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Links can cost anywhere from $25 to $5,000 per link.
Pricing for links can vary widely.
Obviously, several factors go into determining the cost of a link in 2024—and whether that price makes sense for you.
Working with an agency vs doing it alone will change the pricing.
Different tactics will have different costs. The quality of a link also contributes to the cost.
Considering all of this, I put together some numbers so that you can make more educated decisions about your link building strategies.
I’ve combined my experience at an agency, analyzed link vendor databases, and interviewed agency leaders to get you link building pricing in 2024 and beyond.
Guest Post Link Pricing
The average price for a guest post is approximately $220.
To arrive at this price, I’ve accumulated over one thousand unique guest post sites and analyzed and categorized them over the last eight months.
(Here’s a sneak peek:)
The highest highs on sites like Bitcoin.com can range in the $5k range, while you can get guest posts for as low as $20 on sites like 1045 The Dan.
When breaking it down by DA/DR, you can see that, as expected, the higher the site’s authority, the more expensive the guest post link.
How To Calculate the Cost of a Guest Post
In these cases, the cost goes to paying the vendor or marketplace to write a “guest post” and include a link to your service or website.
These vendors have expressed partnerships with the partner websites themselves or have handshake deals with writers who are looking to make a few bucks on the side.
However, it’s important to note that guest posts from a spreadsheet or any link vendor differ significantly from the traditional guest blogging I discuss or from what you would see on a site like BuzzStream.
With BuzzStream, we seek out thought leaders in our industry who can provide value or unique insight.
We don’t accept money for these posts.
In the case of most guest posting as a link building strategy, it’s pay-to-play.
You find a website on a guest post database and spreadsheets; the vendors do the rest.
Are These Guest Post Links Valuable?
Probably not.
The quality of posts is low, and the Helpful Content update has ruined most sites participating in this kind of thing.
Let me show you what I mean.
Based on my talks with a few of these agencies at conferences, the process for most link vendors that provide guest post links as a service is as follows:
- AI writes most of the content, which human writers then massage.
- Articles masquerade as search-driven pieces, but you’ll find a link to a service in the post.
- They are typically direct links to products or service pages, using exact match anchor text.
For example, below is a site called Don’t Cramp My Style that talks mainly about “interiors, rented spaces but also a bit of Fashion, Lifestyle, bits of Beauty, and My Travels.”
A few paragraphs into the article, there is a link to “buy tyres in Strood,” which leads to a tire company.
This is an example of how you would get your link featured in an article.
If it’s not immediately apparent, a link from such a site is irrelevant to a tire site. Further, the article is unrelated to Don’t Cramp My Style.
And, in all but the fewest of cases, even though money is exchanging hands, rel=sponsored is never used when the link is inserted, despite being in Google’s Link Spam Policies.
Then, let’s look at the actual quality of the sites.
I started this analysis with a list of more than 1500 sites I had received since the beginning of the year.
However, since then, many of the sites have been hit by algorithm updates. As reflected below, many sites saw steep traffic drops in March.
This tells me something about the quality of many of the sites on this list right off the bat.
Then, looking at the quality of the content itself, most of the sites that dropped have undeniable issues like poor designs and layouts or blatantly AI-written content:
Take this analysis further and look at quality links: DR/DA over 65 and monthly organic traffic above 10,000.
When I removed the sites from my list that were below 65 DR/DA and 10,000 traffic, the number of sites dropped from 897 to 68.
Although authority and traffic aren’t the only two ways to measure a link’s quality (relevance is also a major factor), they are two significant signals.
In my post about guest posts sites, I lay out an evaluation process for guest post sites and whether or not it makes sense to pitch your story idea to them. It boils down to the following:
- Gauge Site Relevance
- Check Domain Authority or Rating
- Check Traffic
- Assess Audience Engagement
- Judge Content Quality
- Check for E-E-A-T Signals
Next, look at how link insertion pricing differs from guest post sites.
Link Insertion Pricing
The average price for a link insertion is about $141.
I found this based on the same list of guest post sites list that I worked off of above.
The insertion cost for a link from PoshPennies.com tops out at $1,500, while a site like Lake Onocee Health costs only $20.
Here’s the breakdown of DA/DR:
As you can see, the higher DA/DR is comparatively low-cost, but this is because the data set is limited.
Fewer sites offer link insertions; based on the data, even fewer high-quality sites do.
How To Calculate the Cost of a Link Insertion
With link insertions, no content creation is needed. The link is included in existing content, so the only cost associated is paying the service or the link provider.
Are Link Insertions Valuable?
A link insertion can be extremely valuable if you find a highly trafficked page on a quality site.
At $141, this seems like an easy win.
However, when I broke down the quality of sites offering link insertions based on my list, I found that only one site out of the 174 qualified from traffic and DA/DR perspectives.
This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to insert a link on a high DA/DR site—I wrote about a viable link insertion strategy— but when you are paying for it, you might not have a large pool of websites.
Instead of evaluating options based on DA/DR, use page-level metrics like Page Authority or URL Rating.
For example, I found a site on my list offering link insertion for $120.
If I go to Ahrefs>Site Explorer>Top Pages, I can see each page’s estimated traffic.
Something like ‘how to find information on someone’ ranks in the featured snippet and gets an estimated 539 visitors per month. This is a visible page.
