As we mentioned, several factors determine thecost of a link building campaign.
It’s natural that some factors have a larger influence on the cost than others, but they’re all equally important to consider.
Let’s start with the first one.
Domain rating
TheDomain Rating (DR)is one of the most widely used metrics in the world of link building.
It’s a metric developed by Ahrefs and it:“Shows the strength of a target website’s backlink profile compared to the others on a 100-point scale”.
For example, a website with a DR of 91 has a stronger backlink profile than a website with a DR of 35.
This is because the higher the website’s DR, the stronger a backlink from it will be (although other factors should also be considered).
By “stronger”, we mean that more link equity is transferred to the linked domains.
However, keep in mind that the equity is split equally between the domains a source domain links to. This means that a website with a DR of 12 that links to 2 domains has a heavier influencer than a DR-70 domain that links to 100 domains.
Thus, link builders tend to pay great attention to a website’s DR and is often the primary metric they look at, when evaluating alink prospect.
In fact, according to research by Backlinko, a high DR positively correlates with high Google rankings.
Image Source:Backlinko
Making a website’s overall link authority an important factor to consider when link prospecting, so it’s only natural for it to heavily affect the cost of link building.
Referring domain’s authoritativeness and relevance
As you probably already know, backlinks act as a vote of trust from one website to another.
This means that the more authoritative website X is when it links back to another website Y, the better the results for the latter will be.
Although it’s natural to think that the more backlinks the better, it’s in fact theauthoritativenessandrelevanceof a referring domain that play the biggest role.
First of all, what does it mean for a referring domain to be authoritative?
Ideally, a website should aim for search engines to view it as a trustworthy and credible source. On the one hand a high DR can contribute to this, but we should also mention the role ofE-A-T.
In a nutshell, E-A-T stands for:
- Expertise
- Authoritativeness
- Trust
And is a principle Google follows to determine how trustworthy a page is.
Actuallytrustis the most important of the three, because no matter the experience or expertise of a website, if it’s not trustworthy then the E-A-T factor will be low.
For instance,WebMDis considered one of the most trustworthy websites in the medical field, because it has been providing credible information for many years and is often the go-to place for health related matters.
This can also be justified by its highDR of 92from over144M backlinks…
…with over 7.5K of them having a DR of over 95!
So by having such trustworthy websites linking back to WebMD, helps search engines perceive WebMD as a trustworthy source as well, among other reasons.
All in all, the more trustworthy a website is the higher the cost of acquiring a backlink from it usually is.
When it comes torelevance, it’s another factor that plays an equally important role and many link builders overlook.
It’s basically whether a link comes from a website that topically makes sense for your own website.
For example, if you own aSaaS in the email marketing field, it would make sense to acquire links from websites in that niche and not something irrelevant.
Although Google likes to see high authority links, it’s often their relevance that matters the most, since acquiring links from any website out there can be considered manipulative.
Obviously, only going for authoritative and relevant links forces a link building team to be more selective so their choices are naturally limited.
Therefore, the pricing is affected too. After all, what matters the most in link building is quality, rather than quantity.
Vertical
Although it’s vital to acquire links from relevant niches, it’s important to mention that not allverticalsare the same.
What we mean by that, is that in the world of link building some verticals are harder to acquire links from compared to others.
For example, for a certain industry there might not be a great deal of content out there, which makes things more difficult since there are less link building opportunities.
If we take the example of the email marketing SaaS again, you’ll correctly assume that this niche is “easy” to build links for, because there’s a lot of content around this topic from a variety of websites.
On the other hand, for something really specific like aSaaS in the maritime analytics industry, it’s hard to find good link building opportunities out there.
This applies to both active and passive link building.
It’s not only hard to find good guest post opportunities in that niche, but even when creating high-quality content (like linkable assets) it’s hard to earn natural links, simply because the content and the audience online is smaller.
Therefore, the “harder” the vertical, the more expensive link building can be.
Content quality
Another factor that affects the price of link building iscontent quality.
This means that by having high-quality content on your website that can attract links, the whole link building process is made easier.
For example,linkable assetslike:
- Infographics
- Tools & calculators
- Studies & research
- Original content
- Statistics
And more, are designed to attract backlinks naturally, because they include elements that people feel are worth sharing and linking back to.
To give you an idea,4 of the 6most linked pages on Ahrefs’s blog (excluding the main blog page) are studies and statistics:
Because they offer unique data and insights that people are interested in sharing and referring to in their own content.
Thus, should you choose to attract links through linkable assets, you can:
- Save money from links that could’ve alternatively been built through the manual link building process
- Have your link building team create them for you, which will increase the cost
Either way, the cost of link building is affected by the quality of your content.
Content pages vs feature pages
Building backlinks is important, but it’s not just for content pages.
Attracting links to your website’s feature pages isequally importantalbeit more difficult.
In fact, feature pages are often more important than content pages in a sense that they offer more monetary value to the website, considering they might explain how a SaaS product works in detail, its benefits, and more; so it’s more bottom-of-the-funnel content.
