Link Building Agency: How to Vet One and What to Demand

Quick answer: A link building agency earns links from other sites on your behalf. Vetting one means testing their sourcing logic, their contract, and their reporting. Ask how a publisher is persuaded, who owns the relationships when you leave, and what the deliverable is if nothing publishes this month.

This post is about the commercial relationship, not the craft. It assumes you have already decided that earned links are worth funding and you are now deciding who does the work and on what terms. It covers the questions that separate a team doing real outreach from one reselling somebody else’s inventory, the contract clauses that decide what you walk away with, the reporting you should insist on before signing, and how a link building agency compares with hiring in-house or using a freelancer for this specific function. It does not cover delivery models or the shape of monthly pricing, which are separate questions answered elsewhere. If you have not yet established that links are your constraint, do that first; our SEO audit and consulting work exists precisely because the answer is frequently no.

What You Are Actually Buying

Be precise about the deliverable, because vagueness here is where most disappointment originates.

You are buying research, relationships and persuasion, in that order. Research produces a qualified list of sites that could plausibly reference you. Relationships mean somebody at the agency is a known quantity to editors and organisers in your sector. Persuasion is the part that converts a qualified prospect into a published reference. None of the three is a commodity and none of them scales linearly with spend.

You are not buying a guaranteed number of links. Nobody controls the editorial decision at the other end. An agency that guarantees a monthly count is either wrong about how this works or has an inventory arrangement behind it, and paid placements breach Google’s link spam policies with consequences that land on your domain, not theirs.

Most agencies will quote you a monthly link count. A count is a billing unit, not an outcome. It tells you nothing about whether those domains are relevant to what you sell, whether a human editor chose to publish, or whether the same set of domains already appears in every competitor’s profile. The number is easy to hit and easy to hit badly.

And you are buying a defensible record. Six months in, you should be able to show any incoming marketing lead exactly which domains were approached, which published, and why each one was on the list. Agencies that cannot produce that are usually the ones whose sourcing would not survive the question.

The Vetting Questions That Separate Real Outreach From Resale

Ask these before price comes up. The answers are diagnostic and they are hard to fake.

“Walk me through how you persuade a publisher to say yes.” Listen for a mechanism. Good answers describe a reason the publisher benefits: original data their readers want, a genuine expert quote on a live story, a resource that fills a gap in something they already published, a correction to a broken reference, a local angle only your client can supply. Bad answers describe a process with no persuasion in it at all, which usually means the persuasion is financial.

“What percentage of your outreach gets a reply, and what percentage publishes?” Anyone doing this honestly knows their numbers and they are humbling. Qualified outreach on a well-researched list converts in single-digit to low-double-digit percentages. A confident claim of much better than that, at volume, in a market this size, is a claim worth probing.

“Show me three domains you earned for a client in my sector, and tell me why each said yes.” You are testing whether the reason is a reason. If the explanation is the same sentence three times, the sourcing is a template. In our experience the answer to this question predicts the quality of the engagement better than anything else on the list.

“What would make you tell me not to buy this service?” We have seen this question produce the most useful thirty seconds of a vetting call, because a team that has genuinely thought about fit will name the situations where outreach is the wrong spend: no differentiated asset yet, an authority profile already ahead of the competition, or a site with unresolved technical problems that would waste whatever equity arrives.

“What will you refuse to do?” The answer should come quickly and specifically. Purchased placements, link exchanges at scale, private networks, comment and profile spam, automated placement products, and anything where money changes hands for a link. An agency that has not thought about the line is one that has not decided where it is.

“Who does the outreach, and can I meet them?” The person writing the emails matters more than the person selling the service. If the work is subcontracted, ask who to, and whether you are permitted to know.

“What happens in a month where nothing publishes?” There will be such months. The answer tells you whether you are buying effort with an honest hit rate or a quota that will be met by whatever is cheapest to hit it with.

Vetting the Evidence They Give You

Do not accept a case study at face value. Verify it in twenty minutes.

Open the links they cite and read the pages. Is the reference inside real content, or in a footer, sidebar or contributor byline stub? Is the page indexed? Does it look like something a publication would have run anyway?

Check whether the domains are relevant to the client’s sector, not merely reputable. A general business title linking to a clinic is fine. Twelve general business titles and no medical or regulatory sources is a pattern.

Look for disclosure markers on the placements. Sponsored labelling, a paid-content section, an author profile that exists only to publish outbound links. None of these are secrets and all of them tell you what you are looking at.

Ask for a reference you can call. Then ask that reference one question: what happened in the third and fourth months. Anyone can produce a good first month.

And ask what happened after the engagement ended. This is the question almost nobody asks. Links from a genuine editorial placement stay. Links from an arrangement stop when the payments do, and a profile that shrinks after cancellation tells you what it was built from. Our own case study on a finance client is the kind of record worth asking any supplier for, and the durability question is fair to put to us as readily as to anyone else.

