to your site that will help improve your organic visibility, improve your domain rating authority. This is something you don't learn overnight. It's something that requires years and years of experience. So yeah, exactly.

MICHAEL: It's like, if we want it to be a surveyor, we wouldn't just be able to walk in and nail it during surveying for ourselves.

ARTHUR: We'd need to learn it over time. Yeah. And not all links are equal. We know that. So potentially they could be doing more harm than good, getting very poor quality links, not knowing what they're doing. So.

MICHAEL: If a lot of, if a business owner is left to their own devices, they'll go out and post stuff on social media and think that that's a link.

ARTHUR: Maybe go on like Reddit.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Or really low authority. Like, Oh, now one of our suppliers can give us a link and the website's just got no authority. It's not that valuable from an SEO point of view, whatever. And there's maybe one or two of them and that's it. Not going to move the needle. Not at all. So, um, agencies won't do that. They're going to be. Now I have the SEO blinkers on and be going for stuff that will move the needle Big one here's a big pro. It saves you a ton of time Cause as I I'm a business owner, I don't want to be spending my time, all of my time building links. I'd rather be working on stuff that helps the business move forward. And yes, building links will grow your traffic and all the rest of it, but there's operations and finance and sales and marketing and all sorts of stuff that you can be working on as a business owner. That's what I would call higher ROI or higher leverage work. If you outsource to an agency. you're saving all that time. Like I just can't imagine a world where you'd be wanting to spend all your time working on link building as a business owner.

ARTHUR: Well, as a junior link builder back in the day, I can tell you that it takes up all your time finding the right sites to approach. you know, emailing all the people, the bloggers, the webmasters, trying to negotiate a post. I will go through the list of the stuff that we do, but it is super time consuming and managing it all, staying on top of it all, liaising with copywriters. You know, there's just so much involved. It's not as simple as just, Hey, can you link to my site? So yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Very, very time consuming. And that was back when, when you were a junior link builder, it was like in early 2010s. Yes. back then it was way easier to ask people, Hey, can I have a link on your site? And get some sort of response. Like now it's even harder just because of the sheer volume of this.

ARTHUR: Oh, there's just so much spam out there. Yeah. I mean, we have clients that just get bombarded with spam emails from just dodgy link building. We do. We do. Yeah, we do too. Non-stop. So there's just thousands and probably millions of people out there just hitting you on maybe not millions, but a lot of people. Yeah.

MICHAEL: So if you are doing it yourself, Be very careful never to buy links from those random emails that you get sent to you. Like, you know, hello, sir, I have list of sites, all these sites with a price attached to it. Just don't stay away from them.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Cause we actually blacklist those sites and avoid them like the plague, because those are the sites that are going to one day get penalized by Google and potentially harm your site. So avoid that.

MICHAEL: Right. Well, they're the pros. We've been big upping our world and ourselves agency world for a while. What are some of the cons? You know, why would a business owner want to do their own link building?

ARTHUR: probably the price. It's going to be more expensive going through an agency because obviously they have all the different costs associated with it. So not only the link costs, the placement costs, but you have to cover the cost of the salary of the outreach team, the prospecting team, the specialist, copywriter, overheads, everything.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. So if you are a tied up or if, No, let's not say a tight ass. If you're early on in your business, you're building your business and you need to be really strategic with where your dollars go, then yes, I can see that it would maybe make sense for you to do link building yourself for a while until you can afford to invest in it. Cause it's, it's, it is expensive and it does take time. And we've spoken about this in the past, but a lot of people will jump into SEO and after two months flip out when the results aren't there because they're too early for it, too early to work with an SEO agency. So it makes sense. You're going to save money. You're going to save, you're going to save dollars, actual dollars, but you're going to pay for it in time. Yes. You're paying for it some way, shape or form.

ARTHUR: Exactly. And it is very time consuming, like I said. So like you said, focus on the high value ticket items and, Let us handle it, sir. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Link building hit me up. Let's, let's run through what we do in a sec. So people can get a feel for, you know, the question is, should you use an agency for link building? We say, yes, we'll run through everything that we do. And that's why you should. But, um, I would say another con of using an agency would be that agencies, we can get blinkers on when we're doing link building. and be focusing purely on SEO impact. So when we're looking at linking partners, we'll assess all the metrics and we'll decide on a linking partner purely for SEO reasons. Some clients don't, that doesn't sit so well. If they think a site looks a bit weird or doesn't align in the UK or something. Yeah. It doesn't align with their brand. They'll flip out. And a lot of the time it doesn't make any sense. It has no real impact. Like it's not like there's, millions of people reading these articles a lot of the time, but to some people it's important to them.

ARTHUR: It is. Yeah. Cause they don't understand that the reason that we do link building is not to drive referral traffic, but it's to help improve that, you know, authority. So they're, they're probably looking at it through a lens of, you know, people are going to find this article and this, this site doesn't really align with my brand and I don't like this link or this article isn't exactly how I want it to be without realizing that no one's going to read it. Yeah. Ultimately. Ultimately.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So look, and if that's important to you and your brand, like good agencies will be able to try and work within the parameters you give them. But if you're just leaving them to go link building for you and that's important to you, they're not going to be focusing on that. They're going to be focusing on getting results.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Sites that have great metrics that are going to move the needle.

