Link building agency · UK
Link Building Agency UK: See Every Link Cost
Most placements cost between £100 and £300. We add a flat 10%, show you the site before anything goes live, and set no minimum spend.
The call is free and there is nothing to sign.
5 stars across 300+ Google reviews Call 020 7112 8794
You approve every site before it goes live.
Link building explained
What is a link building agency?
A link building agency earns or arranges links from other websites to yours, so search engines and AI tools treat your pages as more trustworthy.
First Place SEO does this across the UK on a per-placement basis, publishing the cost of every site and adding a flat 10% fee, with no minimum spend.
What a link costs
Everyone asks the wrong question about link cost
The obvious question is what a link costs. The better one is how much of your money reaches the website that publishes it.
Most placements we arrange sit between £100 and £300. That figure is the publisher's fee plus the article your link lives inside. We add 10% on top for finding the site, checking it, writing the piece and managing the placement through to publication.
What the placement fee covers
- The publisher's charge for the placement
- The article written around your link
- Authority, traffic and relevance checks on the site
- Placement management, and the live URL when it publishes
Compare that with how this market usually sells. Entry packages from the larger UK agencies start around £3,000 a month for ten links, and enquiry forms often refuse budgets under £2,000. Neither shows you the unit cost inside.
Quotes are free, and we will tell you if link building is the wrong spend for your site.
The margin problem
Bundled link building has a maths problem
Most agencies fold link building into a fixed monthly SEO retainer. The fee does not move, so every pound spent on a better placement comes straight out of that agency's margin. Nobody is being dishonest here. The incentive simply runs the wrong way, and across a year it shows up in the quality of sites your links land on. It is worth seeing where links fit in a full SEO campaign before you judge any retainer.
Open market rates in the UK run from roughly £50 to £500 per placement, depending on a site's authority and how competitive the sector is. Almost every agency page you will read describes its work as manual outreach, though industry surveys put the share of link builders who actually lead with it at around a fifth, down from nearly two fifths the year before. When the placement cost sits buried inside a retainer, you have no way of knowing which end of either range your money bought.
Our fee moves with the placement price. A stronger site earns us slightly more, which means we have no reason to source down. If you are already paying someone else, the tool below will tell you roughly where your money is landing.
Placement quote checker
Check what someone else is charging you
Ask your current agency what a single placement costs and you will usually get a package price back. That answers a different question.
Put your numbers in and the checker sets them beside published pricing benchmarks, works out what you are paying for each thousand monthly visits the site receives, and lists the questions worth asking. It runs in your browser, nothing is stored, and results appear without asking for your email first.
What this is: a comparison against published figures and a set of prompts. What it is not: a recommendation to buy or avoid any placement, or a view on any specific website. It cannot see the site, read its content or check its link history. Treat every result as a starting point for a conversation with whoever quoted you, and make the decision yourself.
Placement quote checker
Five things to hand, and two more if you have them. Any agency should be able to give you all of them for a site it wants you to pay for.
The boxes are empty. The grey figures in them are examples, not values. Type your own numbers, or use "Load an example" to see how the checker works.
Error: enter a price between 1 and 100,000.
Error: enter a rating between 0 and 100.
Error: enter a traffic figure of 0 or more.
If you have them
Error: enter a spam score between 0 and 100, or leave it empty.
This checker sends nothing anywhere. Everything is worked out on your own device, there is no email step, and no results are saved.
You have changed a figure since these results were worked out.
These are example figures, not yours. Put your own numbers in the boxes above and check again.
Six things this cannot check for you
Numbers only take you so far. These six are worth asking about every time, whoever is quoting.
- How will the link be marked?Google says buying and selling links is a normal part of the web, and is not a policy breach as long as the link carries rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". A paid link that passes ranking credit is the part that breaks the policy. Ask which attribute this one will use.
- How long does it stay up?Ask whether the placement is permanent, and whether that is written down anywhere. Plenty of links are quietly removed after a year.
- Is the price a one off?Ask whether you pay once or every year. The answer changes what the placement really costs.
- Where are the readers?A site with 12,000 monthly visits from outside your market is worth less to you than one with 2,000 inside it. Ask for the traffic by country.
