Don’t Hire a Link Builder Without Asking These Questions!

James Dooley: So if I am looking to hire a link building agency for my off page SEO for my website, what's some questions that I should be asking. So first and foremost you should definitely be asking it some questions to make certain the link building agency is the right choice for yourself. I'd say the first part would be the ethics. Are they like a black hat link building agency, are they a white hat link building agency, what type of links and stuff like that they're going to be building. So the first question would be going down the road of looking at the strategy and compliance and the ethics of who the link building agency is. What would you go down the road of asking.

Kasra Dash: I think one thing that I see a lot of is there's a lot of link building agencies that have a one size fits all. Now say for example if you've got a gambling website, you might need a lot more links in comparison to a local plumber. So looking at the actual strategy that they actually present to you at the beginning, because again you can have 10 websites that have 10 different link building approaches.

James Dooley: For sure. Another one that you could be asking your link building agency that you're going to be trying to work with is the costs and the prices involved. Is there any discounts available if you're going to be ordering in bulk or you're going to be ordering it over a stretch of six months or 12 months. Obviously as business owners we all need to be frugal and make certain we're getting best bang for our buck.

Kasra Dash: Definitely. Another thing that I would be looking at is, you've kind of already touched on this, but are they PBN links. Because again one thing you don't want to do is get all the links and then they end up actually having a negative impact. So are they PBN links, how are the links vetted as well. For example not every single link has the same value. For example if you have a dog website and you get another dog website linking to your website, Google is going to think okay that's pretty decent. But if you've got a plumbing website linking to your dog website or vice versa, it's not going to actually have that much power. So actually checking to see how the links are vetted.

James Dooley: For sure. Quality control is key. So that again would be another question that I'm asking the link building company. What quality control measures are you working on. Is it DA from Moz, is it DR from Ahrefs, are you looking at trust metrics with trust flow and citation flow with Majestic, are you looking at toxicity in Link Research Tools. All these are questions that you want to be asking your link building agency so at least you know when you're getting these links how they are outreaching for guest posts or link inserts or whatever type of links you are looking to acquire. Is it that they're doing digital PR or is it like you said guest posts and niche edits. Do they do pillow links, do they do foundational links, do they care about nofollow links and dofollow. Then I suppose you could move on to the strategy behind what is needed. So I think the quality control measures and the strategy is very important.

Kasra Dash: Definitely. Is there anything else that you would ask a link building agency.

James Dooley: Yes. So going back onto the quality control measures, what about the content that you're going to be doing. Are you going to try and write the content so your guest posts are trying to rank. In my opinion if you can try to get a guest post to rank for the keyword you want your money site to rank for, that's the best type of link. You can't get much more relevant than the post actually ranking. Do they do a free audit. Am I getting assigned an account manager. What customer services do they have in place. They're all different questions that you could be asking. Is there anything else.

Kasra Dash: I think the last thing that I would probably be asking is testimonials or case studies. So if for example you are a SaaS company, there's a lot of SaaS link building agencies that only specialise in doing link building for SaaS. So you might want to opt in for something more along those lines. If for example there's a link building agency that only does plumbing, I would be more inclined to go with them. So looking at the actual previous case studies is probably another big one.

James Dooley: Then like you said alongside the case studies is the testimonials. Are you able to actually see the website and check it yourself in SEMrush or Ahrefs to check whether the rankings are good and what they're saying that they are. Trying to get real case studies of real websites if people are willing to show it. Then maybe video testimonials because there's a lot of fake news and a lot of fake testimonials and a lot of fake case studies as well that go out there. So is there any video testimonials of website owners or business owners that basically turn around saying when I first started this company they didn't just say we do follow links. They understood initially they might have been lacking pillow links or foundational links and they might have needed some naked URLs or branded anchors and some nofollows to start with and they didn't just try to hit me with 10 grand a month. Another big question I would ask is what contracts are in place. Are you tying me into a 12 month contract or is it a rolling contract. Because the best link building agencies won't tie you into long term contracts. They'll be saying look it's a long term investment but along the way if they can set out the goal of what's going to happen month one, month two, month three, but at any point if they didn't think it was working, the links weren't good enough, they can say sorry I don't want to carry this contract on. Some of them are tying people into 12 month contracts and legally they can't get out of it. So there's other questions I’d be trying to gauge on when choosing who I think is the best link building agency.

Kasra Dash: Definitely. So that's been our video on what questions to actually ask your link building agency before you hire them. I hope that this has actually been useful. If you guys do want a really good link building agency make sure to check out SEO.com. They actually provide a lot of digital PR, niche edits and guest posts as well. So if you want a valuable link building agency that you can actually outsource it all to, we both recommend them.