However, it’s more difficult to attract links to them for two main reasons:
- Feature pagesdon’t tend to attract links passively, unlike content pages that offer more flexibility and can be turned into valuable linkable assets too
- It can be easier to attract backlinks to content pages, as they typically offermore valuable and informative informationthan feature pages
In essence, blog posts are more likely to attract backlinks because they provide in-depth information and analysis on a specific topic.
These types of pages can be considered as “link-worthy” by other websites and individuals, as they offer valuable information that may be useful to their audience.
On the other hand, feature pages such as product or service pages, may not have as much link-worthy content, since they are oftentimes focused on providing information about a specific product or service.
As you can imagine, the harder it is for a page to acquire a link, the higher the cost will be, so backlinks for feature pages tend to be more expensive than ones for content pages.
Approval of referring domains
This factor applies when you’re outsourcing your link building efforts to an agency or freelancer.
In a nutshell, if the website wants to approve all the referring domains the agency/freelancer plans on reaching out to,the price usually increases.
This is because it’s another step added to the whole link building cycle and the link builders will have to spend more time replacing the links a client potentially didn’t approve.
Let’s continue to the next factor.
Link velocity
Another factor worth mentioning islink velocity.
Link velocity refers to the rate at which a website is gaining backlinks; in other words how fast the website wants to acquire links.
For example, here’s the chart showing Ahrefs’s growth over the years in terms of referring domains.
If we take the period from January 1st 2020 to August 1st 2020we can see that the backlinks grew from 34.112 to 42.363, which is an increase of24,18%in 8 months.
Meaning that the backlinks grew on average by8.252 per monthor a monthly rate of just over3%.
Keep in mind that a high link acquisition speed doesn’t necessarily translate to better results and should be done with caution; earning a great amount of links in a short period of time can potentially be considered manipulative to Google’s algorithm, if it finds the backlink profile to be unnatural.
Which is why all backlinks should be relevant and high-quality.
Nevertheless, if the link building budget is $X, it’s only natural that it’ll be exhausted quickly if the link velocity is high.
Especially when a website aims for continuous link building, a high link velocity shortens a campaign’s cycle and thereforerequires faster investments on behalf of the client.
Plus, you should also track the link velocity of competing pages, since if you want to successfully compete with them, you’ll have to either reach or pass their link velocity.
For instance, Ahrefs’sbeginners’ guide on affiliate marketingacquired 333 new links in December of 2022 (either passively or actively).
This means that if you were to compete with that page with a similar guide, you’d have to continuously try to build new links, as competition has a high link velocity.
This clearly shows that the cost of link buildingis strongly affected by competition as well, and not just your own actions or the quality of the link you acquire.
Now that we covered link velocity, let’s have a look at a few more factors that determine the price of link building.
Additional factors
When calculating the cost of link building, there are more factors to consider that will affect your decision.
Besides the ones we mentioned above, additional benefits that can increase the cost include:
Benefit #1: Potential referral traffic
Whether a link will drivereferral trafficto the target website is a great benefit.
After all, besides the link equity, receiving referral traffic is really important in order to increase a page’s visitors who can ideally convert, or whatever the goal is.
Think of it this way.
Assuming two referring domainsare equalin terms of all the factors we mentioned above (such as the same DR, vertical, and so on), if:
- Website A has a monthly organic traffic of 50K, while
- Website B a monthly organic traffic of 500K
It’s only natural that a backlink from the latter will cost more, because it has higher chances of generating more referral traffic.
Makes sense, right?
However, apart from the referring domains’ total traffic, what’s even more important is evaluating thetarget page’s traffic.
This means that even though website A has fewer organic visitors in total, the page that links back to you can potentially have more visitors than website B’s page.
All in all, the potential referral traffic generated through a link is an additional factor to think about when evaluating its cost.
Benefit #2: Brand name
Receiving a backlink from a relevant website with a high DR is always beneficial, but there’s a certain factor that can’t exactly be measured, but is also important.
The factor we’re talking about is thebrand name.
Each vertical has its own websites that are considered authorities and have a strong brand name, therefore when receiving a link from such a website both users and search engines see that it acts as a vote of confidence to you.
If we take the project management industry for example, it’s different receiving a backlink from a renowned SaaS likeClickUp, compared to a smaller one that’s not as popular, even though the latter can indeed provide good link equity.
After all, it all boils down to how strong the brand name is which can positively influence the website it links back to.
As you can imagine, the more recognition a brand has, the more expensive a link from it will be, although it’s a factor whose pricing can’t exactly be measured.
Benefit #3: Other synergies
A big part of link building is creating strong relationships that can generatedifferent kinds of synergies.
Although receiving a link can provide many benefits to your website, it may also be the start of a new professional relationship with a website that can open many doors.
Relationships with big publications or relevant websites in your niche can turn out to produce great co-marketing activities and more.
What’s important is that you maintain a holistic approach when it comes to judging opportunities and by extension, choosing how much money to spend on acquiring a new link, depending on other potential benefits it can generate.
Let’s have a look at a general overview of the pricing of link building, depending on the factors above.
