How much does a backlink cost in 2024?
A quality backlink costs $614 on average, including fixed and variable costs. However, this number varies depending on factors such as the domain rating, type of link acquired, efficiency of the outreach expert, conversion rate, landing page, tools used, salary expenses, and more.
The fixed cost includes the cost of tools, salaries of outreach experts and guest post writers, and overhead expenses. The variable costs account for the dollar-amount businesses pay websites to acquire links.
The variable costs also vary depending on how the backlink was acquired – free backlinks, link exchange, guest posts, link insertions and paid placements, for example.
Furthermore, two websites with the same domain rating could charge different amounts to link to your domain.
As you probably observed, there are too many moving pieces, so establishing a definite cost is impossible. There are no industry standards but a detailed analysis could provide some guidelines to anyone planning to acquire links through inhouse outreach efforts or through link building agencies.
The goal of this guide is to come up with a ballpark figure that you can measure your backlink acquisition cost against. This guide will help you estimate how much you are truly spending by keeping outreach campaigns inhouse and if it is worth hiring an agency instead. I will refer to an imaginary organization that’s operating at its full potential.
I decided to adopt a conservative approach and come up with a guesstimate for the minimum amount you could spend to get a worthy backlink. Here are some assumptions I relied on for this analysis:
Assumptions
Workforce:
1. One highly capable and experienced in-house outreach expert.
2. One seasoned in-house guest-post writer.
Both employees work 9 hours a day, excluding lunch breaks.
Target domains and link type:
1. Only DR 40+ backlinks
2. Equal weightage to dofollow and nofollow links to maintain a natural link profile
Approximations
1. Normal Distribution (Percentage-Wise) for DR 40-100:
It’s easier and less expensive to get a low DR backlink so the normal-distribution approximation makes sense. Here’s the percentage of backlinks acquired for DR buckets.
DR Buckets | Percentage |
DR40-44 | 25.0% |
DR45-49 | 21.0% |
DR50-54 | 17.0% |
DR55-59 | 13.0% |
DR60-64 | 8.0% |
DR65-69 | 6.0% |
DR70-74 | 3.0% |
DR75-79 | 3.0% |
DR80-84 | 2.0% |
DR85-89 | 1.0% |
DR90-94 | 0.5% |
DR95-99 | 0.5% |
2. Effort and expense
1. Free Links (5%): Links obtained without payment, exchange, or guest posts. Includes free placement and insertions. No money or effort is involved beyond sending outreach emails.
2. Guest Posts (20%): Involve effort in pitching and writing but are not directly paid for.
3. Link Exchanges (25%): Reciprocal agreements where you exchange links with other sites. Includes two-way/multi-way link exchanges.
4. Paid Placements (35%): Fully paid links, including sponsored content or direct payments for placements. Could also include paid guest posts written by you or the target website.
5. Link Insertions (15%): Paid links – cheaper than paid placements. Methods like broken link building, replacing competitor backlinks, brand-mention linking, etc., where the task is only to add/replace a link, no content written by you or the target website.
3. Paid link costs
Based on my experience with link building, the below formula make a good approximation of costs:
Paid placements costs
Cost = DR*(DR/10)+(DR+50)
Net costs based on DR:
DR | Mean Cost per Link |
40-44 | $268 |
45-49 | $318 |
50-54 | $372 |
55-59 | $432 |
60-64 | $496 |
65-69 | $566 |
70-74 | $640 |
75-79 | $720 |
80-84 | $804 |
85-89 | $894 |
90-94 | $988 |
95-99 | $1088 |
Link insertion costs
More often than not, link insertion costs as much as paid placements but since we are being conservative at costing, I will assume that a discount of 30% over paid placements
Net costs based on DR:
DR | Mean Cost per Link |
40-44 | $188 |
45-49 | $223 |
50-54 | $261 |
55-59 | $302 |
60-64 | $347 |
65-69 | $396 |
70-74 | $448 |
75-79 | $504 |
80-84 | $563 |
85-89 | $626 |
90-94 | $650 |
95-99 | $720 |
4. Others
1. Outreach conversion rate of 12% — The expert converts 12 out of 100 domains they reach out to. I am taking a generous approximation because the goal of this costing activity is to calculate the lowest cost. Realistically, this number could be as low as 6-8%.
2. Among paid links — Businesses get an equal number of link insertions and paid placements.
What’s excluded?
I have removed costs that the business must bear anyway, without considering backlinking. For example, tools like Ahrefs help immensely with backlinking campaigns, but they are used by other teams like content marketing, paid marketing, etc. I did not consider their costs.
I have discounted many other expenses like freelance support, legal and compliance, training and development, CMS, project management, graphic design, and many other costs. I am going in with the bare minimum.
