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Search engines view backlinks as votes of confidence in your site and content. As a result, high-quality backlinks on your site help you establish authority and credibility while boosting your rankings in the search results.
Because organic backlinking strategies take time to drive results, sometimes it’s better to purchase backlinks to boost your search visibility online and reach your target audience.
Below, we discuss how much backlinks cost and explore the factors that affect the cost of backlinks. We aim to help you strike the perfect balance between backlink cost and performance.
The actual cost of backlinks varies quite a bit based on numerous factors, among them is the pricing model.
Here’s a breakdown of the backlink prices based on the following price models:
A worthwhile backlinking investment should not be one-off. Just like any other SEO strategy, backlinking requires consistency to drive sustainable, long-term impact.
An ongoing link-building campaign drives a positive return on investment (ROI) by generating an initial traffic spike and sustaining growth with enhanced visibility, credibility, and site authority.
The cost of backlinks can vary a lot depending on various factors that we’ll check out below:
Domain authority represents a website’s reputation score. It ranges between one and 100, with higher scores indicating high-authority sites that feature high-quality content, effective site structure, and relevant content.
As such, websites with high domain authority tend to charge more for backlinks to your site. Understandably, these high-authority referring domains pass greater SEO value to your website because search engines already consider them credible and influential.
A backlink from any referring domain on the internet will not automatically boost rankings and drive traffic to your site. What’s truly valuable is purchasing backlinks from websites in the same industry or a complementary industry.
Site relevance is a crucial factor because search engines, like Google, care about who’s linking to you and why they’re linking to you. For example, if you run a skincare brand and want to purchase backlinks, you should consider beauty blogs, lifestyle magazines, and health and wellness websites.
Failure to show a clear connection could cause Google to flag the link as irrelevant, manipulative, or spammy, providing no real value to users.
Link type affects how much trust, authority, and relevance a referring domain transfers to a website purchasing backlinks from them. When purchasing backlinks, DoFollow links, although a bit more pricey than Nofollow links, are the best choice because they pass link juice or SEO value to your site.
DoFollow links tell search engines that other sites trust you, encouraging them to index and rank you better. Contrastingly, NoFollow links tell search engines not to pass any authority. They neither have direct SEO benefits nor drive a measurable ROI.
The position of a backlink on a site influences how much value a referring domain drives to your site in terms of visibility and click potential. So, it’s only fair that link placement affects the cost of backlinks.
Generally, you’ll pay more if you want your link placed on the homepage of a high-authority website or within the first few paragraphs of a blog or article. Contextual links, which are embedded naturally into the content body, will cost more than links placed on the sidebars, footers, comment sections, and author bios.
Finally, the longer you want your link to stay visible on the page, the more you’ll have to pay.
Websites with high traffic and strong engagement in the form of page views, bounce rates, and time spent on page charge more for their backlinks. Understandably, these real, organic site metrics signal to Google that real people visit your site, increasing the value of any backlink you place there.
However, not all traffic is equal. To ensure cost equals performance, be keen to invest in traffic relevant to your market, niche, and geographical region.
Types of backlinks are another factor that affects the link-building pricing.
Here’s a breakdown of common types of backlinks, and how much you can expect to pay for each according to our set prices:
Website owners often ask, ‘Should I use a link-building agency or do it in-house?’ The answer to this question significantly depends on your short-term and long-term link-building goals.
The table below provides a side-by-side comparison of in-house vs. agency link-building, including their best use cases:
Paid backlinks can be a worthwhile addition to any business’s SEO strategy, provided they’re from a reputable agency that uses white hat backlinks and follows Google’s linking guidelines.
And the following are the benefits of an efficient and effective paid backlinking strategy:
However, your paid backlinking efforts will backfire if the referring domain is low-quality, spammy, and shows obvious signs of being a link farm.
According to Google’s Webmaster guidelines, manipulative backlinking tactics can lead to penalties such as decreased rankings, lost traffic, and diminished credibility.
Buying overpriced, low-quality links will disappoint you because you’ll not get a bang for your buck.
But you don’t have to fall into this trap, especially if you’re keen to notice common red flags, like the following:
Not ready to spend money on link building, just yet? Worry not! You still have numerous cost-effective, technically free link-building strategies that you can use. But you must be patient, as organic link juice may stream in slowly.
Here are the most cost-effective link-building strategies:
You don’t need an in-house team to implement these alternative link-building strategies.
Instead, contact Profit Engine today for a customized link-building strategy and quote. We help our clients find the right linking opportunities for their business and manage these to ensure they’re consistently ranking better than their competitors.
Here are some answers to the most commonly asked questions about paid backlinking.
No. Backlinks are not more important than content, and vice versa. Instead, backlinks should complement your content to boost your SEO efforts.
High-quality backlinks signal search engines that your web page contains authoritative content, which helps boost your SERP rank.
There’s no fixed answer on the number of backlinks you should budget for monthly, as it depends on your link-building goals.
For example, new domain owners should target 10+ backlinks monthly to grow their website’s authority quickly. They can then reduce it to 5 backlinks monthly, with the primary focus on securing high-DR links.
There’s no straight answer whether you should use Fiverr and similar platforms for backlinks or not. Some website owners have utilized these services in the past and have seen a significant increase in their domain authority.
However, many backlinks offered on these platforms are usually from link farms and PBNs, exposing you to toxic links.
Yes, social media links count as backlinks. However, they’re NoFollow backlinks without direct SEO benefits, but they have the potential to drive traffic, engagement, and conversions.
Additionally, Google now crawls, indexes, and ranks social shares, which may lead to real backlinks.
Buying backlinks is a risky SEO strategy that requires skills, expertise, experience, and the right technology to ensure a return on investment.
At Profit Engine, we’re a reputable link-building agency with over a decade of experience building high-quality links. We leverage AI and manually vet each link to ensure that the site has the right DA/DR and traffic metrics.
Contact us today to optimize your backlinking budget and personalize your action plan.
