How to choose a third party agency to help with linking building / SEO strategy?
-
Hi all,
we've not been link building for some time now as we are a small team and been concentrating on other things, such as getting our new look site built and implementing Magento etc. We've historically used external companies to help with link building & SEO... some experience has been good, some bad.
Does any one have any suggestions on how a small company can try to choose a decent external company that can help with SEO strategies? There are a lot of options, a LOT of rubbish and a lot of very expensive large agencies that are well out side of our budget (or for a "small" fee simply produce a standardised report on "how to improve your SEO" that can basically be read on the net). We've tried local, smaller companies in order to limit our options .... but that didn't go well either.
Any suggestions welcomed.
Next is where / how to weight our expenditure and / or our SEO time. Should it be 50% gaining external links (be it by what ever means such as social, checking out where competitiors have links and chasing those possibilities etc) and then 50% internal page SEO, blog content creation, internal linking etc?
Thanks again.
-
I would also run their site or their client's site through Moz tools to see for yourself how well they do things.
-
Since your primary purpose is to make sales through online shopping, you should look for a firm that specializes in that area for starters.
After you find some firms within your budget, ask questions, ask for references, and ask for previous experience and results in your niche.
Next you should ask details about how they build links, what types of sites related to your business they have gotten links from and so on.
In terms of devising a strategy you should focus on quality. Let's say you can afford $500/mo for SEO. If it was me, I would devote $300 to content creation for sharing on guest posts, social, and so on. I would spend $100 on fresh content for a blog attached to your site to generate interest and attract links. I would spend the last $100 just doing good old fashioned outreach to other authority sites in related fields.
The content you created has the ability to build an infinite amount of links at no additional cost to you. The blog will make your site easier to link to since it is not a direct sales page, and the outreach will give you editorial links that rock.
So to answer your percentage it will be 80% off page SEO and 20% on page. This is after you complete the initial on page SEO.
Good luck on your search.
-Travis
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Link Building & Moz metrices
I am just starting up so no flaming please. Okay so i was given a project and i was amused to see a lot of backlinks to the website with viagra pills title. This is why i assume the domain authority is very low. I tried asking a few website owners to drop the links but they said its a lot of manual work they wont do it(that was shocking) So what next? Would building authority links in any domains help me in this case?
Link Building | | hardik_hrc0 -
Link Building for Landing Page
Hey Guys, I have a client that is launching a website in about 2-3 months time. They have had a flash site for the last 4 years and have had no SEO/Link Building to the site and are now going to undertake my services for Content Strategy, Social Strategy and Link Building. In the interim (from now till the next 3 months) they will be launching a "coming soon" landing page. What I want to know is when doing their initial link building do I just concentrate on brand related links through local directories with the aim of getting a few local keyterms? Or should we be deploying a longer term strategy of going after the competitive keyterms now? Thanks,
Link Building | | ecentricmarketing
Michael0 -
When building links should I be doing it through different iIP addresses?
Im working on building links to pages on my site, should I be doing it through different ip's or proxies? Lately its been press releases, that we submit and they are pushed out by 3rd party. Thank You
Link Building | | TP_Marketing0 -
Most effective method for link building?
From your experience, what have you found to be the most effective method for link building? It's starting to look like the only way to receive good links is by writing great content or offering great services and allowing the links to come in naturally (which is obviously the most important thing anway), but are there still any effective methods of getting valuable links through link building, apart from having personal connections and relationships with site owners?
Link Building | | eli.boda0 -
Link building for rankings VS Link building for relationships
A Big Shout To Everyone -- Good Morning and What's Up 🙂 As I read today through seomoz professional guide to link building and the section why link building matters and in addition to this a newsletter I received today that changed my whole thinking towards link building for rankings vs for relationships. It is already happening on social networks if you are active there, but what about on your website. What are your thoughts on the following ? Google's job is provide the most relevant results to surfers online, and looking the link profile of a site & the page itself is the key to determining which page to serve on plate to the surfers link query ! Webmasters Site Objective:
Link Building | | helpwanted
I think that we as webmasters have to ask ourselves what do we want to achieve with link building. To get quick traffic or build slow authority links, high rankings, lead generation, sales & other things here I may be missing etcccc Other Objective Networking & Relationship Building Alliances : What I discovered today is that building links for 1st page rankings are great and will provide me with steady traffic, but not all of it is targeted traffic, but what else can I do to bring targeted traffic and at the same time try to build alliances with other related non competing business owners online. The idea... is to apply old school networking / relationship building alliances to get targeted traffic to my site that can actually benefit from my services. How Do We Achieve This I become a editor for approving resource links for me site, only the best will be placed on my site as a resource. Build a valuable tightly themed categorized resource section with related non competing resources that can help my sites visitors find what they are looking for, send visitors to non competing resources that may purchase their services which helps me build a relationship with them, and may can with rankings as well, provided I am selective with my qualification process. Questions & Concerns Below : What should I be thinking about when creating a resource categorized links page How many outgoing do follow links should I allow from this links partner page How will this links resource page affect my own SE 1st Page Rankings and is it worth it based on getting targeted traffic Any pros / cons I may be missing here0 -
Please critique my link building plan
Hello, Here's my revised link building plan for nlpca.com Let me know if I'm off or missing anything. 1)Identify a list of competitors that are strong enough to have good backlinks (probably about 15 in our industry Look at top content for top competitors and see what type of content is being linked to. build infographics for each area we want to target based on top content Using OSE, analyze competitor backlinks and decide which sites might link to the infographics and which sites might just link to us if we asked them (our site is already an authority). In this step we would also expand the backlink analysis to include sites on pages 4-8 Only choose link aquisition for sites based on the following criteria: Age A lot of unique content A clean site Backlinks going to that site Facebook followers Which of course means high search engine rankings Publish infographics and do outreach
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
Building Links to Exact Match Domains
What are the pros and cons having exact match domain and how can you create a brand name and build backlinks? Say we have a domain personalizedbirthdaygifts.com We are quite stuck with what anchor text we need to use and how do we vary it? I've heard that we have to stay away from using commercial keywords as anchor text heavily. We have to also use our brand name. And here we get stuck as we don't have a brand name. In this case Our brand name should be personalized birthday gifts but this is also commercial keyword. I have seen before similar websites droped from ranking because they have commercial keywords in their domain and most of their backlink anchor texts are commercial. If I had a website called twentyfive.com selling birthday gifts it would be a lot easier. But when you have a website personalizedbirthdaygifts.com and trying to rank for personalized birthday gifts and birthday gifts it's tough. OR isn't it? I hope I explained it well and didn't confuse anybody... Thanks
Link Building | | Jvalops0 -
Create content or more link building?
For those of you who have been doing white hat SEO for many years, I'm curious what % of your time (and/or how many hours/week) you spend on 2 activities: -- creating new, original content for your site -- work on getting links to your existing content I find that working at getting links via article marketing, guest blogging, forum posting, etc, is an open ended time suck that never ends. But maybe a necessary investment for sites that have fewer external links than their competitors (?). Adding unique original content to my site is also time consuming, and I'm not sure about the short-term vs long-term benefit of it. I'm curious if you guys who rank in top 3 positions of the SERPs split your time evenly between link building and content building, or if you spend more time on one than the other? And does the answer change for a site that's been around for a while and already has several hundred external links and several hundred pages of original content? Where should I spend my time on a site that is 8 months old, has about 90 pages of original content (all with good on-page SEO), and several hundred external links (with mostly relevant anchor texts)? My goal is to rank higher for the key terms people search on to find a service like mine. Currently I'm on page 1 in SERPs but not in top 3.
Link Building | | scanlin0