Many people work with SEO agencies to grow their presence on Google and other search engines. A lot of people will actually hire multiple external vendors to manage different aspects of their online marketing, such as Facebook ads, Google Ads, and other platforms. We once spoke with an e-commerce store owner who had 5 different agencies that he had to manage.
At the end of the day, this type of setup can become costly and expensive. When you contract with a third-party agency, you will likely have someone who puts about 5 to 10 hours a week into your website at a price tag starting at about $5,000 per month. We believe that there is a better way, either take on your own marketing in-house or work with a dedicated freelancer that you can trust. If you do choose to work with an agency, we have some suggestions for you on how to find the agency that is a great fit for you.
The Pitfalls of Working With An SEO Agency For Link Building
There are many agencies out there who do a pretty good job of link building and off-page optimization. That being said, a lot of agencies don’t offer the best link building services and do it the wrong way. We identified 10 different e-commerce websites that worked with an agency of some sort for link building and this is what we found out by randomly auditing recent links to their website:
- Many inbound links that were built were from blog comments and directories. By and far, about 85% of links built to the websites in question were either no-follow links or links that were designated as UGC, which means user-generated content.
- We found that many guest blogs that had been published on the website’s behalf were on websites that had very little to do with the target website. These types of links are irrelevant and can actually hurt your search engine indexing if there are too many of them pointing to your website.
- We found that many inbound links created for a website were actually part of PBNs or paid link schemes.
How Do You Create High-Quality Links Of Your Own?
There are many different ways to create high-quality links of your own. First and foremost, you should publish a quarterly press release if you have newsworthy content to share with your industry. While backlinks from press releases tend to be no-follow, occasionally, these press releases can be picked up by more authoritative websites.
Secondly, you should also strive to create high-quality content of your own that other websites will want to link to. A great way to do this is by researching trending topics and providing in-depth, valuable insights that can attract organic backlinks.
