I Hired a Terrible Backlink Building Agency…Here’s What Happened
Thinking of outsourcing your backlink building? In today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you exactly what I learned from my experience of hiring a backlink building agency and how you can avoid making the same mistakes.
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0:00 - Introduction to I Hired a Terrible Backlink Building Agency
0:12 - How I got into this situation
A couple months or so ago, I caught up with an old mentor of mine and one of the big recommendations she gave me for the company I work for a site is to just start backlink building efforts.
Essentially, we were at this point in which we needed backlinks to continue raising our domain authority.
She mentioned that she had a great agency that she's used for several years in terms of backlink building and both of the respective companies she's worked for.
At the very beginning, it seemed really promising.
A few weeks later, they had an outreacher for me, and so from there we started onboarding that outreacher.
2:30 - This is where the problem started
Pretty much, I was under the impression hiring this outreacher that they already had all of this documentation in place in terms of what was the difference between a good link and a bad link? What sort of prospects should you actually be reaching out for versus the ones that might be PBNs or other bad sites.
And it slowly unveiled to itself that this outreacher was a really new outreacher to their team.
3:14 - Digging into the work they've done for me
Here we take a look at the actual spreadsheet to see exactly what sort of work the outreacher did.
We started around March 16th or so, and this was a lot of prospecting pre-work in which we were just getting a list of prospects that might be good for us.
In fact, by the end of it, we got a total of 16 backlinks and 115 replies but for that, he actually had outreached 960 different prospects. So if you do the math on that 115, over nine 60, that works out to about a 12% reply rate.
When you look at the fact that this outreacher got 16 backlinks for 960 prospects that reflects a 1.67% conversion rate.
5:11 - Here's what I've learned from this experience
If you're looking for a budget backlink builder, you pretty much will get what you pay for. In this particular situation, this is a pretty basic backlink builder that I paid for.
The agency mentioned that they had more experienced backlink builders, but it would cost three times the price of what I actually paid.
Another thing that I learned was that in the case for somebody is selling you something as some sort of services, you should always be wary and make sure that you're giving them a lot of attention in those early weeks of onboarding.
The third thing that I'd say that I learned from this experience is that sometimes it still is useful to bring in some contracting help.
The fourth thing is, in the case where your link building agency cannot get you results within a two month time period, you should go ahead and move on.
The fifth thing that I learned from this experience is trust but verify.
8:53 - Here's what I did to rectify the sitation
The first thing I did was I fired the firm. I found that they weren't really useful in terms of the actual work product that they were creating and they couldn't get to the standards that I wanted.
The second thing that I did was I actually went on to Upwork and started posting RFPs for people that were going to cost anywhere from three to four times more than the outeacher's price per hour.
The third thing that I'm doing differently, which is with my new backlink builder, I essentially created the documentation from scratch and I'm training him from the ground up of exactly what I want done for my respective backlink building efforts.
✍️ COMMENT BELOW:
What are your tips when hiring a backlink building agency?
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Disclaimer: Grow with Will does not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice. This video, and the ideas presented in it, are for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal or accounting advice.