As a business owner, you naturally want to rank higher in Google as well as other search engines. To save yourself loads of hassle, you can rely on the best link building agency for your business. Nonetheless, as with other important business decisions, you need to be mindful of the pros and cons so that you can evaluate the link-building agency before availing of their services. You need to ensure that the link-building agency understands the importance of blogger outreach, prospecting, and getting you high quality backlinks.
What is A Link Building Agency?
Before we get into the things that you need to look out for when choosing the best link-building agency for your business, you might want to know what a link-building agency is in the first place. A link-building agency is essentially a marketing agency that helps improve a website’s rankings in search engines such as Google. The link-building agency does so by acquiring high-quality backlinks from high-quality websites.
The link-building agency does so by conducting research, reaching out to other website owners, and publishing content on relevant websites. Link-building is about creating backlinks to a website. Google assesses those links to assess the page’s relevance, which is why having good quality backlinks pointing to your website matters.
Why Do You Need A Link Building Agency for Your Business?
You need a link-building agency for your business to boost your website’s rankings in Google and other search engines. By ranking higher in Google, you will attract more visitors and increase brand awareness. Nonetheless, suppose you avail of the services that a reputable link-building agency has to offer. In that case, you will essentially save time, as link-building is a time-consuming process that involves research, blogger outreach, and content creation.
With the help of a link-building agency, you will get good-quality backlinks for your website from authoritative and relevant websites. Subsequently, you will avoid penalties, given that you have chosen a reputable link-building agency for your website.
The reputable link-building agency will ensure that you get measurable results as they will provide you with regular reports about your progress and see how the backlinks are contributing to your website’s improvements.
What to Look for in A Link-Building Agency
Here is the thing: When it comes to how to choose the best link-building agency, you will need to vet them first, just as you would before outsourcing any aspect of your business. Link-building isn’t a simple case of the number of links you are getting and how much money you will be spending. If you want to avoid a negative experience with a link-building agency, check out the list of tips below that you need to look out for before hiring a link-building agency.
Make Sure They Do Blogger Outreach
When considering the best link-building agency for your business, you should ensure that the agency incorporates genuine outreach instead of resorting to shortcuts that could harm your website’s reputation. To verify that the agency engages in genuine blogger outreach, you should directly ask them about their best link building strategies. What this will do for you is that you will be able to comprehend their link-building processes, which will further provide insights into whether or not they stick to white hat practices that align with Google guidelines.
A Reputable Link Building Agency Will Be Transparent
A trustworthy and reputable link-building agency will be transparent about its outreach strategy and explain each step clearly, leaving no space for guesses. A reputable link-building agency won’t hesitate to provide you with the details regarding how they plan and reach out to prospects, engage with them, and gain valuable backlinks for their clients.
Watch Out for These Signs
Regarding blogger outreach, watch out for the positive signs when the link-building agency uses a cold email campaign to reach out to bloggers and influencers to secure high-quality backlinks. However, if the link-building agency mentions the fact that they have a vast network of sites and partners, we recommend asking them what they mean by that.
Now, their legitimate network might comprise valuable partnerships; however, you must ensure that it is not PBN, which stands for Private Blog Network, as these might lead to Google penalties and affect your website’s health.
Understand How Exactly They Build Their Links
You should understand how exactly the link building agency builds the list of sites where they will be getting your link on. Understandably, you can expect many different answers as people use different strategies to prospect their targets. So, as long as it is a logical way to determine what is relevant to your website’s content and your website, then all is good.
Watch Out for Red Flags
If the built links or link-building strategy is white-hat and relevant to your website, you know you are in good hands. However, if the links are completely pre-built or it seems to be collecting just random sites without explaining where they are from, these are essentially red flags, and you better not engage with this link-building agency.
Also, if the agency only reports live links at the end of the month, you will want to perceive this as a warning sign that the agency is simply buying or outsourcing all of its link-building. It could also indicate that the agency is using some kind of network.
Make Sure The Links Are Unique
You need to ensure that the links come from unique, referring domains. The thing is that if you are only continually getting links from the same domain, it won’t pass on the link juice as you will have the same link equity. Since the links will be coming from the same domain, your website is less likely to rank, and you won’t be able to outperform your competitors.
