Paid an overseas freelancer $1500 and about $1200 to webmasters for backlinks. How can I do this myself?

[gur_preet13]

I read your whole post and found your freelancer just charge you overpay, and even not showing your results of his work.
1. Did he send you daily report of backlinks sites where he worked
2. Weekly Google analytics, webmaster report, how much traffic improved by his work
3. How much alexa, DA, PA improved ?
4. How visibile and ranking your site on local searches with high quality keywords
5. Local directories, classified, business listings

All these and many more factors improtant to improve local SEO and traffic.

DM me we will discuss all there!!

[emiltsch]

They probably just used a link building program, for some low quality links and it only cost them a few hours of their time & possibly $100. (To pay for the program used)

True link building is an art form, takes a lot of time and an incredible amount of organization & time-management.

Plus, balancing quality & quantity is the tricky part.

Recommendations:

– Use a tool like SPYfu to find your competitor’s links and other opportunities. Their platform helps organize the process and includes email templates for requesting links.

– If you can, hire a professional for at least 6 months to get it going. (If you intend to manage it)

– Set your expectations and agree to your definitions of success.

Good luck!

Edit: Added rec’s.

[MiamiHeatAllDay]

Sounds about right for pricing if they are a quality SEO and if the backlinks are relevant.

Was the strategy and expectation of a result explained to you in the beginning?

[sahilsharma_bs]

Your freelancer might have overcharged you but well I think we should not give an opinion here without seeing the quality of those links.

Restwise an outreach manager’s first priority will be to get a link for free through outreach or like below 30 USD. Elsewise you can easily follow a list, contact people and buy links simply eliminating his role.

Motrovrr if you are paying 100 usd/link I am sure your freelancer is keeping his commission as well on per link basis.

Since you mentioned it’s an IT business and needs to be ranked for local keywords ( Again we are unsure local region here is LA or Bangalore ) I would pretty much recommend you to look for guest posting.

Many good IT sites accept guest posts for free and you can rxprct.good referral traffic from them by offering quality content.

It’s more about your connections here. Participate in forums, groups related to the technologies you work and make connections.

Best of luck

[175IRE]

Hire me. I am much cheaper if that’s what you paid him only to do outreach.

Otherwise you csn outreach yourself but it’s a long process. If you are a local business I. E. Work within 100 miles it can be much easier. Dm me if you want free advice.

[-world-]

To be honest no one here can tell if you overpaid or not just by the information provided, if these links are of high quality then you could have actually even underpaid but if the links are garbage/pbns then its a whole different story. Stop listening to half of the people here asking silly question no one can tell you if you overpaid or underpaid unless they have the data of websites the links were placed. Things to look out for a quality website are mainly organic traffic and links pointing to that website. Thats just the simple way of looking at it, there are many other factors to assess the quality of the links.

[cannotbecensored]

well finding and contracting (relevant quality) sites take forever. It is the correct SEO strategy. Did you overpay? Maybe a bit. Try doing it yourself, see how long it takes. Then hire someone to do it and set specific expectations.

Now if the sites are not relevant and not quality, you definitely got screwed.

[odious_pen]

You’re getting taken for a sleigh ride. Your campaign sounds like a mirror image of one I ran a couple of months ago and I suspect we got a much better “product” for the money.

* The campaign involved a similar work effort: identify & contact ~ 50 websites in our niche, with stringent guidelines around content relevancy and domain authority.
* Several sites asked for payment and we rejected them; upon deeper review, many of these sites had other risk factors (indiscriminate link profile, low traffic, thin content) which indicated these were really not “safe” links and the site was getting over-sold
* I estimate the effort took her about 15 – 20 hours; this was also her first project on Upwork, so a fair amount of that time was training and learning. Part of this time was spent learning about the process (I paid flat fee, it didn’t matter to me).
* We netted less links (6 sites) but they were of extremely high relevancy and quality.

I suspect you might be getting skinned at multiple levels:

* Your web designer is probably getting a kick-back from the link building guy
* 120 hours is easily 4 X – 8 X as long as this task should take
* He’s actually getting too many links (50% is too high, even with payment)- wondering if part of that list is basically some link seller’s private blog network in which case you’re buying links that are sold all over town and carry a fairly strong penalty risk over time… (he would likely be getting kickback on those sales from the PBN operator)

[MotasemHa]

As others said its hard to exactly determine whether you’ve overpaid or underpaid as the data about the quality of the links isn’t available.

Three ways to evaluate and get a handle over what happened:

1- See what is the DA, PA and monthly traffic to said backlinks

2- Monitor and observe the organic traffic to your site starting from Google Analytics and Google webmaster.

