Should You Outsource Your SEO Link Building?

- If you're firing up your marketing campaign and you're getting into the SEO portion of it, you've probably clicking this video because you're having trouble deciding whether you should outsource your link building or whether you should just bring it in-house and do it yourself. I'm gonna go through some pros and cons on each of those, for this video and show you compelling reasons why you should and compelling reasons why you should not outsource your link building to another agency or a freelancer. Once again, my name is Danny, thanks for joining me. As always, if you are gonna do your link building yourself, you're gonna need that knowledge. You're gonna need that education. This is gonna be a great resource. This is a free book, "Link Building Mastery." The link for that is in the description below. It's got nine different techniques and tactics for doing that link building campaigning yourself, teaching you how to prospect and how to build value on your content in order to sell that to other websites and other clients possibly to get back links back to your site. So really the biggest question when anybody's getting started is, what does it mean to outsource my back link building? Well, there's several different flavors of outsourcing your back link building. And the one that I'm really gonna go into today is are you going to be better off doing that yourself? Or are you gonna be better off hiring somebody else to do that or hiring an agency or freelancer to do that for you? So when should you consider the task of outsourcing this to somebody else, another agency, another freelancer or when should you consider doing this yourself? Well, my dad was always really huge on doing pros and cons lists. So I've done the same for you. So in the same fashion and same vein as my... What, bumped the mic, in the same vein as my old man, let's go ahead and bust out the little pros and cons journal and get started.

Pro, you don't have to learn the tricks of the trade. The learning for this does not happen overnight. There are tons of different things that you need to know, lots of different processes, lots of different techniques. And it takes a lot of time. The learning curve is steep. It is not something that can be learned immediately. So, when you are talking about bringing this into your own jurisdiction and doing this yourself, you're gonna have to have the patience to learn these techniques. You're gonna have to watch a ton of these videos on our channel. You're gonna have to read some different materials and use the different tools at your disposal. But that is not going to come quickly. So, be prepared for that aspect of it. Con, without the knowledge and education, it's harder to know when you're getting fleeced by a less than reputable agency. When you do learn how to do this on your own, it's a lot more beneficial when you're having these conversations with a different agency or freelancer, because, you're gonna actually be able to contribute to that conversation, you're gonna be able to add some value to it, and if they're bringing something up that sounds shady or sounds too good to be true, you're gonna be able to identify that a lot better and put yourself in a better situation where your site, your business, is gonna be safe from any kind of reputation damage in the eyes of Google. Pro, with the right agency, you're gonna see high quality links built to your site in about a month and probably see results in about six to eight weeks. This is a huge bonus to outsourcing your link building. With link builders like ourselves, we have those networks, we have those relationships, we have the processes down, we've already gone through the learning curve. When we pick up with a new client, we're not starting from square one, we're starting from square 10. We're already 10 steps ahead of where you would need to be. We have the knowledge, we have the education. We're going to be able to provide you those back links quickly. And the faster we can get those back links pointing to your site, the quicker you're gonna see results. Now you're not gonna receive results overnight. So don't expect to get fired back links in a week, and then all of a sudden see your traffic explode the next week, that's not gonna happen. Those Google web crawlers have to actually find their way over to your links. They're gonna have to find their way to your site and then plug those into the algorithm for you to actually become ranked. Con, the right agency might cost more than you originally thought. Link building is very much a get what you pay for type of situation. There's hundreds of freelancers and hundreds of agencies that I've seen on Upwork and on Fiverr, where they're gonna promise you all these back links for super cheap. And normally when you see that, they're gonna be using either like macros or codes or spammy type of link building. they might go into blogs, and in the comment line, they might put just a link to your page. The problem with that, is that if Google sees that you're doing that or that somebody on your behalf is doing that, there's a really dangerous outcome that's possible where Google starts to flag your site as a spammy site. And if your agency is using private blog networks or PVNs, there's a real risk that you see the traffic increase, you see the ranking increase of your site, but then as soon as those PVNs get recognized by Google, all of that can tank, we've seen that happen before. So, it's definitely not something to be taken lightly. If you're thinking about keeping it in-house, you're able to better control where your links are coming from and vet those links yourself. So that's a huge bonus to doing it yourself and not going with the out sourcing. Pro, time is money baby. If you're spending all of this time learning the link building process, doing the prospecting, all of the legwork and all of the groundwork, there's no short cuts to get high quality links. I, we just mentioned that on the last con. If you're going to be taking this on, it's gonna take a lot of time. So one of the pros to outsourcing this link building process is that you completely offload that huge amount of time that you're gonna take in actually building those links yourself. So you're, if you're a business owner, especially if you're a business owner, you have so many hats that you're wearing. And SEO probably is not one of those hats unless you're running a marketing agency. So if you can offload that and find something more valuable to do with your time, you can easily make up the difference that it costs to actually hire an outsource, an agency, to do the link building for yourself. If they cost $1,000 a month, I'm sure that in 10 hours of your work week, you're gonna be able to figure out something that's gonna make your business 1,000 more dollars that month, whether it's working on the sales script, hiring and training your sales team. The stuff that you actually are good at doing and the stuff that you're passionate about doing and being able to bring value to your business and other ways. You can let somebody else do the slog, that is link building. Con, money is money. Sometimes it's easier said than done and paying somebody else to do those back links, especially if you're a startup or especially if you're getting running on your site and the web presence maybe isn't as important as it is for some other business, maybe it's not worth putting that kind of money into it. And if you're looking to do some link building yourself, maybe you have the time to put an hour or two hours a day an do it. And out of your 40, 50, 60 hours that you're working, if you're lucky, in some cases, that 10 hours in that week can be put towards link building and still be valuable for your company.