The Contract Clauses That Actually Matter

This is the section that gets skipped and the one that costs money later. Get these in writing before the first invoice.

Ownership of the prospect list and the research. You paid for the research. The list of qualified domains, with the notes on each, should be yours to keep, in a portable format, at any point including after termination. Say so explicitly, because silence defaults to the agency keeping it.

Ownership of the relationships and the correspondence. Outreach conducted in your name, from an address at your domain, creates relationships that belong to your business. Specify that outreach is sent from your domain where practical, that you have access to the mailbox, and that the correspondence history is handed over on exit. An agency using its own mailbox for all client outreach is building its asset with your budget.

What happens to the links when you leave. Earned editorial links stay because the publisher chose to publish. Anything that can be withdrawn on cancellation was never yours. A clause stating that no placement in the programme is contingent on continued payment is a clause that quietly rules out an entire category of supplier.

Approval rights before anything publishes. You should see the target site, the proposed angle and the copy before it goes anywhere near a publisher. This protects your brand, your regulatory position and your factual accuracy. In licensed sectors it is not optional, which is why the approval workflow is the part we specify first in engagements like our medical SEO work.

Compliance warranty and indemnity. A plain clause in which the supplier warrants that no link is bought, exchanged for payment, generated by an automated scheme or placed on a network, and accepts responsibility if it was. Reputable teams sign this without blinking. The reaction to being asked is itself informative.

Notice period and data handover. Thirty days is normal. Specify what arrives during that period: prospect list, outreach history, live link inventory with dates, and any assets created. Without this clause you leave with nothing but the links themselves.

Reporting cadence and format, defined in the contract. See the next section. If it is not in the agreement, you will receive whatever the reporting tool exports by default.

What Reporting to Insist On

Ask for these fields by name. The list is short and any competent team can produce it.

The row that exposes the most is losses. A report that only ever shows gains is not monitoring. Links disappear in redesigns, in content pruning, in editor changes and in domain sales, and an agency that tracks its own attrition is one doing the ongoing work rather than counting placements.

Insist that reports name domains rather than describing tiers. Language like “three high authority placements” without URLs is a category, not a deliverable. You cannot verify it, your next supplier cannot inherit it, and you cannot tell whether one of them was a directory.

Ask for the report format before signing, not after. A sample report from a live account, with the client details removed, takes five minutes to produce and settles the question. For smaller budgets in particular, the reporting discipline matters more than the volume, which is the reasoning behind how we scope small business SEO engagements.

Agency, Freelancer or In-House, For Link Work Specifically

All three models work. They suit different situations, and the honest comparison is about what each one is structurally good at.

Resolve the trade-off with two questions rather than a preference. First: does your sector have a publisher layer that requires real subject knowledge to approach credibly, and does the supplier demonstrably have it? Second: is this a twelve-week project with a defined asset, or an ongoing programme? A defined project suits a specialist freelancer. An ongoing programme needs continuity, which favours a team.

The hybrid is usually the strongest and is rarely proposed. Keep the relationships and the spokesperson role in-house, because they compound and they cannot be rented, and buy the research capacity and the outreach execution, because those are labour-intensive, seasonal and painful to staff for. That split is why we treat founder availability as a scoping input rather than a nice-to-have.

In regulated professional sectors the calculation shifts toward specialists. Approaching a professional body, a regulator’s publication or a sector title requires knowing the rules on what may be claimed, and a generalist will either get it wrong or get filtered out. That is the reason our law firm SEO engagements are scoped around named publication targets rather than volume.

What This Market Does to the Maths

Singapore-specific, and it changes what a fair offer looks like.

The pool of useful linking domains here is countable. Trade associations, chambers and bilateral councils, statutory registers and licensing bodies, a thin layer of sector trade press, the national business titles, the local podcast and event circuit. You can list your sector’s relevant subset on one page in an afternoon. That is an advantage, because targeting is easy, and a constraint, because the list runs out.

So a realistic monthly target is lower than imported guides suggest. A number quoted from a large market implies a prospect pool that does not exist here. An agency proposing a high monthly count for a Singapore SME is either counting listings as links or sourcing from somewhere you would not want to be.

Relationship quality beats list size, and the list size argument should be treated with suspicion. Three reporters and two association editors who take your calls are worth more over two years than a database of contacts, because you will be approaching the same small set repeatedly and the second approach is easier than the first only if the first went well.

Which means the burn rate on a bad supplier is worse here. An agency that annoys the four editors who cover your sector has damaged an asset you cannot replace. Ask how many touches per contact per year they consider acceptable, and listen for whether the question has ever occurred to them.

