Curious about link building costs in 2025? What’s a fair deal when it comes to link building pricing? As one of the World’s leading link building services, we’re in a good position to help break down the different factors and reveal what a good, fair price point is for link building.
Pricing Scale for Link Building
The price of link building varies greatly between $100 – $20,000 per month depending on quality and volume. You’ll be better off trying to figure out a price point per link in the long term when judging your costs for link building.
Here’s a pretty typical pricing scale for overall link building costs if you’re considering an outsourced link building campaign.
DR and DA dependent pricing model
Another popular pricing system setup by link building vendors and agencies is a price dependent on DR (domain rating) or DA (domain authority). It’s an imperfect system, because these are 3rd party metric scores which do not always reflect the true quality of a website. However, it’s a well known fact that people across the industry use these scores as a benchmark system to gauge the quality of website, along with other factors such as organic traffic.
The prices might range from anywhere between $100 – $1,500 + depending on quality.
Below is a rough idea of how those average price points might look.
Please bear in mind this is a very broad average, and in reality these prices will overlap at all ends of the spectrum.
In-House vs Agency Pricing
If you’re serious about link building and want to train and manage a dedicated team in-house, then it’s a full time job. The time it takes to develop prospect lists, hit them with targeted outreach and nurture every opportunity absolutely warrants this.
- Link Building Manager – $40,000-80,000 – If you want to do this right you’re going to need an experienced full-time link building manager to oversee and lead the operation. In major US cities, this is going to cost you a minimum of $60,000 per year, and at least $30,000 even if you manage to attract great talent from overseas.
- Link Building Assistant X 2 – $30,000 – You’re going to need assistants to help with prospecting, personalization and some of the outreach tasks as well. If you manage to hire from a lower cost-of-living country, for example in South East Asia, a qualified member of staff is still going to cost around $15,000 per year. So for 2 assistants, that’s $30,000.
- Guest Post Writer – $50,000 – I don’t know of any successful link builders that have operated without significant support from third party writers. If you want to land any contributions on excellent blogs (like HubSpot for example) you’re going to need a talented writer on board that passes the smell test of any editor. If you under-invest on quality, nobody is going to accept your content. Let’s say an experienced and solid writer from the US is charging $0.20 per word (including strategizing, editing, and images) – That’s going to cost you $400 for a 2,000-word guest post. If you do 10 of those in 1 month, that’s $4,000 per month. For that reason, I think a budget of $4,000 per month on content is reasonable.
- Link Costs – $25,000+ – If you want to build a meaningful link building campaign, you’re going to need a budget in place to pay for links. It doesn’t matter what other industry thought leaders say, most people are paying for links in one way or another. The only exception might be in the SaaS / Marketing industry, where you can get away just by doing guest posts and link exchanges. If we assume a $2,000 monthly budget (Which is honestly on the lower side) we can estimate $25k per year.
- Link Building Software – $6,000 – You’re going to need a few tools here: Ahrefs (is essential) but we’ll assume you’re already doing SEO and therefore already have a subscription ($500+ month), so we won’t include that in our costs. Besides that, you’ll need outreach software, email-finding software, and link-monitoring software. So let’s guess $500 per month all in.
That brings us to a grand total price of approximately $177,000 per year.
This is also making the assumption that you’ll be actively building a minimum of 30 links per month (or 360 links per year).