So with that being said, how do you determine if you're better off outsourcing your link building or whether you're better off doing it yourself? Well, first let's address some of those cons that we just went over, okay? The most powerful arrow in your quiver. I know I've used that phrase before, but having the knowledge to actually understand what link-building is, is gonna be a crucial. And I think having that knowledge and having that base is gonna be very beneficial for you, whether you're building the links yourself or whether you do decide to actually outsource that process. If you do outsource it, you wanna make sure that you're getting those quality links and you wanna make sure that the company or the agency or freelancer that you hire has a clear understanding and that you can set clear boundaries and expectations on what links you're looking for, the relevance of those links and how they might affect positively or negatively your site.

So the last two cons really had everything to do with, is the value there to outsource the link building to somebody else and pay that amount of cash and set aside that amount of budget and pull it away from other things that might be on the burner and ready to go. And the answer to that is complicated. And I can't give you the answer to that. So this is gonna be a decision that you have to make with your team. But again, this all ties in. If you have that knowledge and you have that base, you're going to be better informed to making that decision. Every decision comes down to the knowledge of what it's going to take one way or the other in order to sway that decision in one way or the other.

Finally, in terms of the outsourcing, should you or shouldn't you? The one thing that I've kind of held close to the chest and I saved for last is, should you hire somebody into your company to outsource those links for you? And I would say 99% of the time that's probably the worst thing you can do. The 1% would be if you have an unpaid intern or a highly trained monkey, or your niece or nephew are willing to come in and do it on the cheap. If you don't have one of those situations, bringing somebody in to do the link building is probably not gonna be as beneficial as just going straight to an agency. If you're bringing somebody in there's a little more overhead that goes into it. You have to pay for an email address, you have to, or a seat in your email system, your server like if you have a G-suite or something. You have to pay for the subscription to Ahrefs or Semrush, you have all of these different costs and all of these different factors, a desk and a chair, a computer, there's all of these that go in that just keep adding to the cost. This person is also, if they don't know what they're doing in terms of the link building before they get started, they're also gonna have to go through the whole learning curve. They're also gonna have to digest all of this information and figure out how to build a good prospecting list and how to actually approach those prospects and how to build those pieces of content, build-up the value and really sell the value of that content to the person that you're trying to get the link from. The other thing too is, if you don't have that base of knowledge, it's going to be harder to guarantee any kind of quality for the types of links that they're getting in. They might go down a road of being the easier way of getting links, and they might go to those PVNs. They might go to those link brokers, and they might go in and start doing the spammy blog comments and stuff that might damage your site. It's just for 99% of cases, bringing somebody in and hiring them in to do the link building, unless they're actually a trained marketer, a trained SEO expert and somebody who knows what they're doing, is normally going to be a more expensive and more risky route.

In conclusion, I think the biggest takeaway that we can take from this, is just to gain the knowledge. I know I've kept hammering on that the whole time but it can't be any more true. You have to know what you're talking about. Even if you are gonna outsource or if you're not gonna outsource, make sure that you educate yourself, that's gonna be the only way to make critical decisions like this. And believe me, how to do your link building is going to be a critical decision. It's going to be as important as your overall SEO strategy. Some businesses and some owners are, and some website owners are going to have the time, they're gonna have the expertise. Maybe they come in and they actually have a background in this. Those are gonna be the portion that I think should consider doing the link building themselves especially if they have a little bit of extra time. I know most business owners don't really have much extra time, but if you're one of those taking on the link building might be a good project. And it's certainly gonna help you in a lot of other aspects in the SEO world. You're gonna have a much better understanding of your on-page, your off-page and your technical SEO when it comes to schema, when it comes to anchor texts and linking all of your blog and content pages into your main pages or your converting pages, those kinds of things actually go along with link building. So that's a big part of the educational process. So if you are considering to outsource your link building, remember, you can always speak with us about it. We're not gonna pressure you into doing it one way or the other. You can actually have a conversation with me about whether it would be better to outsource it or not. I might be a little bit biased, so just take it with a grain of salt, but we have plenty of tools, plenty of information available for you to make that right decision. Once again, we have the book, it's free to download a digital copy. The link for this is in the description below. There's also a link to go to the site and schedule that meeting. If you do schedule that one-on-one meeting, it's most likely going to be with me. So you can ask me any question you want about what it would take to outsource it, or whether it would be a better choice to keep that in-house and maybe do it yourself. As always, thanks a lot, I really appreciate your time and we'll see you next time on the channel.