Choosing a vendor
Choosing a link building agency comes down to checks you can run before spending a dollar: sample verification, pricing models, contract terms, and red flags.
Overview
Every link building agency says the same things: white hat, high authority, real outreach. The words are free. What separates vendors is verifiable: where their sample links live, how they price, what their contract actually promises, and what they refuse to do.
Below is the vetting we would run on ourselves, with our own answers included. For the wider landscape of what agencies actually sell, from guest posts to niche edits to digital PR, see link building services.
What should a link building agency cost?
Genuine editorial links run roughly $400 to $1,000+ each depending on method and publisher quality. Guest posts and niche edits sell for $100 to $500 with wildly variable quality, and below about $100 you are almost always buying farm or PBN inventory. Our retainers work out at $530 to $660 per editorial placement.
Service detail
Request five recent placements for clients in your vertical. For each, check the linking site's organic traffic in Ahrefs or Semrush (real publications have real visits, link-farm blogs have none), run a site: search to confirm the page is indexed, and scan the site's other articles for wall-to-wall commercial links to unrelated businesses, the classic footprint of sold placements. The full method is in our backlink quality checklist.
Per-link pricing is transparent but can reward volume over fit. Retainers align the agency with a monthly outcome, provided the contract sets a hard link minimum so "we did outreach" never counts as delivery. Pay-on-results sounds safest and usually signals inventory: links that can be guaranteed come from sites the vendor controls. Reality check: genuine editorial placements cost several hundred dollars each, so a $50 link is a directory, a PBN post, or a template guest post.
Before signing with any link building agency, get these in writing:
Walk away from guaranteed placements in named publications (editors do not pre-sell coverage), "DA 50+ guaranteed" menus built on metrics that can be inflated, any mention of a private network of sites (that is a PBN), guaranteed rankings, and prices that only make sense if the linking sites are worthless.
SEO Backlinks is the US arm of a UK-founded digital PR agency: 12,000+ PR links placed for 120+ active clients, with coverage in Forbes, Bloomberg, Business Insider, TechCrunch, and The Guardian. Links are earned from journalists, never bought from webmasters. Publishers run DA/DR 40 to 95 with a portfolio average of DA 82, every placement is reported live, and we sell no PBNs, no guest-post inventory, and no ranking guarantees.
Managed delivery
You do not need to manage journalist outreach, write the pitch, or chase live URLs. Send the site and target pages, and the campaign desk handles the rest.
Collect five recent placements per vendor, ideally in your vertical, with the client target pages they supported.
Check each linking site for organic traffic, indexation, and sold-link footprints using Ahrefs and a site: search.
Confirm link definitions, replacement policy, reporting rights, and that you can leave after a bad month.
Run one month, verify every delivered link yourself, and only then commit to a larger scope.
Questions
Genuine editorial links run roughly $400 to $1,000+ each depending on method and publisher quality. Guest posts and niche edits sell for $100 to $500 with wildly variable quality, and below about $100 you are almost always buying farm or PBN inventory. Our retainers work out at $530 to $660 per editorial placement.
In-house wins when link building is a permanent, high-volume need and you can hire genuine outreach talent. Freelancers suit small, defined projects. An agency makes sense when you need journalist relationships, story production, and volume without building a team. The vetting checks are identical in all three cases.
First placements within three to six weeks is normal for earned approaches, because stories need building and pitching. Anyone promising twenty links in week one is selling pre-arranged inventory. Judge the first month on link quality and verifiability, then judge the quarter on volume against the contracted minimum.
Ask before signing, because policies differ wildly. A reasonable standard: links that drop within an agreed window are replaced at no cost, and reporting flags removals instead of hiding them. Our live reporting shows the current status of every placement, so a dropped link is visible to you, never buried.
Start here
Email info@seobacklinks.com and ask for recent sample placements in your vertical; we will send them with the target pages they supported.