Make Sure The Links Are Relevant
Relevancy is essentially the key point, as it is at the forefront of any link-building campaign. Why, you might ask? The reason is link relevancy ensures that your website ranks for the correct keywords and that your website attracts relevant traffic.
Various metrics help with assessing the “ranking ability” of a website, such as the following:
- DA
- DR
- Trust Flow
However, all of this is meaningless if the website on which the link is placed is irrelevant in any way.
Assess Links from Google’s Perspective
Now, the question is, if the website is not relevant, then why was the link placed? In Google’s eyes, irrelevant links with misleading anchor texts mean a complete reliance on paid links, which can get a website penalized. It might also indicate that all links were outsourced without applying quality checks.
So, while choosing a link-building agency, double-check whether or not they are measuring relevance only in terms of the page that the link is placed on, the niche of the entire website, or the target audience of that target website.
Now you know that these are all different degrees of relevance – however – each and every one of them impacts the quality of links in various ways. However, this is something that you want to determine as well and ensure that you are on the same page as your respective link-building agency.
Make Sure the Agency Is Skilled Enough to Help with Content
When choosing a link-building agency for your business, gauge their expertise and see that they aren’t only relying on a cookie-cutter approach for link-building but that they understand that the best link-building strategy is tailored to their client’s unique needs. The agency should know how to use strategies to make the most out of your link building campaign.
If you are a business that is an expert in their niche or you know your customer base fairly well, then you know the type of content that your target audience needs. However, any seasonal link-builder should be able to bring up the topics of content and linkable assets. If they somehow cannot do so, then it is time for you to step back and wonder how the agency builds its links.
Content is A Crucial Part of Link-Building
Content creation is also a part of link-building. As a matter of fact, content creation will directly impact the success of the outreach campaigns. However, you should know that the vast majority of link-building agencies might not create your content for you. But – they can definitely help you by coming up with ideas for the content type that will boost your chances of getting the best links.
On the same note, if you are doing guest posts, you must ensure that the link-building agency creates the content ideas that they are going to be using to entice bloggers and editors to accept articles. Likewise, make sure that the content ideas that the experts create are relevant enough for your website to have a link to bridge the gap of relevancy.
Make Sure Everything is Transparent and Not Under Wraps
The primary reason why a lot of people are turned off by any kind of SEO work is because they don’t know exactly what is going on behind the scenes, and not everything might be transparent. However, before choosing to work with an agency, you can ask for transparency and see the kind of websites that the team is going to reach out to.
A good link-building agency will be transparent in how they do manual outreach and show you which targets are looking promising. You might as well want to see if there are any guest posts that have gone live or are about to go live. Now, if everything seems to be well taken care of but you don’t see any action, such as suddenly the entire link quote has gone live instantly, you want to treat this as a red flag.
Ask them About Potential Risks
If all of the previous aspects passed, then you don’t have a reason not to choose that agency. However, before you go ahead and hire them, you might want to clarify with the agency regarding what their experts personally think and whether any of their work could put you at any risk. So, if they voice their concern that they might be at risk of getting penalized, then you should definitely step back and not work with the agency.
When asking them for guarantees, you can also ask them about their past clients and what results they rendered for those clients. Make sure to read through testimonials so that you know that you are in safe hands.
Final Thoughts
Choosing the best link-building agency can be the ultimate secret to your website’s SEO success if you want to rank higher in Google as well as other search engines. By working with the right link-building agency, you can save time, effort, and error while building a long-lasting partnership with the agency. The agency’s experts will be highly professional, ensure great communication, and be incredibly invested in seeing your business succeed in reaching its SEO goals.
FAQs
Why Do You Need A Link-Building Agency for Your Business?
You need a link-building agency for your business to boost your website’s SEO and authority. A reputable link-building agency will help you get good quality backlinks to your website, which will help you boost brand visibility.
What Are Good-Quality Backlinks?
Good-quality backlinks are essentially inbound links that come from high-domain authority websites that are also reputable and trusted. Good-quality backlinks are organic, relevant, and pass on value to your sites. Google sees these backlinks as votes of trust and confidence, which in turn helps your business rank higher.
What is White Hat SEO?
White hat SEO refers to a defined set of practices that help website owners improve their rankings in Google and other search engines. White hat SEO practices include organic tactics that are aligned with Google guidelines and can rank a website higher in search engines without breaking the rules.
