Link Building Agency vs Freelancer: Which One Should You Choose?

A link building agency is a marketing firm specializing in supplying clients with backlinks, fulfilling internal linking needs, and facilitating press releases. 

Agencies are grouped teams of link builders and SEO experts who work in tandem to deliver high-quality backlinks from relevant sites with the purpose of getting clients to rank higher on search engine results pages. 

A link building agency does:

• Team-Based Delivery: Host page discovery, outreach, and placement are all conducted by multiple people working in tandem.
• Specialized Quality Control: Responsibilities are spread out across members who are strong at each step, leading to mistakes and oversight being less common.
• Account Management: Clients are often provided with a dedicated account manager who handles structured reports and updates. 
• General SEO Provisions: The best link building agencies are usually also equipped with fine tuned SEO capabilities other than earning backlinks, providing expertise into overall site optimization.

A freelance link builder is an individual who specializes in backlink placements. 

Backlink freelancers are independent professionals who run the entire process of link building on their own, usually at hourly or per placement rates. These professionals often focus on smaller scale projects to give a light boost to a page’s search engine rankings.

A link building freelancer does:

• Solo Execution: One person is responsible for the entire process of vetting, analysis and outreach. 
• Direct Communication: The freelancer takes care of link building and communication with the client, providing a direct channel of dialogue between both parties. 
• Link Building Specialization: Freelancers are purely focused on executing link building needs.

Pricing

Most obviously, an individual freelance link builder is more likely to provide you with their services for a cheaper price than a link building agency. Nevertheless, it’s invaluable to understand what goes into that stark difference in cost, instead of blindly following the smaller number on the price tag.

• Link Building Agency: You’ll often find that agencies offer their services in the form of link building packages. These packages necessitate regular payments in the form of either monthly, quarterly or annual transactions. Furthermore, when agencies do provide per link purchases, you’ll likely be paying more for them. This is because agencies are teams of multiple people fulfilling different roles which ensure an attribute of expertise and safety that cannot be replicated. 
• Freelance Link Builder: Freelancers provide cheaper deals thanks to their common practice of offering backlinks on a per placement basis. Furthermore, on sites like Upwork you can find contractors who work at hourly rates. Nevertheless, for long-term sustainability and for bigger project plans, you start to understand why exactly freelancers don’t charge as much as agencies, considering their lack of resources as one man teams. 

Speed

Agencies distribute their workloads into different departments which work parallel to each other, leading to quicker attainments of backlinks than a single independent freelancer can manage. 

• Link Building Agency: Agencies have separate members of their teams fulfilling different roles, which allows for their workforce to work in tandem and make placements easier and quicker. While link building is still a time-consuming process and can take weeks before you see your backlinks placed, an agency’s combined efforts bring forth quicker results.
• Freelance Link Builder: Freelancers run the entire link building process themselves, which includes vetting, competitor analysis, outreach, placement etc. Due to this, you’ll often find that even if freelance link builders have contacts and industry connections which can act as shortcuts for their outreach (agencies are just as likely to have such connections), it’ll still take longer than a full team for quality placements. 

Scalability

Link building agencies are designed to work for long-term high-scale projects, as their faster output paired with their maintenance of quality becomes attractive for goals requiring deeper backlink profiles. In contrast, link freelancers are more appropriate for endeavours on a smaller scale.

• Link Building Agency: Agencies can not only lay a very reputable foundation of links for a website, they can scale those links appropriately after gauging a given client’s need for backlinks. They can supply a site with 15 links one month and then shift to 30 the next, creating a sustainable rise for a page throughout the entire course of one partnership. This is all thanks to the amount of resources agencies have at their disposal, allowing them to allocate time and manpower to appropriate areas of need.
• Freelance Link Builder: Freelance linkers usually have fixed working hours throughout a week, limiting their potential backlink output. Granted, these hours can be increased through a mutual agreement, but considering the fact that freelancers are just one person, there’s a cap for how much your volume of link attainment can be increased. 

Reliability

Freelancers could come across issues which derail the time they can put into getting backlinks, while agencies are constantly able to compensate because of their larger staff.

• Link Building Agency: Since agencies work thanks to various moving parts, and those parts are usually interchangeable. This allows for teams to make up for sudden losses in personnel by allocating employees to compensate. 
• Freelance Link Builder: Freelancers can potentially get sick, or have an unforeseen event take the stage in their lives. Due to these unexpected factors, your flow of backlinks could be suddenly cut off, which may throw a wrench into your plans. 

Quality Control

The differences in quality between agencies and freelancers for backlinks depends more so on your own awareness when choosing a specific service provider. However, agencies have more specialized divisions within their workforce which allows for a higher likelihood of quality placements.

