How to Find the Best Link Building Service Providers

Today, if your website attracts the wrong links, there’s almost a guarantee you’re going to see an “unnatural link” warning show up in your Google Webmaster Tools account. Since building links can take up a lot of your time, you may be thinking about hiring an outside service to do the work for you, and while this is okay to do, you have to understand that you’re going to want to make sure you’re choosing the right company to get the job done right. If you don’t, you may end up buying bad links and getting penalized for them.

Since the Internet is filled with hundreds of link building companies, here are some things you can look out for to find the best candidates possible.

1. Look for personal recommendations

Whether you know someone who can recommend a service for you or maybe you read a well-known SEO blog, recommendations are a fantastic way to find a link building service that works. The last thing that you’re going to want to do is search for a local link building company and hire the first one you come across. A good service, like anything in life, is going to have many people recommending them. This is one of the reasons we like to collect a lot of Facebook testimonials for our services. They’re real people making real comments about their experience with our stuff.

When people talk about the company, they are also helping build local citations for this company, which is always great and shows that the company may be more competent than you initially realize because they know stuff like local citations.

2. Look at service specialties

Some link building services are going to cater to a certain service.

For example, some companies may focus on developing viral videos that draw in links, while another may focus on guest posting.

The lesson here is to make sure that you know what you’re buying. If you don’t understand the product, then it’s probably best to skip it. You have to remember that today’s search engines heavily reward backlinks that are authoritative and look natural. If the service scales your backlinks and blasts hundreds of them across low-grade domains, there’s a higher chance you’re going to inherit some issues in the future.

3. Focus on quality over quantity

Touching on the last point, you no longer want to focus on the number of backlinks pointing to your domain; this doesn’t matter anymore. For instance, if a service were to tell you that they could get you a link from a well-known newspaper or 500 links from blogs with duplicate content, which one would you choose?

Today, it’s so important that you don’t focus on the number, and the company that you plan on hiring should have the same mindset as well.

Aside from the links coming through, it’s also important that you look at how they are building these links. For instance, if you were to hire a guest posting service, how are the guest posts? Are they informative? Would you be proud of posting this particular article on your own website? Are they outsourcing the guest post content to someone else, reducing its quality? Remember that some of these links are going to reflect your brand’s image.

4. Consider focusing on premium services

A good link building company isn’t going to come cheap. If you plan on spending $10 for a guest post, then you’re going to get just that – a $10 post.

Solid links are going to be well into the hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, and if you don’t have that kind of budget, you may want to second guess outsourcing your link building.

For a very long time, I built my own links for my own websites and clients. The great thing about building good links is it’s just time-consuming. You can DIY if you don’t have the budget yourself.

Premium services today are going to include guest posts, citations if you’re in the local SEO space, and quality press releases that get into the hands of the media. Try to avoid services that want to build blog comments, link wheels, or those that want to blast the same article across hundreds of article directories. Don’t be cheap when it comes down to hiring a service because it won’t be worth it in the end.

What does success with link building services actually look like?

Since SEO is constantly changing, it’s important that you figure out exactly what the company thinks “success” is.

SEO takes a lot of time and precision, and if a company just wants to game the system for short-term success, then it’s probably best to move on.

I’ve found sticking to the fundamentals is the best way to see long-term SEO success. Namely, quality and unique content, backlinks built on quality sites that also contain quality content, a solid social presence with a verified GMB connected to it, and anything else that a legitimate website has.

Before you even hand over your cash, make sure that you’re comfortable with the answer that they are giving you. As long as they abide by the search engine rules and have a high client retention rate, it should be a reputable company that you can trust.

Finding a good link building company may take up a lot of time; however, if you take the hiring process seriously, you shouldn’t have a problem finding a great service. As long as you ask hard-hitting questions and get a feel that they have competent traits, you should be able to develop a great relationship with a company for years to come.