Hiring a link building agency for SaaS: what to check before you sign

Before the first call

Two things are worth settling before you speak to anyone, because both are much harder to decide once a good salesperson is explaining why your budget should be larger.

Know your number. Work out what you can spend monthly and how many links that buys at market rates. The calculator does this from published bands in about thirty seconds. Walking in without a number is how a $3,000 problem becomes a $9,000 retainer.

Know whether you should be buying at all. If your target pages would not convert at position three, links will not fix that and you will spend a quarter finding out. The fit quiz is deliberately willing to tell you no.

The seven contract clauses that matter

Link building contracts are short, which is not the same as simple. These are the seven points where the difference between a good and bad engagement is actually written down.

The eleven questions

Ask every shortlisted agency the same eleven questions in the same order. The point is not to catch anyone out — it is that identical questions produce comparable answers, and comparability is the thing proposals in this market are missing.

1. What proportion of the links you will build involve a payment to the publisher?
2. What disqualifies a site from a campaign? Give me the actual criteria.
3. Show me five links you placed in the last 60 days for a client in a comparable category.
4. What is your cost per link, and what is included in that number — prospecting, content, placement, monitoring?
5. Will the links point at the pages I nominate, or at the pages you find it easiest to place?
6. How do you report referring domains at page level rather than domain level?
7. What happens when a link goes dead, and for how long does that apply?
8. Who writes the content, and do I get to review it before it publishes?
9. What is the minimum term, and what notice ends the engagement afterwards?
10. Who owns the content and prospect list if I leave?
11. What would you tell me if you thought link building was the wrong spend for us right now?

The last one is the most informative. An agency willing to tell you that link building is the wrong spend this quarter is an agency that expects to be around next year. It is also the answer that is hardest to fake, because it costs them the sale.

What should stop you signing

• Refusing to show recent live placements. Everything else an agency claims can be argued about. This one can only be shown or withheld.
• Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed metrics. Nobody controls third-party metrics or Google's ranking of your page. A guarantee is either meaningless or a promise to manipulate something.
• No questions about your category before quoting. Per-link costs vary from $141 to over $1,500 depending on the vertical. A price quoted before understanding your market is a price that was never calculated.
• Vagueness about where links come from. If an agency cannot describe its sourcing and vetting, the most likely explanation is inventory it would rather not describe.
• No link monitoring after placement. With 66.5% historical link rot, placing and moving on leaves you buying an asset that quietly disappears.

Fuller detail on each, with sources, in the red flags guide.

The first 30 days

You will not have links in the first month, and an agency that promises them is either using inventory it already holds or setting up a disappointment. What you should have by day 30:

• An agreed list of target URLs, in priority order, with the reason each was chosen.
• The vetting criteria in writing, applied to a sample prospect list you have seen.
• Anchor text distribution agreed, including how much will be branded.
• A reporting template you have signed off, showing page-level referring domains.
• Outreach genuinely under way, with volumes you can see.

First placements typically land in weeks three to six for editorial outreach, and later for digital PR. The full timeline covers what to expect through month six, and what a stall actually indicates.

Questions