How Much Do Backlinks Cost [2024 Update]

How Much Do Backlinks Cost in 2024?

In 2024, the cost of a single, medium-quality backlink averages just around $300. 

Our prices pretty much reflect this. They range between $180 and $380 per link placement, which equates to an average price of $280 per backlink. (But we also offer bulk discounts.)

However, it'd be more accurate to say that backlinks can cost anywhere between $100 and $1K+ in 2024. There’s obviously a huge gap between those two numbers, and there are good reasons why that’s so.

Like with most things in life, quality  usually costs more, so high-quality backlinks will cost more than low-quality ones. A link-building agency may also simply want a higher margin, so they'll charge more for their services.

In short, there are many factors that influence the price of backlinks. We’ll discuss them in more depth below. 

Before we get to that, let's see how the current cost of backlinks compares to that in previous years. You'll probably be surprised to hear that it's not so different.

In fact, it may even be somewhat lower:

• 2018/2019: SociallyInfused Media found that the cost per link was $291.55. However, once they removed the marketing niche from the calculations, the cost rose to $391.55. – Read here.
• 2022: Ahrefs found that the cost per niche edit was $361.44. But, to be fair, they also found that paid guest posts were much cheaper; $77.80, on average. – Read here.

There are two important things to take away from this:

• (1) The price of backlinks stayed more or less the same since at least 2018, and
• (2) The price of backlinks varies greatly depending on many different factors, such as link type and quality. 

Let’s examine these factors in more depth.

‍TL;DR: You can expect the price of an average backlink to be around $300 in 2024. 

What Influences the Cost of Backlinks in 2024?

The cost of backlinks in 2024 depends on several factors:

• Backlink quality, usually determined by the linking sites' DR and DA scores,
• Backlink type, such as niche edits vs. paid guest posts,
• Other factors, such as your brand's reputation.

First Factor: DR and DA Link Building Pricing Scales

The cost of a backlink is often based on DR and/or DA scores of a site that will host the links. Both are used to measure the quality of a link coming from that site.

• DR (Domain Rating): Measures the strength of a site’s backlink profile. Scores range between 0 – 100; high scores indicate a high-quality profile with a significant number of backlinks.
• DA (Domain Authority): Predicts how likely a website will rank on the SERPs. Scores range between 0 – 100; high scores indicate a high likelihood of ranking.

DR is mainly based on the quality and the number of backlinks. DA, on the other hand, is based on a number of factors — linking root domains, domain age, quality of incoming and outgoing links, and so on.

So, how do these scores determine the price of a backlink? Here’s a general rule of thumb:

Backlinks with high DR and DA scores are more expensive than backlinks with low scores.

College backlinks, for example, are typically considered high-quality because their .edu domains are highly reputable — but they aren’t always cheap.

Of course, there are exceptions. Every link building service can determine its own rates. But charging more for links with lower scores simply doesn’t make sense.

Service providers may base their prices on either of these metrics. But which one should you use to assess the quality of a link?

Our suggestion: use both.

Both scores are important and contribute to the quality of a link.

Plus, you’ll be able to check them for free with Moz and Ahrefs as long as you don’t exceed the monthly entry limits. Find out how to do this in the section on finding high-quality links.

Second Factor: Backlink Type

As the aforementioned Ahrefs’ study indicates, there’s a big difference between the cost of niche edits and paid guest posts. 

(A quick refresher if you need it: paid guest posts are, on average, 4.6x cheaper than niche edits.)

Then, there are also sites that will publish your guest posts for free—or even pay you for them. But such sites are few and far in between, and often don't have great domain ratings or authority.

For example, here’s a response we got after contacting a website that didn’t seem to charge for guest posts:

So, obviously, even if it doesn’t seem like that at first glance, most sites actually do charge for guest posts.

The price varies for other types of links, too. For example, image links can be cheaper or, less likely, more expensive than text links. Contextual links are also typically more costly than, for example, profile links, and so on.

Other Factors That Influence The Cost Of Backlinks

Various other factors can influence the price of backlinks, too. Here are some:

• Brand reputation: If you have a well-established brand, you may be able to drive the price per link down.
• Content quality: Sites that have first-class content usually have first-class rates. Plus, they receive many link building inquiries, so they can be picky about who they work with. If you want to get backlinks at a cheaper price, you could choose sites with lower- or medium-quality content. (But be aware that this will influence your results.)
• Industry: For example, backlinks are traditionally more expensive for industries directly related to money.
• Agency fee or in-house team expenses: There are additional costs that come with link building. Take those into account too.

In-House vs. Agency Link Building Pricing Scales

So, yes—another fee to take into account is the cost of overhead, i.e., the cost of having an in-house link-building team or hiring an agency or a contractor.

Having an in-house link-building team is bound to get you a sizable number of links every month. But it’s not cheap.

Besides paying your staff — and other expenses that may come with having employees, like rent and utilities — you’ll also need to pay for the necessary software.

For starters, you’ll need SEO tools, such as Moz or Ahrefs, and outreach tools like Buzzstream or Hunter.

That's why, in most cases, agencies are more affordable than in-house teams. We say "in most cases" because agency rates can significantly vary; price points may range anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 per link building campaign.

