10 Best Link Building Agencies (2026)

Most lists of the best link building agencies rank them by the authority scores of the sites they sell. That is the wrong axis, and it is the reason a lot of retainers produce a spreadsheet of DR 60 placements and no new customers.

This list sorts 10 link building services by the thing that actually decides whether they fit you: the pricing model. Managed retainers, per-link placements and white-label marketplaces are three different products with three different minimum spends, and picking the wrong one is a more expensive mistake than picking the wrong vendor inside the right one.

Disclosure: MentionAgent is our own product. It is software, not an agency, so it is not ranked among the 10 below. It appears at the end as the option for people who would rather not hire anyone.

How to judge a link building agency

Three questions separate the agencies worth paying from the ones selling a number.

1. Ask for referring pages, not authority scores. DR and DA describe a domain's overall link graph. They say nothing about whether one specific page sends you readers. A DR 70 page nobody reads is worth less than a DR 20 page whose audience is your buyer. Ask any agency for placements that produced measurable referral traffic or signups for a client in your niche. Vendors who only quote authority tiers are pricing a proxy, not an outcome. See relevant backlinks for the fuller argument.

2. Work out the cost curve, not the sticker price. Per-placement pricing is linear forever. Ten links a month at $225 is $2,250 a month in year one and $2,250 a month in year three. A retainer buys judgement and usually some economies; a marketplace never gets cheaper. Our guide to what backlinks cost has the full breakdown.

3. Check who owns the targeting. Marketplaces hand you a catalogue and let you choose. Agencies choose for you and should be able to defend each choice. If you do not have someone in-house who can tell a good target from a bad one, the marketplace discount is not a discount.

Quick comparison

Prices are the published or widely reported entry points at the time of writing and are quoted per our own vendor research linked in each section. Rate cards move, and several of these agencies quote only on a call, so confirm before budgeting.

1. Page One Power: custom outreach at a real retainer

Model: Managed retainer, custom scope.

Cost: Retainers from around $3,500/mo, roughly $600 per link, roughly $700 per linkable article, with a three-month minimum. Full breakdown in our Page One Power pricing guide.

Page One Power builds campaigns around resource pages, custom content and manual outreach rather than a placement catalogue. The three-month minimum is honest about how long editorial outreach takes to produce anything, which is more than most vendors admit.

Best for: Companies with budget who want links that came from someone actually pitching, and who can wait a quarter to judge it.

Trade-offs: The per-link maths only works if your customer value is high. At roughly $600 a link you need the channel to matter. See our full Page One Power review.

2. Siege Media: links as a by-product of content

Model: Content-led retainer.

Cost: Custom quotes only, $5,000+ minimums, $100 to $149 per hour per their Clutch profile, with retainers commonly around $8K/mo and 12-month engagements. See the Siege Media pricing breakdown.

Siege Media is a content marketing agency that earns links rather than a link vendor that writes content. The distinction matters: you are buying assets that keep attracting links after the engagement, not a fixed number of placements.

Best for: Brands that want the content anyway and treat the links as compounding return.

Trade-offs: The 12-month shape and five-figure minimum put it out of reach for most small teams, and you cannot buy a small test. Full Siege Media review.

3. LinkBuilder.io: a defined monthly link target

Model: Managed retainer with tiered plans.

Cost: Monthly plans from $2,999 up to $19,999, detailed in our LinkBuilder.io pricing guide.

The pitch is a fully managed campaign with a stated number of links per month, which makes it easier to forecast than a custom scope. The tiers are wide, so what you get at $2,999 and what you get at $19,999 are different services.

Best for: Mid-market teams who want a predictable monthly number and a named account contact.

Trade-offs: Entry tier is already a real commitment. Read the LinkBuilder.io review and the alternatives before signing.

4. Growfusely: the B2B SaaS specialist

Model: Managed retainer, custom quote.

Cost: No public rate card. Everything is scoped on a call. See our Growfusely pricing notes.

Growfusely positions specifically around SaaS SEO rather than link building in general, which means the targets they already know tend to be the ones a SaaS company wants. Vertical focus is genuinely useful here, because the hard part of outreach is knowing which sites in your niche will say yes.

Best for: B2B SaaS companies that want a partner who already understands the category. Also see our guide to SaaS link building.

Trade-offs: No published pricing makes comparison shopping harder, and quote-only vendors tend to price to your size. Full Growfusely review.

5. Stellar SEO: buy one link or buy a campaign

Model: Per-link placements and managed retainers.

Cost: Guest posts approximately $297 to $600 per link, niche edits around $225 per link, managed campaigns from $2,500/mo scaling to $5,000 to $10,000+ for larger accounts. Detail in the Stellar SEO pricing guide.

Stellar SEO is one of the few on this list where you can buy a single placement to sanity-check quality before committing to a retainer. That optionality is worth a lot when you have never used the channel.

Best for: Buyers who want to test with a few links and scale into a managed campaign if the links do something.

Trade-offs: Every engagement starts with a consultation, so there is no self-serve checkout. Full Stellar SEO review.

6. LinksThatRank: quality control as the product

Model: Per-link tiers and monthly packages.