Fixed cost analysis
1. Tools
1. Hunter.io – For finding prospect emails: $408 annually
2. Pitchbox – For prospecting, outreach automation, and relationship management. Also help automate emails and follow-ups.: $1980 annually
Total annual tools cost: $2,388
Total monthly tools cost: $200
Other tools like Ahrefs, CRM, CMS, Email management, etc. are a company-wide requirement. Most SaaS businesses have them even when they do not have active link-building campaigns. Since they pay for those tools anyway, I have excluded them from the cost of backlinks.
2. Salaries (inclusive of benefits)
1. Outreach expert – Salary — $70,300 (source)
2. Guest-post writer – Salary — $58,600 (source)
Total annual salaries – $129,000
Total monthly salaries – $10,750
3. Annual miscellaneous expenses –
Expense | Cost |
Office Supplies & Equipment | $2,000 |
Utilities & Overhead | $1,000 |
Total | $3,000 |
Total monthly sundry expenses (one-time) – $3,000
Total fixed costs
Total fixed costs = Tools cost + Salaries + Miscellaneous expenses
Annual total fixed costs = $2,388 + $129,000 + $3,000
Annual total fixed costs = $134,388
Variable cost analysis
The variable cost accounts for the amount that a business would spend on buying backlinks. We need to account for both the quality and quantity of backlinks to arrive at a number that is fairly accurate.
Let’s explore both aspects.
Quantity of backlinks
The number of backlinks acquired directly depends on the bandwidth of the outreach expert and the guest-post writer.
Let’s explore how much they can contribute.
Day in the life of an outreach expert at peak efficiency.
- Email Review & Prioritization (30 minutes): Check emails, respond to urgent inquiries, and prioritize tasks for the day.
- Daily Planning (30 minutes): Review the day’s goals, check campaign status, and align with ongoing projects.
- Prospect Identification (1 hour): Use tools like Hunter.io and Ahrefs to find and qualify new leads. Focus on identifying websites with the highest potential for backlink opportunities.
- Competitor Analysis (1 hour): Analyze competitor backlink profiles to discover potential opportunities and strategies.
- Personalization of Outreach (1 hour): Craft personalized email pitches for the identified prospects. Use insights from research to tailor each message.
- Template & Sequence Setup (30 minutes): Set up outreach sequences in BuzzStream or a similar tool, scheduling follow-ups as needed.
- Email Sending (1 hour): Execute the first wave of email outreach. Focus on quality over quantity, ensuring each message is well-targeted.
- Social Media Engagement (1 hour): Engage with prospects on LinkedIn or Twitter. Comment on posts, share relevant content, and build rapport before or after email outreach.
- Follow-Up Emails (30 minutes): Send follow-up messages to prospects who haven’t responded to initial outreach.
- Relationship Management (30 minutes): Engage with existing contacts to maintain relationships. Share updates, offer value, and keep the communication lines open.
- Content Alignment (30 minutes): Collaborate with the Content Creator to align content with outreach goals. Discuss upcoming pieces that can be used for outreach.
- Team Meetings & Reporting (30 minutes): Attend brief team meetings to discuss progress and challenges. Report on key metrics and adjust strategies as needed.
- Performance Review (30 minutes): Analyze the day’s outreach performance, track response rates, and adjust tactics for future outreach.
- A/B Testing & Optimization (30 minutes): Test different email subject lines, content, or sending times to optimize outreach effectiveness.
- Daily Recap (15 minutes): Summarize the day’s accomplishments, noting what worked and what didn’t.
- Next Day Preparation (15 minutes): Plan tasks for the following day, ensuring a smooth start.
Total Time: 9.5 hours (with a 30-minute break)
Estimate of how many emails they could realistically send
The number of emails an Outreach Specialist can realistically send every month depends on several factors, including the level of personalization, the tools used, and the time allocated to outreach each day. Let’s break it down:
1. Time allocated to Email outreach
- In the schedule provided earlier, the outreach specialist dedicates around 3 hours per day to email-related tasks (1 hour for initial outreach, 30 minutes for follow-ups, and 1 hour for prospecting/social media engagement).
- Assuming a 5-day workweek, that’s 15 hours per week spent on outreach.
2. Types of emails
- Highly personalized Emails: These take more time to craft but are more effective. A well-crafted personalized email might take 10-15 minutes each.
- Templated but slightly personalized Emails: These are quicker, with slight tweaks based on the prospect. These might take around 5 minutes each.