• Link Building Agency: Agencies usually spread their duties across their team members, allowing for more specialized members to tackle aspects of the link building process which they excel at. Thanks to this, mistakes and oversights are much less common for agencies.
• Freelance Link Builder: With freelance link builders, you’re trusting a single person’s methods of evaluation and judgement. While this can provide you with more confidence in an individual provider once you do realize you accept their approaches, it can potentially lead to some less favorable results if you get things wrong.

Both models of outsourcing can take shortcuts such as reselling marketplace links or using PBNs when providing you with backlinks. Ensure that you trust their efforts before choosing an agency or a freelancer. 

Risk

While both outreach models are often bound by agreements to deliver their sides of the bargain, agencies usually have more to lose in terms of managing their reputation than freelancers. 

• Link Building Agency: Agencies have an entire brand of their own attached to their services. One individual missing expectations doesn’t bode well for the entire organization, creating a tendency of risk aversion.
• Freelance Link Builder: With freelancers, you’re putting your faith into one person’s tendencies when link building to deliver results. As such, you’ll often need additional oversight on their processes in order to ensure that things are going smoothly.

Additional Services

Agencies are equipped with additional SEO services and abilities, while freelancers often focus solely on link building.

• Link Building Agency: Agencies have the ability to also offer general SEO provisions on top of their link building amenities, as their larger teams allow for smaller changes to be made in order to facilitate longer-term growth.
• Freelance Link Builder: Freelance link builders are SEO savvy but are most often hyperfocused on completing their backlink responsibilities, making more general SEO advantages difficult to provide. 

Marketing Expense

Agencies can count as a marketing expense, while that’s not always the case for freelancers.

• Link Building Agency: Taxes are not applicable for marketing expenses, and in most scenarios you can easily count a partnership with an agency as a marketing expense. 
• Freelance Link Builder: Freelancers sometimes bill through informal channels, payment apps, or incomplete receipts, which can lead to such expenses being considered non-marketing because of a lack of proper paper trails. 

Payment Methods

The line of work for agencies necessitates multiple payment types, while freelancers usually only use the most popular types. 

• Link Building Agency: Agencies are able to accept payments and transfers through almost any payment method thanks to their porous client list. 
• Freelance Link Builder: Freelancers are usually limited to a handful of payment options which are used most across their own country or industry they work in.

Now that you know the key differences between the two service models, it’s time to choose which option is right for you and your organization. 

When To Choose a Link Building Agency

You should choose a link building agency when:

• You’re in a competitive market: Agencies excel at providing high quality backlinks which take successful competitors into account and can be supplied into high doses, benefiting clients in competitive industries.
• You need consistent monthly volume and scale: If you’ve got long term projects and plans, you’ll need sustainable monthly supply and scalability. Agencies provide amenities for those needs thanks to their higher manpower.
• You want to outsource the entire process: If you hire an agency, you’re going to be entrusting all procedures of link building to their workforce. While constant reports will still be conducted, agencies give you the privilege of not having to worry about the process. 
• You have a larger budget: While agencies are worth their price of entry, it is important that you acknowledge whether or not you can continuously pay for their services, as they’re more on the pricier side. 

When To Choose a Freelance Link Builder

You should choose a freelance link builder when:

• You have a tighter budget: Freelancers don’t cost as much as other methods of getting backlinks and require much less commitment. 
• You want more direct communication: You always talk with the one person doing the work when partnering with a freelancer, allowing you to keep one line of dialogue. 
• You want to have more oversight: It’s easier to follow through with all the processes and approaches that a freelancer employs considering the fact that you’re maintaining direct communication with them. 
• You have a smaller/short-term project: Freelancers are better for quick batches of links which help to boost a small project. Though unideal for once you want to improve scale, they do help for when your goals are much more short-term.

When To Choose Both

You may have heard of recommendations which entail that you start off your website’s project with a freelance link builder before moving on to an agency. However, in truth, if you’ve already established a partnership with a capable freelancer, you’re better off keeping them and finding other ways to address potential gaps that the freelancer cannot fill, like simply hiring another freelancer. 

Nevertheless, if you do want to employ the help of an agency while still retaining your freelancers, you can do so by ordering a feasible strategy. 

Agencies are experts at vetting your site and your competitors, allowing them to build a comprehensible roadmap for link building which will help your company reach its potential. In this scenario, you can request agencies to run these sorts of strategy evaluation for your agency, then provide that strategy to your freelancer. Freelancers are specialized in execution, so if you give them a plan formed by a capable link building agency, they won’t disappoint. 

Link building agencies and freelancers are both viable options for getting your site’s search rankings up to scratch. Nevertheless, you should think about which one is more appropriate for your plans and goals, as their differences in pricing and scalability can impact your business in a major way. Additionally, regardless of your choice, you must be vigilant of who you’re hiring, since both models of outreach can easily disguise their more manipulative practices and act as if they’re supplying you with high-tier links.