Agencies are also usually more effective because they follow link-building procedures they’ve already tested and perfected with their other clients. In-house teams often need more time to drive results.

One thing to note, though, is that many agencies—us included—charge one flat rate which already covers their fee. So, you usually don’t have to worry about extra costs.

You can check out our prices here.

Should You Buy Backlinks? Natural vs. Paid Link Building

Now that we’ve determined how much backlinks cost, let’s see if you should buy them in the first place.

Well, first of all, you should know what the alternative is—earning backlinks organically. This is called natural link building.

Both natural and paid link-building can benefit your business in at least three ways:

• Increased brand awareness: Link building lets you reach a wider audience through other people’s sites.
• Higher rankings on SERPs: Backlinks help search engines discover new sites and determine how high they should rank. More backlinks = higher rankings.
• More conversions: Brand awareness and high rankings will bring your site more traffic to convert. Even if your conversion rate stays the same, your bottom line will likely improve.

Although they share some similarities, natural and paid link-building are different in many ways. We’ll go through the most crucial differences below to help you choose the better option for your business.

Natural Link Building: Pros & Cons

Natural link building refers to earning backlinks instead of paying for them. 

You can earn them by publishing high-quality content that other bloggers and site owners want to link to because it makes their content more valuable.

• ‍Example: In this post, we’ve linked to Ahrefs’ study on link-building prices in 2022. We’ve done so because we believe it will be useful to our readers, and not because Ahrefs paid us to do so.

Pros

Here are some pros of natural link building: 

• Decreased costs: As we’ve said, natural links are earned — not bought.
• High-quality traffic: If someone links to your content because it’s valuable to their audience, it’s likely that the traffic you’ll get is very interested in your industry (and, hopefully, your products and services, too).

Cons

Here are some cons of natural link building:

• It's slow: You can consistently make first-rate content, but you won’t get backlinks until someone notices it and decides to link to it. This may take months or years, or it might never even happen.
• Unpredictable results: You never know when someone will link to you. You also can’t know if their sites will be high or low quality, and how much their backlinks will actually benefit you. So, most people can’t rely on natural link building for steady results.
• Falling behind your competition: (Paid) link building is a widespread SEO practice. You can fall behind your competitors if you’re relying solely on natural links.

Paid Link Building: Pros & Cons

Paid link building is about buying backlinks instead of earning them naturally. It works like a simple business transaction – after the buyer pays for a link, bloggers, site owners, or link builders link to their site. That’s it.

• ‍Example: If Ahrefs had paid us to link to their study in this post, that would be paid link building.

Pros

Here are the pros of paid link-building: 

• Faster results: If you pay for a link, you get it immediately. There’s no waiting until someone notices your world-class content.
• Competitiveness: As mentioned, your competitors are probably already paying for links. Doing so yourself will help you keep up.
• Zero time wasted: With paid link building, you don’t have to spend time forging relationships with site owners and bloggers in hopes of getting a backlink one day. You should get a link within several days of your transaction; that’s it.

Cons

Here are some cons of paid link building: 

• Can be risky: Google doesn’t encourage paid link building. In fact, they sometimes penalize sites that go about it in the wrong way.
• Potential to waste money: Paid links won’t pay off if they’re low quality. So, before you buy them, you should know how to assess link quality.

How to Buy Backlinks (Or Build Them Via Outreach)

You have two options when it comes to link building:

• Buy a link directly: Buy guest posts, sponsored posts, link placements, etc., on SEO marketplaces.
• Build links via outreach: Pay someone to contact bloggers and site owners and arrange link placements (or do it yourself). This is link-building in its truest sense.

Each option has its pluses and minuses: buying links is faster; outreach can be cheaper and come with extra benefits.

For example, you could pay someone $70/hour to build links for you.

Three hours of their work would cost you $210 — which is still cheaper than the average price of a single backlink you can buy. Besides that, if you do outreach the right way, you'll have new contacts you can collaborate with in the future.

However, note that this method has two significant drawbacks:

• Firstly, there’s usually no guarantee that the person you hire (usually a VA) will manage to build you links. 
• Secondly, you may still need to pay an additional fee for the actual link placement.

Alternatively, you could build links via blogger outreach yourself. But beware: it’s nowhere as easy as it sounds. It takes time, effort, and some marketing knowledge.

But, no matter if you decide to build links yourself or buy them, it’s vital that you can:

• Define what you need: How many links you need to rank;
• Assess the quality of links: To ensure that you’re making a wise investment;
• Track your results: So that you know if you’re getting the ROI you want.

This quick guide will help you do just that. We’ll try to give you the steps you need to take in both scenarios—i.e. if you’re buying links or building them via outreach.

0. Know Where To Buy or Build Backlinks 

Knowing and deciding where you’ll buy or build backlinks will determine all the other steps you need to take. 

When it comes to buying backlinks, there are two most popular options:

• Working with link-building agencies, like ours. You can usually pay link-building agencies one, flat fee per link placement. As mentioned, some link-building agencies also offer bulk discounts. This option is great for you if you don’t want to pay someone to try to build your links—you only want to pay if they actually manage to do so. 
• Buying links from online marketplaces. Many websites are solely dedicated to advertising links for sale. You can usually find cheap links there, but the quality can be questionable. 