Field notes: When we report link work, we name the sources, and our law firm case study shows what that looks like. For the general practice firm in Tanjong Pagar, the link building in Months 4 to 7 is listed as contributed articles on two Singapore legal information platforms, editorial mentions in Singapore SME resource articles, and three directory submissions to Law Society-recognised directories, all editorially reviewed with no paid link placement. Anyone taking over that work could see exactly what exists and why. Ask any agency for the same: named sources, and prospect lists and outreach that you own, so the work survives a change of supplier.

Our Take

Vet the sourcing logic first and the price second. Almost everything that goes wrong in this relationship traces back to a supplier who could not articulate why a publisher would say yes, because the honest answer was money or volume and neither survives being said out loud. Ask the persuasion question, ask what they refuse to do, ask what happens in a month with no placements, then read the contract for the three clauses that decide what you own when you leave. If you are a Singapore SME with a genuine story, real data or a founder worth quoting, a specialist team is worth its fee for the research capacity and the relationships you will not build in a quarter. If you have none of those yet, build the asset before you fund the outreach, because outreach without something worth referencing fails politely and expensively. Our pricing page sets out how we structure this, and our about page tells you who would be doing the work.

We get asked to review other agencies’ contracts more often than we would like, and in our experience the clause that matters most, who owns the links once the contract ends, is the one most proposals leave vague on purpose. Our team always asks for sample reporting before signing anything on a client’s behalf, because a vendor who cannot show real placements from real sites is the single biggest red flag in this part of the industry.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much should a link building agency cost in Singapore?

Expect four-figure monthly retainers in SGD for genuine research and outreach, with the range set mostly by how much research capacity is included and how specialised your sector is. Be more suspicious of low prices than high ones: qualified outreach is labour, and a price well below the cost of the hours implies volume from somewhere that is not earned. Ask what portion of the fee is research, outreach and reporting respectively.

Should I expect a guaranteed number of links per month?

No, and a guarantee should worry you. Nobody controls another publisher’s editorial decision, so a guaranteed count can only be met by arrangements that pay for placement, which breaches Google’s link spam policies and puts your domain at risk rather than the supplier’s. What you can reasonably fix in a contract is outreach volume, named target sets, research output and reporting standards.

Who owns the links if I change agency?

Genuinely earned editorial links stay, because the publisher chose to publish and has no reason to remove anything. Anything contingent on continued payment disappears, which is the clearest practical test of what a programme was built from. The things you must claim explicitly in the contract are the prospect research, the outreach correspondence and the link inventory, because none of those transfer by default.

Is it better to hire in-house for link building?

In-house wins on relationships and product knowledge, and those compound permanently, but it is one person’s entire job for a year before it produces much and the role is genuinely hard to hire for locally. Most SMEs get more from a hybrid: keep the spokesperson role and the relationships internal, buy the research and outreach execution. Full in-house makes sense when you have a real PR angle and a two-year horizon.

What questions reveal a supplier who buys links?

Ask how a publisher is persuaded to say yes, and listen for whether there is a mechanism or only a process. Ask what they refuse to do. Ask whether any placement in the programme would be removed if you stopped paying. Ask to see a sample report with named domains. Evasiveness on the fourth question, in our experience, is the most reliable signal of all.

How long before link building shows results?

Plan on two to four months before new referring domains appear at any pace, and longer before ranking movement is attributable, because the first weeks are research and the first outreach round has a low hit rate by nature. Months one and two should be judged on research quality, prospect list depth and outreach volume. If you are being shown placements in week two, ask where they came from.

What reporting should I insist on?

Domains approached by name, the reason each was selected, reply and publish rates for the period, live links with URLs and dates, links lost or changed, anchor text per link, placement type, and indexation status. Get the field list into the contract and ask for a redacted sample report before signing. A report that never shows a loss is not monitoring anything.

Can a link building agency get my site penalised?

Yes, if it buys placements, uses networks or runs automated schemes, because the consequences attach to your domain. The realistic outcomes are algorithmic devaluation of the links, a manual action in the worst case, and budget spent on assets that were never durable. A compliance warranty and an indemnity clause in the contract are the practical protections, together with approval rights before anything publishes.

Should the agency use my email domain for outreach?

Where practical, yes, and it is worth writing into the agreement. Outreach from your domain builds relationships that belong to your business and stay with it, and it gives you visibility of what is being sent in your name. Some suppliers prefer their own mailbox for deliverability reasons, which is a fair argument, but then insist on full correspondence handover on exit.

What if the audit says I do not need link building at all?

Then do not buy it, and any supplier worth hiring will tell you so. If the sites outranking you have fewer referring domains than you, the constraint is on-page relevance, intent match, or something technical, and outreach will not touch it. Establish the gap before you fund the fix; reallocating that budget to the actual cause is usually faster and always cheaper.