The Hidden Cost of Chasing Your Link Building Vendor Every Month

The client report is due tomorrow. Your link building vendor promised an update earlier this week, but it still hasn’t arrived. 

Your account manager sends another message. Someone from the SEO team checks the spreadsheet. A few placements are live, several are missing, and one points to the wrong page. 

Now your team has to decide what to tell the client. 

Nothing on this list is reflected in the vendor’s bill. But your agency pays for it with staff hours, lost productivity, and pressure on the people responsible for maintaining the client relationship.

The cost of outsourcing link building exceeds the price paid per placement, as well as the work involved in converting the placements to an acceptable product.

The Invoice Only Shows Part of the Cost 

Comparing vendors by placement price is straightforward. Comparing the work they leave for your team is harder. 

Think about a hypothetical order of 20 links for $100 each per month. The invoice is $2,000.

If your team also works an additional 8 hours on updates, delivery verification, report correction, and error fixing, those hours should be considered as well. Your internal staff hourly rate is $40. So, $320.

Thus, the actual cost of delivery will equal $2,320 without any additional client communication yet.

Your numbers might vary between agencies, but the question is relevant: 

What amount of work will your team need to perform after placing the order?

The vendor with a cheaper price tag could be your choice. Yet, you will need to consider all costs first in order to decide whether that price ensures your margin.

Chasing Updates Breaks Your Team’s Focus 

A follow-up message takes only a minute to write. The workaround often takes longer. 

Before sending it, someone may need to check the agreed deadline, review previous conversations, compare delivered placements with the order, and identify what is still outstanding. 

Once the answer comes through, they have to go back into the task and figure out what happened.

Multiply this over a number of clients, and link building turns into an unfinished dialogue process. The account managers remember things in their heads. The SEO specialists take time out from their tasks to see how much work has been done. Founders step in when the regular follow-ups don’t provide any answers anymore.

What is especially annoying about this situation is that the agency outsourced this task in order to gain capacity.

If all orders require such follow-up, some capacity will be used up on managing the outsourcing process.

Vendor Uncertainty Becomes Your Client Conversation 

Your client has an agreement with your agency. Your agency remains responsible for explaining what was delivered and what happens next. 

If a publisher delays an article, your team needs enough information to communicate that clearly. If a placement falls through, you need a revised plan. 

An early notice provides you with several opportunities. You can change the reporting date, approve another publisher, or at least inform them about the issue before the client asks for it.

Silence takes away any such opportunities.

At the moment when you get to know about the problem, it might be already too late. The conversation will not be about the completed work and the priorities anymore. It will be about why the expected delivery is not there yet.

A single delay is not the problem. However, constant doubts may affect your relationship with clients. 

Reports Can Create Work Instead of Removing It 

A report is useful when your team can understand and verify it without rebuilding it. 

That means more than listing publisher domains. Depending on the agreement, a placement report may need to include: 

• The live article URL. 
• The client’s target URL and anchor text. 
• The publication date and link attribute. 
• Relevant site metrics, with the source and date recorded. 
• Any outstanding issues or replacement status. 

If that information is either unavailable or not consistent, someone from your agency will have to locate the article, confirm the destination, correct the spreadsheet, and finally prepare the client version. 

It is essential that the agencies maintain their own quality controls. However, such controls must confirm the organised delivery, rather than restore it. 

Quality Problems Frequently Appear As Minor Exceptions 

Not all problems look alarming by themselves.

One article has weak relevance. Another uses an unapproved anchor. A third appears on a site that does not match the agreed audience. A placement has disappeared, but nobody has recorded when it happened. 

Each exception needs a decision. 

Should it be accepted, corrected, replaced, or explained to the client?

Without a defined standard, the discussion repeats itself each month. You negotiate something that should have been clear already. 

Written criteria reduce that uncertainty. Before work starts, both sides should understand the acceptable publisher types, topic relevance, approval process, exclusions, and remedies when a placement does not meet the brief. 

Metrics can support these decisions, but they should not replace a review of the actual website and article. 

Delays Are Easier to Manage Than Unclear Ownership 

Publishers have editorial queues. Articles can need revisions. A website may reject a topic after initially expressing interest. 

An effective partnership takes these into account. 

It is important that you have clarity about who is going to make the next move, when to expect an update, and what to expect if it turns out that the first plan cannot be implemented.

When evaluating white label link building services, you need to ask yourself about their stance on such issues as:

• Who is responsible for the order from briefing to delivery? 
• What is visible without an additional request for an update?
• When will you be notified about a delay of the deadline? 
• What if the placement does not fit the requirements? 
• How much monitoring or replacement support will be provided?

All these questions are going to make it easier for you to evaluate the cooperation.

Try the Relationship Out Before Scaling Up 

Sometimes a short test is more insightful than an elegantly written sample report. 

Use it to analyze the whole process – from briefing through placement verification and reporting.

The trial should also show how the vendor handles search policy requirements. According to Google’s guidance on link spam, sponsored or advertisement links require proper qualification through attributes such as rel=” sponsored” or rel=”nofollow”. You will need to find out how they do this before committing yourself to purchasing more. 

Write down the number of times your team has to chase up. Write down what was not answered and whether the final report reflects the actual service received.

A successful trial will involve suitable placements as well as processes your team can handle.

Before increasing the order volume, ask your account manager and SEO lead a simple question: 

Did this partner take work off our plate? 

Their answer may reveal costs that the invoice cannot. 

What Outsourcing Returns to Measuring

Evaluating vendors has to involve the quality and timeliness of delivery, together with the amount of manpower involved in handling the processes.

Measuring follow-up, rectification, unallocated work, and reporting efforts will take a few months. This will provide you with more grounds to speak about improvements or other possibilities.

The goal here is to establish an efficient and responsible relationship.

When that happens, your team can spend more time interpreting results, improving campaigns, and helping clients make decisions. That is the capacity outsourcing was supposed to create.