Link Building Cost Calculator: What You Really Pay Per Link
Almost every conversation about link building cost starts with the wrong number. People compare the price of a placement. The figure that decides whether a campaign works is the all-in cost per link: the time, the tools and the fees divided by the links that actually went live. This calculator works that out from the four things that really drive it.
Why cost per placement is the wrong number
A $150 placement is not a $150 link. Someone found the prospect and checked it was worth having. They found an address, wrote the pitch, followed up twice, wrote or commissioned the content, and chased the live URL. On a campaign contacting 500 prospects a month, that work is the majority of the cost even when the placements themselves are free.
Put the whole cost over the links that went live and the picture usually changes. Campaigns that look cheap per placement are often expensive per link, because the conversion from prospect to live URL is poor.
The two rates that move everything
Reply rate and placement rate compound. Five hundred prospects at a 12 per cent reply rate is 60 replies; at 18 per cent placement that is 11 links. Lift the reply rate to 18 per cent and hold everything else, and the same hours produce 16 links. That is roughly a third off the cost per link without spending another dollar.
This is why prospect quality beats prospect volume. Doubling the list usually doubles the hours too. Improving relevance lifts both rates and leaves the hours alone.
What to put in the hours field
Everything, including the parts that do not feel like work: building the list, cleaning it, finding addresses, writing, sending, following up, tracking, and checking that live links stayed live. If an assistant does part of it, enter their cost as the hourly figure for those hours and run the calculation twice.
Reading your link building cost
Cost per link only means something next to the quality of what you got. Twenty links at $90 from sites nobody reads is worse than four links at $450 from publications in the client’s sector. Use the figure to compare campaigns of similar quality, not to justify chasing whatever is cheapest.
The links-a-year figure is the one worth showing a client. It turns a monthly retainer into something they can hold you to.
Common questions
What is a normal cost per link?
Link building cost moves enormously with sector, link quality and whether you pay for placements. The number worth tracking is your own, over time, on campaigns of comparable quality.
Should I count links that came down?
No. Count links still live at the point you report them. A link that came down in month two was a cost, not a result.
Does this work for digital PR?
Yes, with one change: put the cost of producing the asset — the study, the data, the design — in the tools field as a one-off, and run the calculation across the campaign rather than the month.
Is anything sent to a server?
No. The calculation runs in your browser and nothing is stored.