Link building for search engine optimization is almost a requirement now if you want your website to rank well in Google and Bing. Without link building, websites will languish way back on the 10th, 20th or 30th page receiving no love for their search terms.
The challenge with link building is how to manage it internally. Most companies and website owners realize pretty quickly that it is too much for them to handle and end up outsourcing it. Let’s now look at a few reasons why they often choose this route.
#1. Time Limitations
There are many facets to link building. It includes chasing down high-powered links as well as pillowing links that are lower quality yet pad out the link distribution. Getting enough social signals and citations to balance out the power links avoids you from being penalized for a poorly optimized link profile.
Managing the link building, social media activity, and on-page SEO requirements for a single website is too much for most companies. It’s not their central focus – they’re busy running their business – and they don’t have time to give link building the undivided attention that it deserves. A part-time SEO practitioner trying to outrank a professional SEO team isn’t going to win. The time limitations quickly prevent a company from doing as well as they might otherwise do.
#2. Lack of In-House Knowledge
An SEO agency usually has a team of people. Each person is a specialist in their own right. When they specialize, they can go deep into their chosen area and yield better results than what a generalist can produce.
For instance, someone who focuses on broken link building will develop techniques for finding websites that have outbound links pointing to now defunct pages. They have preferred, tested approaches to succeed in getting their link as the chosen replacement for the offline one. Performing this task many times each day, they refine their approach to find the largest number of potential targets and the highest success rate for placing a link on these sites.
A company that is in a different type of industry is going to struggle trying to run SEO in-house. It won’t be cost-efficient, and they’ll lose money try to make it so. Some businesses with an IT department will mistakenly think that it’s just an extension of that and try to get one of their IT team members to move into SEO and link building campaigns. That would be a mistake.
#3. Fast Moving Industry
SEO changes monthly. Every few days to a couple of weeks, Google updates their search algorithm, and the frequency of the updates has sped up in the last few years. The implications of these changes to how search results are created in Google often results in a modification or ripping out of a strategy that was previously successful but is now not acceptable. When companies do not have the time to keep up with the SEO industry, it’s all too easy to do the wrong thing for too long and get a penalty because of it.
A reliable SEO agency is going to have their finger on the pulse of every change in the rhythm of Google’s heartbeat. It’s the only way to get the best results possible and avoid the pitfalls that are coming. They won’t do everything right – sometimes updates happen without advance warning like the recent ‘Your Money of Your Life’ (YMOYL) update – but other times, they can avoid problems before they occur.
#4. There is a for Need Higher Level Contacts to Secure the Best Backlinks
The quality of backlinks is partly based on the trust that Google and Bing have for the website/page linking out and how many other outbound links they have. Using metrics like the MozTrust, Moz’s Domain Authority and Page Authority, provides an indication of how useful a link from that website/page will be.
Backlinks are based on a logarithmic scale. Therefore, a link from a site with a Page Authority rating of 50 is significantly more valuable than a site with a Page Authority of 25. A website doesn’t make up the ground by having twice as many links from sites with a Page Authority of 25 and go home. It doesn’t work that way.
Getting access to websites that offer high page authority and high domain authority is not easy. It requires building up a wide range of professional contacts who are happy to supply a link perhaps in exchange for a guest post on their site. These business relationships don’t develop overnight, which means any company bringing someone in-house is likely going to need significant time to develop the right contacts.
The better agencies have the best contacts. In many ways, that’s their unique selling point. It’s what separates them from other agencies that don’t share their reach or scale.
#5. Leave It to the Professionals
With an SEO team that you outsource to, it’s their sole focus to deliver better ranking results for their clients. They’re not running a completely separate business and have SEO as an offshoot. It’s what they do all day. Every day.
When leveraging better connections, the right tools and the latest techniques, you want people who are dedicated to their task in this fast-moving business.
#6. Need to Disavow Bad In-bound Links
Every website picks up spammy links they don’t want. Usually, it’s a competitor trying to damage the ranking of the site because when it has too many bad links, it’s ranking position falls. Taking the time to search for new unwanted backlinks is a time-consuming process but a necessary one to protect the organic traffic still being received daily from search engines. But the process is a real headache for companies to manage alone. An SEO agency has a dedicated person for that.
It’s difficult to argue a case for handling your link building campaigns internally. Getting the best results is usually only achieved from outsourcing it to people who live and breathe SEO.