- How many paid posts does the site run?Look at the blog. If most recent posts are sponsored articles for unrelated businesses, that tells you what the site is for.
- Is the site in Google at all?Search Google for the domain. If very little comes back, ask why before you pay anything.
We quote each placement separately. You see the publisher's fee for the site, and we add a flat 10% on top for finding it, checking it, writing the piece and managing the placement. We are not VAT registered, so nothing is added at the end, and there is no minimum spend.
Price benchmarks are published UK 2026 guide ranges for guest posts and link insertions by Domain Rating band. Where no published UK figure exists for a combination, the checker says so and shows no comparison rather than estimating one. Wider context on how price rises with authority comes from Adsy's 2026 study of 52,671 websites and BuzzStream's 2026 pricing analysis.
The traffic expectations are a vetting rule of thumb used widely in the industry, not an official standard: at least 500 monthly organic visits for a site rated DR 20 to 49, and at least 5,000 for DR 50 and above. Domain Rating is an Ahrefs metric and Domain Authority is a Moz metric. Both are third party estimates of a site's backlink profile, not Google measurements, and neither is a ranking factor. Traffic figures from these tools are estimates too.
Spam Score is a Moz metric, scored from 0 to 100, built from 27 signals shared by sites Moz has found to be penalised or banned. Moz groups it as low from 1 to 30, medium from 31 to 60, and high from 61 to 100. Google does not use it and has never referenced it. It describes features of the site itself rather than the links pointing at it, and it is based on correlation, so a higher number is a prompt to look closer rather than a verdict.
The point about link attributes comes from Google's own spam policies, which state that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship, and that such links are not a policy breach when qualified with rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored".
Benchmarks are guide ranges gathered at a point in time. Any individual site can sit well outside them for perfectly good reasons.
Send us a list of sites someone has quoted you and we will work through it properly, free, whether or not you end up hiring us.
Site approval
You should see the site before you pay for it
Several of the biggest agencies in this market state openly that clients cannot pick the websites their links go on, and cannot request specific anchor text. That is a workflow decision, and it happens to keep the buyer in the dark.
-
We shortlist
You receive candidate sites with authority scores, traffic figures, topic fit and the exact price for each one.
-
You approve
Nothing is placed until you say yes. You pick the target page and the anchor text.
-
We place and report
When the placement goes live you get the URL, the date and the final cost. The report below is the actual format, not a sample of a longer document.
Link types
Three ways a link actually gets built
Each one suits a different starting position, and each one costs a different amount. Knowing which is which is the difference between buying links and buying a package.
-
Guest placements
A guest placement is an article written for another website that includes a link back to yours. These suit sites building authority from a low base, because the article is new and your link sits in context from day one.
-
Link insertions
A link insertion, also called a niche edit, adds your link into an article that already exists on another site. These often work faster than guest placements, because the host page is already indexed and often already ranking.
-
Journalist requests
Journalist request platforms connect reporters with expert sources, and a published quote usually carries a link. The recent history is worth knowing, because plenty of agency pages still describe this channel as though none of it happened.
- Early 2024 Cision renames HARO as Connectively and moves it behind a paid subscription.
- 9 December 2024 Cision discontinues Connectively, saying it is concentrating on its core platforms.
- April 2025 Featured.com buys HARO from Cision and relaunches it on 22 April as a free email of journalist queries.
- Since then Featured has also revived the Connectively name for its own platform product, so both brands now sit under one owner.
We work this channel through direct journalist contacts as well as the platforms.
These three channels feed the same goal from different angles. There is more on how that connects to links and AI search visibility.
Risk
The real risk is not a penalty, it is paying for nothing
Three things are worth understanding before you spend anything on links. Open whichever matters to you.
01What Google's policy actually says
Google's spam policies are public and specific. Exchanging money for links, or for posts containing links, is listed there as link spam. The stated exception is that such links are acceptable when marked with rel=sponsored or rel=nofollow, and both tags stop a link passing ranking credit. You can read Google's published spam policies (opens in a new tab) in full.
