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Paid an overseas freelancer $1500 and about $1200 to webmasters for backlinks. How can I do this myself?
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Throwing my 2 cents in here….
Take it for what you think it’s worth….As soon as I read “links pay off and local rankings improve”….
I thought to myself why in the world are you building up backlinks for local rank improvement?
While some can argue all day about the value or the worthlessness in backlinks, both sides should be in agreement that when it comes to local rankings keywords and content are king, and the queen would be Yelp and Google reviews to help visually.
Most web designers are just that, designers and typically know or care little for SEO. They get questions all the time about ranking, and also get blamed frequently for not ranking due to code or unrealistic expectations of web grandeur from first timers.
Link building and the “trust” it creates does not reflect a n rankings quickly, it takes many months and even years until the rewards if any are received for the effort…… Simply put, it’s an effort and not worth it investing into when all other avenues have been exhausted.
Theoretically, if your site has value to a user or a purpose then it would naturally be linked to. Those links take a good while to grow and mature, unlike buying links, and that length of maturity and growth rate has some value to the google search engine.
If I had a client ask me the same I would have directed them towards a Google ads campaign targeting local customers with the services you provide. Now, it stands that you may be in a very competitive business locally and those ads may get expensive, but you stand a far better chance reaping the reward of a new client then you would with links.
In short, drop the link builder and look for a local in town ads manager who will work for 10 percent of the ads budget. -
What’s your website?
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$3k/month for inexperienced outsourced workers is super expensive. You could hire a knowledgeable professional to take care of everything for much less per month.
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You’re getting screwed. You should either pay $7.50/hour for them to get you links OR you should pay for the links. Not both. That’s ridiculous.
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You say you’re using a person on upwork.. They give you a complete record of screenshots while the person is billing time. Why not look at that?
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Looks Like You overpaid but still links quality matters. You can hire someone directly instead of Upwork if you have trust. can you share what work done duration of 40 hour a week.
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Paying websites for backlinks is not generally a good practice if they openly state on their websites that they accept payment for links or guest posts. IMO if I were paying someone to do outreach, I want good quality sites that want to link to good content. That’s just me. PBN’s can also be very risky and any site linked to should be vetted to make sure it’s not a PBN.
If you want to learn more about link building, read the free content of some industry leaders. Everyone has their favorites and some people will slam mine but here goes. The Skyscraper technique is from Brian Dean, check out his very extensive blog and comprehensive YT videos on link building. Matt Diggity also has some very good free content on his blog about link building. There are a few others but I can’t recall and think the aforementioned are solid and a good place to start.
You mention running Google ads. Don’t know if Facebook is relevant in your niche but I run Facebook ads for local businesses very successfully. And at far less cost than Google.
Lastly, your freelancer should be providing the websites contacted and linked to on your spreadsheet, along with the site metrics. You can check/confirm their metrics in Ahrefs, Moz or another tool. As well visit the sites to make sure they are legit. The price you paid may or may not be too high. As someone else suggested, your web developer may be getting a cut. Personally, unless I have trained a VA and know exactly what they are doing, I don’t pay hourly. Agree up front on a flat price.
You mention writing your own content. I am hearing a lot of good things about a tool called Surfer SEO that optimizes content. Haven’t personally used it yet but they have a free trial.
Don’t beat yourself up about whether or not you paid too much. We’ve all overpaid for something and sometimes the lesson is worth it. The pushback and arrogance of some freelancers can be a sign that they’ve been caught out. Move on but keep it nice as you don’t want the person doing any negative SEO to try to do damage. It happens with the unscrupulous. Make sure you change any logins, etc. and keep an eye on GSC metrics.
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Tbh like someone else said, it’s too quick to judge without reviewing the links he built you but imo that is pretty expensive, if the email is sent right in a non-advertisy way – it’s easy to get link built for free sometimes.
If you want, I can review the links for you. Do inbox me
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In the long run buying links is not worth it because those sites are usually less quality and also if they continue to sell links their site will go lower in quality and eventually may become toxic. I had to disavow or delist 100’s of links a business bought that went bad, because google deemed them as spam or toxic.
Paying someone to help you gain organic links is totally fine, however, paid links are highly frowned upon by Google and will get caught eventually.
You should start writing content, very compelling content, that is attractive to your existing target market. In itself will build your credibility with your clients, and the 2nd benefit is that other sites will organically link you. This is the true sign of link authority that Google was founded on.
You can write it yourself, or hire a writer with experience in your industry (i.e. IT). When I worked at Oracle as well as for other IT firms, the marketing teams would write articles that hit different persona’s / and job roles within your market (i.e. C Level message on security and saving costs, as well as to the IT person with IT tips).
You can do all of this yourself or hire consultants to help you. However, it’s better if you drive the strategy and direction. Again, helpful to real customers with be many times the value of just buying links that will eventually disappear or even hurt your SEO score. The content will rank on their own as well as entice people to link to you. Some minor outreach is needed, but now it’s permanent high quality links. 1 high quality links is more value than 100 poor quality links.
For hiring someone at $7.50/hr x 40hrs/wk that has poor experience and grey hat tactics is not worth an experienced quality consultant $40/hr x 7 hrs (Actual ranges are about $30 to $100/hr). Especially when those poor quality links can turn negative on you in the future.
Tools like ahrefs, semrush, moz and others offer some good SEO tools. Google Ads is also a great place to try advertising, and free research on keywords to use on your main site for SEO.
Long story short, don’t buy links (it’s temporary). Don’t hire poor quality. You get less than what you pay for. Google specifically will lower your ranking once they find them.
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