2. Define the job before you shop
Write down three things before talking to any provider:
- The pages. Which three to ten pages need authority? For most businesses these are category, comparison or service pages, not the homepage.
- The keywords. What does each page need to rank for, and who ranks there now?
- The gap. How many relevant referring domains do the pages above you have? That gap, not a package size, should set your volume.
A provider that asks about these on the first call is usually worth a second call.
3. Set a quality floor
Decide what every link must have before you look at a price list. It stops a good sales pitch from lowering your standards.
- Organic traffic that has held steady for a year, from the countries you sell to
- Content in your topic, at site level and on the page the link sits on
- A reasonable number of outbound links, and none to casinos, pills or loans unless that's your niche
- Pages that are indexed in Google
- An editor who would plausibly publish the piece without payment
Traffic is the most useful single filter. In our price data, sites with 10,000 to 99,999 monthly visits had a median guest post price of $359, while sites with fewer than 100 visits were the cheapest group at $87. The cheap ones are usually cheap for a reason.
4. Ask for evidence, not adjectives
Every provider says “high quality” and “white hat”. Ask for things you can check:
- Three live placements from the last quarter, in a niche close to yours
- A sample report with URLs, anchors, dates and metrics
- The list of sites before you pay, or a pay-after-approval arrangement
- How sites are found, and how sites that lose traffic are removed
5. Read the terms
- Minimums and contract length. Six-month minimums are common at agencies; make sure you can test first.
- Replacement window. How long a link is covered if it disappears, and what counts as a failure. Terms we've seen range from six months to a year.
- Refunds. Many providers replace rather than refund. Know which before you order.
- Content ownership and approval. Who writes, who approves and who owns the article.
- Reporting. How often, in what format, and whether reports are unbranded if you're an agency.
6. Check the price against the market
Use real benchmarks. Across 253,527 priced placements, the median guest post cost $240 and half cost between $104 and $561. By authority, medians ran from $194 for DR 20–29 to $637 for DR 70–79. Managed agencies usually charge $3,500 to $20,000 a month because strategy, content and outreach are included.
If a quote sits far outside those ranges, ask why. The full numbers are in our link building cost study.
7. Start with a test and measure it properly
Order five to ten links to three to five pages you track. Record where each page ranks before you start. Once the links are indexed, give them two to three months and watch four things: rankings for the target keywords, organic sessions to those pages, referring domains, and whether every link is still live.
If the pages move, scale what worked. If they don't, you've learned cheaply and can try a different model.