Link building pricing can vary from around $100 to over $1,500 per link (with competitive niches even reaching ~$2,000), depending on the industry you are in. Typical campaign budgets range from $3,000 up to $25,000 per month in 2025, often tied to content marketing initiatives that also drive secondary KPIs.

However, if you’re Googling (or ChatGPTing) “link building cost,” you likely want to know how much you’d pay someone to manually build backlinks for you. That answer is very different — and it can often lead you down the wrong path.

Siege Media is a 110-person organic growth agency that generates thousands of links per month for our clients.

Link building is what we do, and as part of that process we actually turn away clients, because either manual link building isn’t right for them or the ROI just isn’t there.

In fact, only 21.4% of link builders in 2025 say they use manual outreach as their main strategy (down from 38.2% in 2024) reflecting a shift toward more scalable link acquisition methods.

In this post, we’ll break down why that is, how to know if manual link building is right for you, and what to do instead if you find that it isn’t.

The Value of Links for Your Business

Manual link building isn’t for every business because the ROI may not justify the cost. That doesn’t mean links don’t have value; it just means you may need to earn them through other methods to achieve a positive ROI.

The way we calculate this at Siege is to look at the monthly traffic value (via Ahrefs) of the leading website in your vertical, and then divide it by the number of linking root domains it has. This tells us the average monthly value of a link for that top-ranking site.

We then multiply that number by 24 to create a “lifetime link value” — a reasonable ~two-year period that a link should pass value on the web. Some links drop off the web in that time as pages are removed or redesigned.

This number is a baseline to compare against your manual link costs. We recommend aiming for roughly a 10:1 ratio of lifetime link value to manual link cost to account for the uncertainty in SEO.

As we can see above, CardRatings has a huge value per link. This is pretty rare, and most businesses will should expect to see a lifetime link number between $5,000-$15,000 .

On average, the higher the lifetime link number, the harder it is to generate links.

If your lifetime link value is $8,000 or higher, it’s almost always a good idea to have some manual link building. At that level, it’s unlikely that your brand or other marketing efforts alone will generate enough links to carry your site.

If the number is $5,000 or less, focus on generating links organically to see positive ROI. A counter example of this would be Facebook, who gets linked to so commonly given their brand strength that their lifetime link value is only $52.

In the middle, a hybrid strategy tends to work best. Generate some manual links to your highest-value pages while also creating content that earns organic links.

You can even nudge naturally link-worthy content higher via a few manual backlinks. This mix will often yield lifetime link values in the mid-range of these metrics.

To recap, here are some lifetime link value ranges and expected strategies off each:

  • $7,000+ Lifetime Link Value: Manual link building recommended to win.
  • $3,000-$7,000 Lifetime Link Value: Link building is important but would ideally be part of a hybrid strategy based on generating links to passive link assets, and manual links to the most important pages on the site.
  • <$3,000 Lifetime Link Value: Links should be generated organically (focus on publishing more/better content to accelerate natural link growth).

The Cost of Manual Link Building

So… if you know you need manual links, how much should you expect to pay per outcome? As mentioned above, if your lifetime link value skews into the $12,000+ range, I would expect quality links to cost around $800-$1,000+ to generate on average.

This is because these numbers occur in verticals where it’s difficult to generate them due to the commercial association with their topics, such as legal, insurance, and credit cards.

The lower your lifetime link value, the less you should expect to pay per link. For verticals around the $7,000-$12,000 range, links typically cost about $600-$800 each (and these niches often attract some organic links on their own).

As you get under $7,000 and closer to $4,000 or $3,000, you really shouldn’t consider the cost per link at all.

At that point, links should be a byproduct of other efforts (like content marketing or digital PR). Focus on the success of those efforts as an indirect measure of your links’ value.

What Do Manual Link Vendors Charge?

There are link building vendors out there that will charge you for one-off links. These links are usually acquired via guest posts or paid link placements (sometimes both).

For 95% of businesses, this is the only viable way to get links without a content component. As a result, costs have become standardized, and you’ll typically pay around $500-$1,250 per link depending on the site’s authority and relevance.

We’re biased at Siege because we generate links through hosted content on-site almost always. We believe in this model because it allows you to generate passive links more often, as well as secondary if not primary KPIs such as direct sales.

In our experience, lifetime link value through this model can be as low as $250 for just the links, and that’s before all the secondary benefits content marketing has.

Add to that the fact that organic, content-driven links are what Google prefers to reward. When you weigh all the facts, it’s hard to justify going the off-page route at all.

How to Think About Link Building Cost

To recap, the cost-effectiveness of link building depends on how much value each link brings to your business, and how difficult it is to earn links in your vertical.

If you do the math on lifetime link value, you’ll often find that paying someone $600-$1,000 for a manual link by itself (with no other benefits) does not make sense.

That’s why you should crunch the numbers (or have an expert do it) before pursuing links that may not actually have any real value for you.

Befuddled by the math? Check out our link building services and get in touch for a free assessment of the value links and content have for you. One of the things we’re most proud of is only working with clients we’re confident we can generate significant ROI for.

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