If I can find a page with a lot of traffic, the link will be more valuable.
But again, the problem is that the higher-visibility pages are more expensive or less likely to accept a link insertion (or both).
So although it may be valuable, it’s tough to achieve at scale.
That brings me to my last pricing analysis: digital PR.
Digital PR Link Building Pricing
Digital PR link building pricing is $1,250-$1,500 per unique link, not including syndicated links.
In this case, I’m referring to digital PR link building as generating dofollow links in top-tier and industry-specific news sites.
This is based on my 7+ years of experience working at agencies and extensive chats with agency owners.
How We Calculate the Cost of a Digital PR
The costs associated with digital PR link building are writing and email outreach tools (you’ll also include design if you do content-led link building).
In most cases, agencies don’t talk about cost per link.
Instead, they sell monthly services that work towards more considerable traffic or ranking goals.
For example, if you wanted to get “travel gift cards” to rank, you’d pay an agency to create a campaign dedicated to this goal like Flight Gift’s “Best Places to Visit in Florida.”
The costs associated might be broken down into data collection, writing, design, and outreach.
Or they might create several smaller campaigns where they pitch expert commentary to generate brand mentions.
The costs here are just management of these quotes, maybe using a paid platform like Qwoted.com or Featured.com
But, typically, digital PR campaigns cost between $5-10k and net between 6~7 unique linking root domains (not including syndication.)
Is Digital PR Link Building Valuable?
Digital PR is one of the most valuable kinds of link building today. There are several reasons:
The Google algorithm leak showed us that Google looked at links from high-clicked areas of a site that were updated frequently. Those are two critical characteristics of top-tier news links that digital PR achieves.
We’ve already shown in other analyses how digital PR can positively influence SEO and rankings where you can see boosts in organic traffic as links are gained:
I’d argue that the value of a digital PR link is even higher today, which I’ll get into at the end of the post.
How Much Should You Spend on a Link?
You should be willing to spend at least $1,500 to get a high-quality, non-syndicated, dofollow link in 2024.
This can go towards an agency, freelancer/consultant, or in-house team to generate links for you.
Does this mean you always need to spend $1,500?
No, of course not.
The name of the game is to lower that number by creating great link building campaigns.
I’ve got a list of link building strategies and tactics that work to build links at scale.
Let’s quickly look at how tying to search volume can lower costs.
Scaling Link Building to Increase Returns
One of the more popular ways to scale link gains and lower spend is to lean on data and statistics tied to search volume.
We interviewed Darren Kingman of Root Digital about how he did this for a client around a ChatGPT Statistics post.
The post in question ranks for “chatGPT statistics,” which gets about 300 monthly searches.
This doesn’t sound large, but the term has a very high link intent, meaning researchers and writers are more likely to search for and cite what they find.
The post has accrued over 350 links over time.
So, while the cost to produce content like this might be between $5-10k, even if your link building cost is $1,500 per link, your ROI is over 5,000%.
Not too shabby.
Let’s look at another way to consider spending on link building.
Using Monthly Lifetime Link Value
In my time with Siege Media, we leaned heavily on monthly traffic value from Ahrefs divided by number of linking root domains to get a sense of a link’s value in a given industry.
Siege Media goes further and calculates a link’s lifetime value—you can see it all in Ross’s post on the topic here.
For example, if I was trying to understand the value of a link in the link building space (we are getting a little meta here).
Let’s take Ahrefs and SEMRush, given they are two leaders in the link building space.
$3.1M/80.9K = $38.
$38 X 24 = $912
This $38 is essentially this industry’s monthly link value.
Then, let’s look at SEMRush.
$8.9M/ 114K = $78.
$78 X 24 = $1,872
These are relatively low-medium values, meaning both brands in the space can (and do) generate links reasonably easily.
This tells me that, in our case, the link building industry is fairly open to link building.
But, take an industry like personal finance, and it will start to get a little tougher.
Let’s look at Nerdwallet and Bankrate.
Using the calculation, $37.4M / 98.4K = $380.
Then, $380 X 24 = $9,120 lifetime link value.
Now, just to have another data point, let’s take Bankrate.
$27.9M / 102K = $274.
And then, $274 X 24 = $5,928 lifetime link value.
This tells me that you should be willing to spend more on link building in the finance space because building links to the industry itself is more challenging.
This analysis can help you understand the value of a link in your industry and whether it’s worth investing considerable time in your link-building efforts.
The Value (and Cost) of a Quality Link is Rising
Building links has become more complex in the past few years since Helpful Content was introduced (it’s been rolling out since 2022).
Google has recently done a decent job of devaluing low-quality sites. (This is evidenced by the many guest posts and link insertion sites on my list that were nerfed to zero traffic.)
Combine this with the fact that more and more link builders are turning to digital PR, and the pool of available quality sites is getting smaller.
You must also consider that publications are cutting journalists altogether or pushing the remaining ones into quasi-editorial roles as publications dabble in SEO-driven content.
I expect the cost of link building to rise in 2025, which is a good thing. As the actual value of a quality link increases, it should force out the spammy link building practices, link vendors, and marketplaces selling off low-quality links.
It will force those remaining to focus on the quality of backlinks, not the quantity, which is more important for your success.
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