How Ignite SEO slashed link building costs by bringing it in-house
The same links, at half the vendor markup
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£180 a link, and you still couldn't control the quality
Ignite SEO didn’t want to waste money sourcing links for clients only to find they were low-quality or from poor authority sites. Sourcing an individual link can cost upwards of £180, a significant overhead when scaled up.
Like many SEO agencies, Ignite SEO struggled with quality control when outsourcing the link-building process to white-label link building services. That’s because it’s hard to consistently get high-authority, relevant links when dealing with link vendors.
“It is extremely expensive to be outsourcing link building when you could be doing it in house. It’s costly, it’s inefficient, and the lack of quality control were the main issues that we had”
The popular outreach tools weren't built to run the whole process, so it never scaled
After moving away from white label services during COVID, the management team wanted to take link building in-house, a practice larger SEO agencies follow.
However, the team faced significant operational hurdles managing link building internally.
They attempted an in-house approach using basic tools like Hunter and Mailshake to find emails and manage follow-ups, while manually finding sites, checking traffic, DR, and other metrics, and managing lists in spreadsheets. Even with virtual assistants, the process remained labor-intensive and difficult to scale effectively. The manual verification of each site’s metrics, lack of proper CRM, and juggling multiple tools created a fragmented workflow that bottlenecked their operations.
“It’s a nightmare when you look back and try to figure out how to do it. It was a very, very manual process. You still have to find the sites, you still have to check traffic, DR, all manual, manual, manual… it was just incredibly hard to scale. Even with building out VAs doing it, it was a bit of a nightmare.”
One platform for the entire process, start to finish
With the whole process automated and managed in one platform, Ignite stopped wasting money on low-quality links and started delivering better work to clients. It quickly became a pillar of how the agency runs.
Integrate SEO Tools
Pull domain authority, traffic, and ranking data from Ahrefs and SEMrush to qualify every site
Prioritize Relevance
Score sites on relevance and authority against detailed criteria before reaching out
Verify Emails
Cut bounce rates with verified addresses from Pitchbox Contact Finder
Personalize Outbound
Personalize outreach at scale and sharpen every message with Pitchbox AI
Increase Deliverability
Set up outreach personas, email rotation, and message testing to land in more inboxes
Manage Relationships
Build direct relationships with publishers and track every negotiation in the Link Partner CRM
More control, better links, a fraction of the cost
Bringing link building in-house with Pitchbox gave Ignite SEO more control over link quality and direct relationships with publishers.
“If you’re building links yourself, you can get a lot of these links for a fraction of the cost that are on this marketplace. You can be in control, you can build the relationship with the site owner.”
About IgniteSEO
Ignite SEO is an award-winning London-based agency whose proven “SEO Success Framework” consistently propels clients to the top of Google search rankings. Their team of expert strategists combines data-driven techniques with creative approaches to transform businesses’ online visibility. This dedication to excellence has earned recognition from clients and industry peers alike for outstanding search engine optimization services.
Turn link building into a profit center
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