3- Don’t forget to check out the manual actions section in the webmaster to see whether you have been hit by penguin or not.

[theeastcoastwest]

I think that it helps to understand the process but also that the time scale and the fees are within reason. I found that a lot of freelancers, especially those working for someone for the first time, are maybe a little overzealous and how they qualify websites.

Pulling metrics for sites like that also isn’t a free action in most cases. A lot of programs that provide metrics like that are priced on a quota basis such that a freelancer might only be able to run traffic reports for 50 or so websites per day. on the other hand, there’s plenty of tools out there that have unmetered analytics. SEM Rush is one such tool.

One of the best ways that I found to seed an outreach campaign, especially when it’s one that you have to provide instructions for a contractor, is to get several export files from AHrefs backlinks reports of websites that rank for similar keywords..

Filter the list of backlinks for in content and do follow attributes. Filter down to a single domain, and then just start firing down the list shooting emails asking for posting rates and etc.

At a very casual, very manual pace, you can squeeze in 35 or So emails in an hour’s worth of work.

I’d recommend using a spreadsheet on the side to keep track of email addresses and website domain names, and then just mail merge once you have everything put together. I find keeping tasks compartmentalized usually helps keep an optimal workflow.

TL;DR You’re probably overpaying and the freelancer is probably spending too much time prospecting but I wouldn’t point the finger of blame necessarily. Better instructions help create better contractors.

[pmmeyournooks]

Paying 25-100 dollar per link sounds pretty normal in this field. There are some websites that charge as high as 250 dollars. It depends on the DA and traffic of that website.

I still don’t think there’s enough evidence to suggest your guy cheated you.

Please do the following:

* Learn the difference between dofollow and no follow
* Learn what’s meant by DA
* Get a subscription to Ahrefs or Moz. It’s only 99 dollars per month.
* See the DA of the links you got. If they’re high DA and doesn’t look like spammy poorly made websites, then you got your money’s worth.
* Check the websites you got links to. Does it feel like
a. It was made with an audience in mind
b. Or it was just made so that webmaster could make a quick buck off selling links.

This can be difficult unless you have an eye for it but if you see that the websites content is poor and isn’t ranking for any keywords, then there’s a good chance it’s just made to sell links.

Also about the time issue: Again Yes, I can see how it might actually take that long if he’s doing things by the book.
Finding good websites take time. Reaching out to them and getting a reply takes time. If you mail 10 people 2 people will actually reply.

I honestly believe your guy deserves the benefit of the doubt but everything he’s delivered needs be verified.

[swanhunter]

I will take a somewhat contrarian view and say that it doesn’t sound to me like you have been duped at all.

The fact that you are able to write the articles yourself and so have editorial control on links and anchor text shows that the manual blogger outreach is real. This isn’t some shady link-building scheme. You can easily confirm the DA, DR and Majestic (TF, CF) metrics for the links that have been built so far. To give you an idea many SEO agencies or private businesses would pay $200+ for a DA 40+ link with no control over the content of the blog. You have paid approximately $120 per link (I assume they are all dofollow and different domains) and this is actually potentially reasonable value for money (depending on the metrics I have mentioned).

Can you try to do this yourself? Yes. But you need to check some things first: do you already have a list of blogs you could approach? If so why were you not doing it already? What is your approach going to be? Are you writing engaging content? Do you actually need to outsource this too? Writing articles for blogger outreach isn’t the same as getting them to link to content already on your site.

As to expectations- it depends: Is your onsite SEO already optimised? Do you have AMP pages? Lighthouse metrics? There are lots of other factors that google considers for SERP outcomes and especially after the May 2020 update these are very important. You would typically have to wait 10 weeks to see a significant rankings improvement from link building.

[Subbytubedotcom]

Everyone will charge you up for something that could be done easily by professionals.

I suggest you ->> [speedbacklinks.com](https://speedbacklinks.com)

Yeah, it’s a service I provide together with my team.

The main reason for it, it’s the blog, which brings you a lot of details about SEO and how to do backlinking for FREE!

No reason to get upset, I am trying to help ->> want cheap quality backlinks?

Come to us! We will do a greater thing than you expect.

[trailbooty]

Udemy has some good courses. Part of what you’re paying for though are the tools they use. Those can get pretty pricey.

[AdorableFlight]

Look up the shotgun skyscraper technique or the skyscraper technique in general.

Authority hackers have a step by step walk through.

Costs are only as follows:

$49 mailshake

$7 ahrefs 7 day trial.

$99 hunter.io

Then you can either pay or get free links. We send out 5,000 emails a month and get 15 free links that our competitors are unable to get.

Building links is probably the easiest part of SEO, especially outreach doesn’t require any technical skill whatsoever.