Hiring in-house versus outsourcing link building
Whether to hire someone or buy the capacity is mostly a question about how many clients you have and how predictable they are. Here is the arithmetic, including the part where hiring wins.
Where hiring genuinely beats us
You get someone in the room. They sit in client calls, they hear the context that never makes it into a brief, and they will notice things about a client site that a supplier working from a ticket never will. That is worth real money and we cannot replicate it.
They also build institutional knowledge. Two years in, a good in-house SEO knows your accounts better than any external ever could, and that compounds. If link building is the thing your agency is known for, keeping it inside is the right call and you should ignore most of what follows.
Where it goes wrong
The cost starts on day one and the output does not. A competent link builder is somewhere around three to five thousand a month all in, and you are paying that through the ramp, through the quiet months, and through the gap after they leave. Publisher relationships walk out of the door with them.
Then there is utilisation. A full-time hire needs enough client work to stay busy. Below that line you are paying a salary to produce a handful of links a month, which is a considerably worse per-link cost than buying them.
Side by side
| An in-house link builder | The Stark SEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost before the first link exists | A month or two of salary | Nothing |
| Time to first placement | 2 to 3 months including ramp | 2 to 7 days |
| Understands the client deeply | Yes, and improves over time | Only what you brief |
| Cost when client work dries up | Unchanged | Nothing |
| Publisher relationships | Theirs, and they leave with them | Ours, and they stay |
| Scales down | Redundancy | Order less |
| Scales up | Hire again | Order more |
| Sits in client calls | Yes | No |
So which one
If you have enough retained client work to keep a person busy every month and SEO is core to what you sell, hire. The knowledge compounds and you will be glad of it in year two.
If your volume moves around, or link building is one line item among several, buying the capacity is cheaper and reverses without a redundancy conversation. Plenty of agencies do both: someone in-house who owns strategy, and a supplier for the placements.
The usual questions
The other comparison
FATJOE versus buying the sites yourself
FATJOE is the most widely used link supplier in the agency market, and the comparison comes down to one structural difference: they sell you a metric, we sell you a named site. Both are legitimate. They suit different people, and the honest answer depends on how much you want to be involved.
Adsy versus a list somebody already vetted
Adsy is the closest thing to us in the market and by far the hardest comparison to write honestly, because we are the same shape: a marketplace, publishers named, prices published, you choose. The difference is scale and who checked the sites — and on scale they win outright.
The HOTH versus choosing your own publishers
The HOTH is one of the most recognised names in white label SEO and is usually where an agency starts. The model is a productised menu: fixed products at fixed prices, ordered like items in a shop. Ours is a list of named sites at individual prices. Both work; they suit different temperaments.
Loganix versus a list you can see without asking
Loganix sits at the premium, managed end of this market and is closer to a consultancy than a shop. They run a large database you can filter and an expert-selected service where their team chooses for you. The comparison is mostly about how much of the decision you want to keep.
Outreach tools versus buying placements
Outreach tools cost a hundred or two a month against hundreds per placement. That gap is real and worth understanding properly rather than dismissing.
Have a look at the list
Every site with its price, nothing to fill in first, and nothing to pay unless a link actually goes live. 365 days of cover on every placement.
Open the marketplace