The Hidden Cost of DIY Link Building

Well, you decided to handle link building yourself. Sounds simple enough, right? What could go wrong? It makes total sense because why pay someone else when all you need to do is reach out to a few websites? You know enough about SEO to know that links are gold, so if you’re getting them for “free,” it’s the ultimate hack.

Good for you!

So, how much time do you think you’ll spend sending those emails? An hour or two per day? That’s not that bad. Although you first need to find the right sites. Which means you also need to do some research before you send the email. Oh, and let’s not forget that it can’t be any ol’ email; it needs to be a good pitch in order for the site to even consider working with you.

Bit by bit, you just lost a good 5 hours.

And there’s no guarantee you’re even getting anything out of it; you could always get rejected. Authoritative sites get tons of inquiries all the time, so what makes you think they’ll say okay to yours?

Sounds like you need a (friendly) reality check.

Time is the First Thing You Miscalculated

Wouldn’t it be nice if link building meant sending a few emails and getting great links back? Sadly, that’s not how it works. If it did, no one in their right mind would pay for SEO.

The first thing you’re wrong about is how long those “few emails” will take you.

Before you send any, you need to find the right website to contact, and this isn’t as simple as googling it. You’ll spend HOURS digging to find relevant sites that have traffic and that are willing to give out links. Then, once you manage to find one, you have to figure out who to contact and prepare the perfect email to send, something that doesn’t sound like a template. And there goes a solid chunk of your day. No links to show for it yet.

But the “best” part about this is that, while you were trying to get links, you didn’t do any real work for your business.

You didn’t handle any SEO issues that slow down your site, you didn’t make tweaks to convert visitors, you didn’t work on a marketing strategy… Nothing.

What most people don’t want to face is that link building, while valuable, is a relentless, time-sucking process if you want to do it right. It messes up your focus and, worst of all, there’s no guarantee you’ll have any success whatsoever.

Unless you’re a pro, this is pure torture. And the people who know it and value their time outsource this.

That could be a freelance specialist, but some businesses that want to go all in, especially in high-stakes industries such as legal, healthcare, IT, aviation, finance, real estate, energy, cybersecurity, logistics, SaaS, etc., they go all out and use services from a dedicated agency that offers specialized/targeted services, such as Stellar SEO’s white label packages.

These types of businesses know the real cost of this work since most (if not all) have already strategized around creating in-house teams for this, as it’s something they’ll require continuously and long-term, but outsourcing (usually) comes out as the more affordable solution.

Plus, specialized agencies already have all the systems/tools required, all the relationships with vendors, and they already have their entire workflow tried and tested.

Opportunity Cost and the Work That Never Gets Done

There’s this tricky idea that deserves to be talked about more, and it’s called opportunity cost. To put it simply, this is what you give up when you choose to do one thing instead of the other.

In terms of your business and website, you’ll find that the most important work will get pushed back because you’re stuck doing something else. In this case, link building. On your own. To save money. So what’s not happening while you’re sifting through random websites and chasing down email addresses?

Well, your content sure suffers.

Quality content is incredibly important for SEO, but you don’t have the time to create anything remotely engaging and original. You know, the kind of piece that attracts links by just existing. You also don’t have the time to go back and update the content you already have, and that includes the pages that do well. So you’re leaving money on the table there.

Plus, bigger projects like getting PR coverage and building partnerships are out of the question because you don’t have the creative energy to make that happen.

This all creates a truly terrible domino effect.

Your link building is slow and inconsistent, so if your rankings even manage to climb, they do so at snail speed. Lower ranking means less new traffic to your site. Less traffic means fewer leads. Fewer leads mean less revenue.

For every month that goes by with you manually sending emails is a month where your competitors are getting ahead because their strategy is more focused. You lose momentum, and once that happens, you’ll have to work twice as hard to catch up.

The moral of the story? Leave link building to the pros. You’re not doing anyone any favors by doing it yourself.

Final Thoughts

If you were to sum up this entire article in a few words, it’d be “Don’t do link building DIY-style.”

Seriously.

It’s not worth the time or the effort, and it’ll cost you a lot more than what you’ll get out of it (if you even get anything). Think about why SEO agencies exist. Why is that an entire industry now? Why do you have people working 9-5 jobs in this industry? It’s because it’s time-consuming, it costs money, it requires skill, you need people/communication skills, it requires you to know what you’re doing, you need a bunch of expensive tools, plus it requires you to do it every day.

There are some aspects of SEO you can do on your own, sure, but link building isn’t one of them.

This is a full-time job, and you simply don’t have the time for it.

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