Cost: Per-link tiers roughly $177 to $327 depending on DR, monthly packages from $697 to $4,997, with agency discounts available. See the LinksThatRank pricing breakdown.

Matthew Woodward's service leans hard on a documented 23-point quality control process. Whether a checklist that long changes outcomes is arguable, but publishing the criteria at all puts them ahead of vendors who will not say how a site qualifies.

Best for: Buyers who want to read the vetting criteria before they pay, and who are happy to pay a premium over marketplace rates for it.

Trade-offs: The tiering is still DR-based, which is the metric this page argues against relying on. Full LinksThatRank review.

7. Search Intelligence: digital PR rather than placements

Model: Per-campaign digital PR.

Cost: Quoted per campaign in GBP with bulk discounts. Our Search Intelligence pricing guide has the ranges.

This is a different product from everything else on the list. Instead of placing your link on a blog, they build a story and pitch journalists, so the links arrive as press coverage. The upside is links you cannot buy at any price. The downside is that campaigns can land flat.

Best for: Companies with data or a story worth covering, who want coverage as well as links. Start with our digital PR guide.

Trade-offs: Outcome variance is much higher than placement buying. You are paying for the pitch, not a guaranteed number. Full Search Intelligence review.

8. FATJOE: the white-label marketplace

Model: Productized marketplace, unbranded for resale.

Cost: Blogger outreach guest posts from around $85 per post at the DA 10 to 20 tier, rising with authority. No retainer. Our FATJOE review has the tier detail, including a correction we published after finding our earlier entry-price figure was too low.

FATJOE is the default white-label supplier for a large number of agencies. You order from a dashboard, everything arrives unbranded, and you resell it under your own name. It is one of the cheapest routes into a paid placement.

Best for: Agencies with their own client relationships who need supply, not strategy. See white label link building.

Trade-offs: At the entry tier you are buying low-traffic sites. And the economics are linear: at roughly $85 to $225 per link, ten links a month is $850 to $2,250 every month, forever, with no volume curve.

9. The HOTH: productized and self-serve

Model: Productized catalogue with DA-tiered pricing.

Cost: Guest posts approximately $200 per link at DA 30+, $500 at DA 50+ and $1,500 at DA 70+. Link insertions around $300 at DA 30+. Managed SEO sold separately as HOTH X. Full catalogue in our The HOTH pricing guide.

The HOTH sells the widest catalogue here: guest posts, insertions, local SEO, content and managed retainers, all orderable without a sales call. Guest posts typically take 30 to 60 days, insertions two to four weeks.

Best for: Teams who know exactly what they want to buy and do not want to talk to anyone.

Trade-offs: DA-tiered pricing is the clearest example of the problem this page opens with. Two DA 50 sites at $500 each can differ wildly in whether anyone reads them. Full The HOTH review.

10. Rhino Rank: the cheapest curated links

Model: White-label curated links and guest posts.

Cost: Curated link tiers from roughly $60 to $210, guest posts from around $80, with a 12-month replacement guarantee. See the Rhino Rank pricing breakdown.

Rhino Rank is the lowest entry price on this list, and the replacement guarantee is a real differentiator: if a link drops inside 12 months they replace it. Link decay is common enough that this is worth more than it sounds.

Best for: Agencies buying curated links at volume where per-unit price is the binding constraint.

Trade-offs: Curated links, also called link insertions or niche edits, are inserted into existing articles, so you do not control the surrounding content. Full Rhino Rank review.

Also worth knowing: Linkifi sells packages from $4,250 to $31,250 if you want a fixed-scope enterprise engagement, and Brafton and KlientBoost both do link building inside broader content and performance retainers rather than as a standalone service.

The cost curve nobody puts in the pitch deck

The three models cross over at predictable points, and knowing where saves you a year of overpaying.

Marketplaces are cheapest below roughly five links a month. At $85 to $225 a placement you can test the channel for a few hundred dollars and stop if nothing happens.

Retainers start making sense once you want strategy, not supply. A $3,000 monthly retainer is about $36,000 a year. That is worth it when someone is choosing targets against your positioning and you could not do that in-house. It is not worth it as a more expensive way to buy the same placements a marketplace sells.

Neither ever gets cheaper per link. This is the part that catches people. Per-placement pricing is linear forever, and retainers are priced to your size, so scaling the channel scales the bill in a straight line. The only thing on this page with a flat cost at volume is doing the outreach yourself.

If you would rather not hire an agency

Every option above is someone else doing outreach on your behalf, priced per link or per month. The alternative is running the outreach yourself, which used to mean a full-time job and now mostly does not.

MentionAgent is $99/mo flat. The agent searches for blog posts in your niche, finds the author's verified email, writes a pitch tied to the specific post, and sends after you approve it in Telegram. Follow-ups run until you get a reply. There are no credits, no per-contact fees and no per-link pricing, so the cost does not move when you scale the volume.

That is a genuinely different trade. You give up an account manager and a strategist. You keep the flat bill and you see every pitch before it goes out. We wrote the honest version of this comparison in AI link building vs hiring an agency, including where the agency is the better answer.

How to pick

Frequently asked questions

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