3. Estimate based on Email types
- Highly Personalized Emails:
- 10 emails per hour = 30 emails per day
- 150 emails per week = 600 emails per month
- Templated but Slightly Personalized Emails:
- 20 emails per hour = 60 emails per day
- 300 emails per week = 1,200 emails per month
4. Realistic Monthly Estimate
Considering a mix of both highly personalized and templated emails, a realistic monthly estimate would be:
Average: 900 emails per month
Out of these 900 emails, it’s safe to assume that the outreach expert sends an initial email seeking backlinking opportunities, followed by one followup email. The outreach expert will either get the link by then or skip the prospect and start pitching to others.
At 2 emails sent per opportunity, the expert would be able to reach 450 websites.
Conversion rate of 12%
12% is a highly-ambitious conversion rate, even for established brands. One of the SaaS giant companies I worked with returned a mere 6% conversion rate for brand-mention link-building. An average brand might have an even lower conversion rate.
However, since we assumed that the outreach expert knows his game, the outreach email templates are primed for conversion, and also since we are quite conservative with costs, we will go with a 12% conversion rate.
Total backlinks acquired
At 12% conversion rate and 450 websites approached, the backlink count stands at 54 per month, 648 per year. We are talking about good quality DR 40+ links, so that number is quite solid.
Quality and variety of backlinks
We are analyzing only DR 40+ backlinks and now we have 648 of them.
Apply the approximation that we discussed earlier. Here’s what the rounded off link distribution looks like:
DR | Link distribution |
DR40-44 | 162 |
DR45-49 | 136 |
DR50-54 | 110 |
DR55-59 | 84 |
DR60-64 | 52 |
DR65-69 | 39 |
DR70-74 | 19 |
DR75-79 | 19 |
DR80-84 | 13 |
DR85-89 | 6 |
DR90-94 | 3 |
DR95-99 | 3 |
Total | 648 |
You will notice that DR 90-99 link count is quite low. It’s quite a practical estimate as well since those links are hard to come by. No amount of outreach can acquire those links as they are often not for sale. In the rare instances they are on sale, they cost more than $1000, at times more than $10,000, making them an exception – not the norm.
Also, based on our approximation for outreach method, here’s what the distribution looks like:
Category | Annual link distribution by category |
Free Links | 32 |
Guest Posts | 130 |
Link Exchanges | 162 |
Paid Placements | 227 |
Link Insertions | 97 |
Total | 648 |
As for paid link building methods:
Paid link-building category | Annual link distribution by paid category |
Paid Placements | 227 |
Link Insertions | 97 |
Total | 324 |
Distributing these 324 links into DR buckets:
DR | Paid links split into DR buckets |
DR40-44 | 81 |
DR45-49 | 68 |
DR50-54 | 55 |
DR55-59 | 42 |
DR60-64 | 26 |
DR65-69 | 19 |
DR70-74 | 10 |
DR75-79 | 10 |
DR80-84 | 6 |
DR85-89 | 3 |
DR90-94 | 2 |
DR95-99 | 2 |
Total | 324 |
Cost of links aggregated for paid placements and link insertions:
Average DR for the bucket | Paid placement cost per link | Link insertion cost per link | Total links | Paid placements | PP Cost | Link insertions | LI Cost | |
DR 40-44: | 42 | 268 | 188 | 81 | 57 | $15,232 | 24 | $4,556 |
DR 45-49: | 47 | 318 | 223 | 68 | 48 | $15,154 | 20 | $4,533 |
DR 50-54: | 52 | 372 | 261 | 55 | 39 | $14,371 | 16 | $4,299 |
DR 55-59: | 57 | 432 | 302 | 42 | 30 | $12,745 | 13 | $3,812 |
DR 60-64: | 62 | 496 | 347 | 26 | 18 | $9,015 | 8 | $2,696 |
DR 65-69: | 67 | 566 | 396 | 19 | 14 | $7,708 | 6 | $2,305 |
DR 70-74: | 72 | 640 | 448 | 10 | 7 | $4,361 | 3 | $1,304 |
DR 75-79: | 77 | 720 | 504 | 10 | 7 | $4,903 | 3 | $1,466 |
DR 80-84: | 82 | 804 | 563 | 6 | 5 | $3,652 | 2 | $1,092 |
DR 85-89: | 87 | 894 | 626 | 3 | 2 | $2,029 | 1 | $607 |
DR 90-94: | 92 | 988 | 692 | 2 | 1 | $1,122 | 0 | $336 |
DR 95-99: | 97 | 1088 | 762 | 2 | 1 | $1,235 | 0 | $369 |
$91,526 | $27,377 |
Net Annual cost of paid links – $118,903
Total cost
Total cost = Fixed cost + Variable cost
Total cost = $134,388 + $118,903
Total annual cost = $253,291
Cost per backlink
Cost per backlink = Total annual cost/ links acquired
Cost per backlink = $233,328/ 648
Cost per backlink = $390
The cost per backlink, acquired through outreach with conservative estimates is $390. But realistically, many more costs get added to the fixed component. Furthermore, much more than 50% of acquired links are paid for, contrary to our assumption.