Instead of directly buying backlinks, you can use tactics that will help you build them via outreach. Now, again, keep in mind that this doesn’t mean you won’t need to pay for these links eventually.

• Hiring virtual assistants to do your outreach is often a cost-effective link-building strategy. However, as mentioned, most VAs don’t guarantee they’ll build you links. Also, you may need to pay extra for the actual link placements.
• Doing your own outreach and asking for links is the cheapest, but also the most time-consuming link-building tactic. It also may not yield the best or fastest results.
• Making appearances in podcasts, contributing to other people’s content, and practicing similar collaborative tactics can help you build links, too. They can also helps you build credibility. Still, finding the right collaboration opportunities can take time and may not be as straightforward as it sounds.

1. Determine How Many Backlinks You Need

You’ll need an SEO tool to determine how many links you need to rank. (Or you can have a link-building partner do that for you.)

To do that, you could look at keyword difficulty — a metric that tells you how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword. The higher it is, the more links you’ll need.

You can enter your keyword in a tool like Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty Checker:  

Ahrefs also gives you an estimate of how many backlinks you need. Usually, this number is similar to the keyword difficulty. For example, according to Ahrefs:

• you’ll need backlinks from ~8 websites for a keyword at 7 difficulty, and
• you’ll need backlinks from ~22 websites for a keyword at 20 difficulty.

2. Conduct a Link Gap Analysis

Now that you know how many links you need, you want to find relevant sites that could host them. That way, you’ll avoid spending money on backlinks that won’t bring you high-quality traffic.

To find relevant sites, you can conduct a link gap analysis with an SEO tool like Moz’s Link Explorer.

You’ll get a list of sites that are linking to your competitors but not to you. This should help you pinpoint easy link-building opportunities because of two reasons:

• Sites that are already linking to your competitors are more likely to link to you if you reach out.
• These sites are probably related to your industry and have an appropriate audience.

After you finish your analysis, you’ll have a list of sites that are good candidates for hosting your backlinks.

Now what?

3. Find High-Quality Links

Now you’re ready for the final step before you seal the deal — examining the quality of the sites you’ve collected.

Site quality is important because it determines the link quality.  

(And you should double-check it yourself because your competitors may have chosen low-quality sites for their backlinks.)

One way to assess a site’s quality is to establish its DA and DR scores. We’ve explained what they are in the section on link building pricing scales.

To discover these scores, you can use Ahrefs and Moz. Simply enter the URL you want to examine:

Most SEO experts consider DA and DR at 20+ acceptable.

4. Plan Your Drip Dates

Drip dates are the dates on which you’ll introduce the backlinks you’ve built or bought. 

But why would you spend time planning dates if you can have all your links published at once?  

One word: Google.

Google doesn’t encourage buying links. They would prefer you build them naturally. So, you should avoid raising eyebrows by getting 50 sites suddenly start linking to yours.

In other words, releasing many backlinks at once will signal that perhaps your links aren’t earned but bought — and this can lead to Google penalizing you.

That’s why you should release your backlinks slowly and methodically over time. So, again, plan your drip dates.

5. Track Your Results

The number one mistake people make is they don’t track their results after buying backlinks. We get that it’s not exactly the most exciting part of the process. But it’s crucial.

Without keeping an eye on your analytics, you can’t know whether your investment was worth it.

You can start or even stick to tracking only these metrics:

• Page Authority: The authority of specific pages on your site should improve after getting backlinks that link to them.
• Domain Authority: The overall authority of your domain should improve, too.
• Organic and Referral Traffic: You should see a spike in organic and referral traffic because high-quality backlinks create more avenues to your site and help you rank higher on SERPs.

If you don’t see an increase in these metrics, chances are you’ve invested in a low-quality backlink.

There isn’t much you can do about it after you’ve paid for a link, as most sellers don’t offer guarantees or refunds.

What you can do is switch to another seller or, better yet, hire an expert who will assess the link quality for you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I buy backlinks on Fiverr?

We wouldn’t advise buying backlinks on Fiverr. Many case studies, like this one, have concluded that Fiverr sellers mainly deliver low-quality, nofollow links.

These won’t help you rank. In fact, they’ll probably hurt your backlink profile and your rankings.

Is it illegal to buy links?

No, buying links isn’t illegal.

Does Google care about backlinks?

Yes, Google cares about backlinks. It uses them as signals of authority. The more backlinks link to your site, the higher its perceived trustworthiness – and the higher your site will rank.

So, Should You Invest In Link Building?

You should invest in link building if you want to gain visibility and grow your audience. Nowadays, it’s virtually impossible to achieve those outcomes without backlinks.

But keep in mind that you need to know how to assess link quality before making an investment. Otherwise, you risk wasting your money.

The problem is that reliable assessment can take a lot of time and resources.

If you don’t know how to do it yourself — or just don’t feel like doing it — we can help. Schedule a free consultation today and discover how we can get you high-quality backlinks that yield results.

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