Real outreach to real sites, with the numbers reported honestly. A handful of good links a month, not fifty from places nobody visits.
The easiest targets are sites that have already linked to two or three businesses like yours. They cover your industry, they accept this kind of link, and they've proved it.
Who links to whom
ExampleThis is the first thing we do, and it usually produces a target list of somewhere between twenty and eighty realistic sites. That list gets sent to you before a single email goes out, because you'll recognise names we won't and you may have relationships we don't know about.
Outreach asking for a link with nothing behind it gets ignored, and it should. These are the four things that give an email a reason to exist.
Numbers from your own business or a survey of your market. Journalists and bloggers need figures to cite, and there are never enough of them.
Looks likeAverage repair costs across 400 jobs, broken down by property age.
A calculator, a checklist, a template. People link to tools because linking is the easiest way to share one.
Looks likeA cost estimator that gives a real range instead of asking for an email.
If your page is the best answer to a question people keep asking, it gets cited over time without any outreach at all.
Looks likeA guide to the new regulations that a trade body ends up pointing at.
A view on something changing in your industry, from someone who actually does the work. Quotable, and quotes come with links.
Looks likeTwenty minutes of your time turned into expert comment on a deadline.
Notice that three of these need something only you have. That's the honest constraint of link building: an agency can run the process, find the targets, and write the emails, but the substance has to come from your business. Campaigns where the client supplies nothing are the campaigns that end up buying links.
Most people are surprised by these numbers, so here they are before you commit to anything rather than in month three.
The shape of a typical month
Illustrative, not a promise. Real numbers vary enormously by industry, by how strong the asset is, and by how well known you already are.
The clickable text of a link is a signal. Natural link profiles are messy, and a tidy one where every link says the same thing is a pattern Google looks for.
What earned links look like
What bought links look like
The awkward implication is that you mostly don't get to choose the words. When someone links to you naturally, they write whatever suits their sentence. Asking every site to use your target phrase is how a profile ends up looking like the panel on the right.
Three things, and the second one is the part most agencies leave out.
The page it's on, the page it points to, the words used, and how it came about. If we can't explain how a link happened, it doesn't belong in the report.
How many sites were researched, contacted, and replied. A month with a lot of work and few links is a real outcome, and hiding the denominator is how agencies avoid admitting that.
Which angles worked, which didn't, and what changes next month. If nothing is working after a fair run, we'll say that rather than repeating it.
We won't quote a guaranteed number, because the only way to guarantee one is to buy them. What we'll do is set a realistic expectation for your industry once we've seen the target list.
Some months produce more than expected because one piece of coverage brings several links with it. Some produce almost nothing. Both are normal over a longer run.
No. Not for links, not as a "content contribution fee", not through a middleman who calls it something else.
It's the main reason the numbers are lower than what you'll be quoted elsewhere. The full list of what we avoid and why is on the off-page SEO page.
More than other SEO work. Realistically an hour or two a month from someone who knows the business, plus approving the target list at the start.
What we need is usually your data, a quick answer on a technical question, or a quote on something happening in your industry. Short inputs, and they're what make the outreach work.
Not really, and this catches people out. Nobody links to a service page selling something, because there's no reason to point their readers at it.
Links go to things worth linking to, then internal links pass some of that value to the pages that make you money. That's why the two have to be planned together.
Months, and it's gradual rather than a step change. A single link almost never moves anything on its own, which makes early progress hard to see.
This is the slowest thing we do. If you need movement inside a quarter, on-page work and paid search are the honest answers and we'd say so.
Often no, and we'd tell you. In plenty of local and specialist markets, the sites ranking above you don't have many links either, and the gap is content or on-page work instead.
Link building earns its cost when everyone at the top has already done the rest properly. Checking that first takes half an hour and saves months of spend.
It comes last, after the site itself is in order, because links pointing at a weak site achieve very little. Pricing sits on the main SEO page.
Other SEO services
Thirty minutes comparing your links against whoever ranks above you, and an honest answer either way.
Or email hello@culmen.digital