02Why a penalty is rarely what happens
What most people expect from that is a penalty. That is not usually what happens. Since 2016 Google has mostly moved from punishing weak links to quietly ignoring them. March 2026 showed both mechanisms at once: a spam update on 24 March targeted link schemes directly, and a core update three days later reassessed quality across the board. Sites propped up by bought links saw compounding drops, and the great majority never received a manual action or any notice at all. Their links were not held against them. They simply never counted. For your bank balance the outcome is identical, and it is worse in one way, because there is no warning and nothing to fix.
03Why we do not claim to be white hat
Every agency in this market works in the gap between the policy and what publishers actually charge. Most handle it by calling the work outreach and describing themselves as white hat. You will not find that claim anywhere on this page, because the same agencies making it are selling guest posts and link insertions on the page underneath. What we control is relevance, editorial quality and pace, and those three things decide whether a link counts at all.
What we turn down
- Private blog networks and site networks of any kind
- Bulk packages priced by volume
- Sites with high authority scores and no real traffic
- Repeated exact-match anchor text
- Any promise about where you will rank
Where a link needs to be earned rather than arranged, that is a different job, and we handle it separately as media coverage and reputation work.
What to expect
Three weeks in, nothing will have happened
That is normal, and it catches almost everyone.
-
Days to weeks
Nothing visible
A link does nothing at all until Google crawls the page carrying it, which takes anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending on how often that site gets visited.
-
3 to 6 months
Movement compounds
Ranking movement usually compounds across three to six months.
-
12 months and beyond
Competitive terms
Competitive terms take longer, sometimes past a year.
The line above changes as it runs: dashed while nothing is happening, solid once movement builds, and lighter across the stretch nobody can put a date on. It describes a typical shape, not a schedule, and no one can promise you either.
What matters more than the timeline
The biggest factor is not link quality, it is where your site starts. Ten placements do very different things to an established site with an existing link profile than they do to a site with almost none.
Most agencies avoid saying this out loud because it makes the sale harder. We would rather you knew before spending anything, which is why we suggest you check your current backlink profile first.
Testimonials
What clients say
These come straight from our Google profile. We do not choose which ones appear, and you can open any of them on Google and read it there.
Google reviews
Pulled live from our profile
Frequently Asked Questions
Questions we get asked
Ask About Links
Can I choose which websites link to my site?
Yes. You get a shortlist showing authority, traffic, topic fit and price for each site, and nothing is placed until you approve it. Not every provider works this way, so it is worth asking wherever you buy.
How long does link building take to work?
Expect three to six months for ranking movement to compound, and longer on competitive terms. Very little happens in the first few weeks because Google has to crawl the page your link sits on before it counts for anything. Sites with an existing link profile move faster than sites starting from nothing.
What is a niche edit?
A niche edit, also called a link insertion, is a link added into an article that already exists on another website. Because the host page is already indexed and often already ranking, these can take effect sooner than a brand new article.
Is HARO still running?
Yes, though the name has moved around. Cision renamed HARO as Connectively in 2024 and discontinued it on 9 December 2024. Featured.com then bought HARO and relaunched it on 22 April 2025 as a free email of journalist queries, and has since revived the Connectively name for its own platform product. Journalist request work still produces some of the strongest links available.
Do you guarantee first page rankings?
No, and neither can anyone else. Google's own guidance for businesses hiring an SEO says that no one can guarantee a number one ranking, and warns you to be wary of anyone who claims they can. What we do commit to is that you see every site and every price before committing a penny. You can read Google's guidance on hiring an SEO (opens in a new tab) yourself.
How much does link building cost in the UK?
Most placements we arrange cost between £100 and £300, plus our flat 10% fee. Across the wider UK market, published guide ranges run from about £50 to £800 per placement, driven by the authority of the site, its traffic and how competitive your sector is. Most alternatives bundle that cost into a monthly retainer, so the per placement figure never appears.
Free link building consultation
Talk to Us About Your Links
Tell us which pages you need to rank and who you are up against. We will look at the links you have now, explain which new ones would move you up and tell you honestly whether link building is your best next step. The first consultation is free, there is no obligation and you keep the advice either way.
Still Looking?