MICHAEL: Yeah. All right. Well, let's run through what we do as a link building business. So that you can see like as a business owner, what you'd be up for if you really want to do it well and at scale. So let's start with the team. We have SEO specialists, like the people that sort of handle the strategy. So they will deal with the clients and understand goals and put together the strategy and then manage the whole SEO campaign across onsite, technical links, all that sort of stuff. Part of that will be, as I said, managing offsite. Outreach, so we have an outreach team which has an outreach manager and then a whole bunch of outreach specialists who sit in that team All they do all day long is build links So right there, let's say if you wanted to replicate that internally in your business You're looking at SEO specialists outreach manager and then a couple of outreach specialists What are they doing all day? Like why is there so many people? What are they doing? I'll let you run through that so it's not just me ranting on but um… What are they doing? What are they doing? What's our team doing? Why do we have all these people?

ARTHUR: Well, the team's kind of split into prospecting and outreach really. So we have the prospecting team that will, so for example, if we have a client that comes on in a specific, you know, vertical, let's just say they're a travel client, what they'll start doing is try find different sites which are related to travel. So they'll go through using different tools or even manually and find blogs and websites that we can approach to get a link back from. So that's a very time-consuming process, as you can imagine. And on top of that, we don't just approach any site. We have stringent metrics that the site must tick off. So we look at things like domain rating, site traffic, whether or not the site's indexed. Top three rankings. Top three rankings. Ideally, is it a site that gets some sort of engagement? So there's a lot of things that we look at before we approach a site.

MICHAEL: Now on this topic, we actually did an episode in the last 15 episodes, I would say on how to judge a good link really narrowed it down. I didn't, I didn't prepare a head for that, but like we've done a whole episode on just judging link quality because not all links are built equal. No, they're not. And it's very easy to go out and get like crappy links and um, ultimately hurt yourself. So, um, episode 44, there you go. Wow. So if you want to go back to episode 44, it's good. What makes a good link? But, um, yeah, the prospecting team.

ARTHUR: Yeah. So they, they find sites, basically they find sites which are relevant to the client site that we will then reach out to. So we have an outreach team who will basically use different tools, email tools to reach out to all these sites that we prospect. Prospected? Prospected. Prospected. And essentially try to negotiate a link. So they'll use different angles, different hooks to try to get a link back to the client's site.

MICHAEL: Let's break that down for a sec, because it's basically like you're being an outbound salesperson. Very much so, yeah. We're using all the same tech. So we use software. So we've got to pay for the software. We use email sequences. We've got to pay to create them and like change them up. Um, the software has to be set up. Like, so when you're setting up email, you need to like have a domain or multiple domains dedicated just to sending outbound emails, multiple inboxes, set them all up. Do your SPF, DKIM, DMARC settings on your email. You're getting very excited about this. Keep the emails warmed up, you know, like try and keep your emails out of spam. So there's a whole, that aspect of it, you know, it's not just as simple as saying, oh, just do some outreach. No, it's not. It's quite involved.

ARTHUR: Managing all that as well, because you're sending out so many emails, you're dealing with so many different people, your inbox is just full all the time. So managing all the relationships and liaising with all the website owners, it's a full-time job. Sounds like a nightmare. It does.

MICHAEL: Lucky there's agents doing it. Um, so anyway, let's, let's say you've done all your outreach, you've got, you've prepared your lists, you've manually tracked down the first name, last name, email address, contact details of the people that own them. You've reached out to them with your well set up software and sequences, and they're interested. Then what happens? You've got to bloody write an article, right?

ARTHUR: Or you've got to negotiate it first. So you've got to have a chat with them, see what sort of, first and foremost, they need to agree to it. If they agree, you need to figure out what type of content. You're going to be writing about, are they going to write it? Do they want us to provide it? If so, we need to liaise with a copywriter, brief them in. Then, you know, QC that, there might be some back and forth there. Then obviously send it through to the website owner, liaise with them. They might want revisions. Yeah. So again, very time consuming. The cost as well of copywriting is attributed into the cost of placing a link.

MICHAEL: Following up, like once they say yes, they don't always publish it. You got to keep on top of them.

ARTHUR: The management of it all alone is just a lot to deal with because you're dealing with not just one person at a time, you know, at scale, you know, you're dealing with dozens and dozens of people at any given time, different copywriters, different content, different posts, different sites. Takes a whole team really.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Hence why we have one. And of course, as we said, there's costs, writing, publishing software, as you do more and more and more link building, all of that, those costs scale. Placement costs. Yeah. And reporting as well. Like what was done over the month? What were the end results? You know, what were the links that replaced? Where are they? Can I see them? So as a business owner, you can, if you want to do a good job, go and do all of that stuff, but you won't have any time or you'll just become a link builder, wouldn't you?

ARTHUR: Yeah. So unless you're looking for a career in link building. I recommend you use us.

MICHAEL: Yeah. That's why people use an agency. So I guess we're being a bit facetious in a way, like we don't expect any business owner. Unless you're just starting out, you might spend a bit of time, but you get that off your plate as soon as you can work with an agency that can handle all of everything we've just covered. And that is why you should use an agency for link building. We've answered that question, I think.

ARTHUR: Use us.

MICHAEL: That's why you should use us for link building, Arthur says. All right. Well, that is another episode of the SEO show. Until next week. Happy SEOing. Happy SEOing. See ya.