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
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