Outsourcing Linkbuilding: Companies, Costs, Payment models

[Diderino]

Hi there

I am looking at outsourcing linikbuilding to a new content site. I want to target one 3 word keyphrase to begin with, it has a keyword difficulty of 48% (moderately competitive) on Google US. Goal is to rank 1-3, the target page is well on-page optimised.

Here are my questions:

• Are there companies that have performance based payment models?

• Any rough guestimates on how much money is needed to get a page to rank 1-3 for a 48% difficulty level keyword? Over how many months?

• Any recommendations for good companies?

Thanks a bunch,

Chris

[Mark_Ginsberg]

Hi Christoph,

In today's world, I'd be very hesitant to outsource my link building to company that will guarantee a top page 1 ranking for  a moderately difficult keyword. There are so many other factors to take into consideration.

I'd also stay away from a performance based model - this may encourage the link builder/SEO to try various methods to get quick results. If you suddenly shoot up in the rankings with the usage of dodgy tactics, I wouldn't be surprised if your site took an even bigger drop a short time later. Google is really cracking down on webspam and problematic tactics, and I think you need to be a bit patient and let things go naturally.

Currently, I'd advocate guest blogging and other forms of organic link building.

Is the site currently ranking for the term? What is the backlink status of the domain? If you pay a link builder to optimize for one term, and neglect your branded anchor text and the backlink profile of the rest of the site, you can run into serious issues with the search engines that will be harder to resolve and will take more time and money than you had originally intended to invest.

Hope this helps - just to clarify, I'm all for link building and organic growth in rankings. I just think you need to take a larger approach looking at your whole site, its onpage optimization and its backlink profile.