Another factor to consider is the conversion rate. If that comes down to 6%, the cost of the link crosses the $600 mark, without considering other costs.
Furthermore, the outreach expert might not be able to actually deliver 900 emails per month, or they might need to send two followup emails instead of one. This further pushes up the cost per link.
Let’s do a thorough analysis further accounting for all additional fixed and variable costs.
Additional fixed costs
Additional Cost | Estimated Annual Cost |
Freelance or contract support | $10,000 |
Legal and compliance costs | $1,000 |
Training and development | $500 |
Graphic design costs | $1,000 |
Professional memberships and associations | $500 |
Total Estimated Additional Costs | $13,000 |
Updated total fixed costs
Updated net fixed costs = $134,388 + $13,000
Updated net fixed costs = $147,388
Updated variable costs
Highlights
- Domains reached through 900 emails with one primary and two follow up emails per website – 300
- Conversion rate of 6%. Backlinks acquired monthly – 18. Annually – 216
Updated rounded off link distribution
DR40-44: | 54 |
DR45-49: | 45 |
DR50-54: | 37 |
DR55-59: | 28 |
DR60-64: | 17 |
DR65-69: | 13 |
DR70-74: | 6 |
DR75-79: | 6 |
DR80-84: | 4 |
DR85-89: | 2 |
DR90-94: | 1 |
DR95-99: | 1 |
Applying approximation for outreach method
Free Links | 11 |
Guest Posts | 43 |
Link Exchanges | 54 |
Paid Placements | 76 |
Link Insertions | 32 |
As for paid links:
Paid Placements | 76 |
Link Insertions | 32 |
Updated paid links across DR buckets:
DR40-44: | 27 |
DR45-49: | 23 |
DR50-54: | 18 |
DR55-59: | 14 |
DR60-64: | 9 |
DR65-69: | 6 |
DR70-74: | 3 |
DR75-79: | 3 |
DR80-84: | 2 |
DR85-89: | 1 |
DR90-94: | 1 |
DR95-99: | 1 |
Updated variable costs
Paid placement cost per link | Link insertion cost per link | Total links | Paid placements | PP Cost | Link insertions | LI Cost | ||
DR 40-44: | 42 | 268 | 188 | 27 | 19 | $5,077 | 8 | $1,519 |
DR 45-49: | 47 | 318 | 223 | 23 | 16 | $5,051 | 7 | $1,511 |
DR 50-54: | 52 | 372 | 261 | 18 | 13 | $4,790 | 5 | $1,433 |
DR 55-59: | 57 | 432 | 302 | 14 | 10 | $4,248 | 4 | $1,271 |
DR 60-64: | 62 | 496 | 347 | 9 | 6 | $3,005 | 3 | $899 |
DR 65-69: | 67 | 566 | 396 | 6 | 5 | $2,569 | 2 | $768 |
DR 70-74: | 72 | 640 | 448 | 3 | 2 | $1,454 | 1 | $435 |
DR 75-79: | 77 | 720 | 504 | 3 | 2 | $1,634 | 1 | $489 |
DR 80-84: | 82 | 804 | 563 | 2 | 2 | $1,217 | 1 | $364 |
DR 85-89: | 87 | 894 | 626 | 1 | 1 | $676 | 0 | $202 |
DR 90-94: | 92 | 988 | 692 | 1 | 0 | $374 | 0 | $112 |
DR 95-99: | 97 | 1088 | 762 | 1 | 0 | $412 | 0 | $123 |
$30,509 | $9,126 |
Total variable costs = $30,509 + $9,126
Total variable costs = $39,635
Updated total costs
Updated total costs = Total fixed costs + Total variable costs
Updated total costs = $147,388 + $39,635
Updated total costs = $187,623
Updated cost per backlink
Updated cost per backlink = Updated total costs / Acquired backlinks
Updated cost per backlink = $187,623 / 216
Updated cost per backlink = $868
Average cost per backlinks
Average cost per backlink = (Maximum cost per backlink + Minimum cost per backlink)/2
Average cost per backlink = ($360 + $868)/2
Average cost per backlink = $614
Conclusion
Hard to predict the real number but the average cost of a quality backlink is $360-$868.
Idea: Create a backlink cost calculator that returns the approximate cost and tells users how much they can save with stats page link building or digital PR link-building. Then ask them to check out the stat way to place an order.