Off page SEO service, explained for the buyer

Agencies with a verified published price

How to buy off page work without buying a problem

1. Ask what the deliverable actually is. Links placed, articles pitched, sites contacted, coverage secured, listings corrected, or hours worked. These are very different products at similar prices. A proposal quoting a monthly number of links without saying where they will come from is quoting a supply contract, and the supply is usually a network selling the same placements to everyone.
2. Get the last three months of live examples. Ask any candidate for links they built for other clients in the last quarter and open every one. Look at whether the host site has genuine readers, whether the article reads like it was written for anyone, and whether a dozen unrelated businesses appear alongside you. Five minutes of clicking tells you more than any pitch deck.
3. Ask directly whether placements are paid. Some are, and some publishers are open about it. Google's spam policies treat exchanging money for links that pass ranking signals as link spam, and expect such links to be qualified with the appropriate attribute. A firm should be able to say plainly which of its placements are paid and how they are marked, without the question causing discomfort.
4. Fix the free things before paying for the hard ones. Inconsistent business listings, an unclaimed profile, missing structured data and duplicate location records cost nothing to correct and often move local visibility more than any link campaign. Any candidate who proposes link building before auditing these is selling their inventory rather than reading your situation.

What separates real off page work from link supply

Genuine off page work looks like public relations with a search brief. Someone finds a story, a dataset, a tool or an opinion in your business that another publication would want, pitches it to relevant outlets, and earns coverage that happens to link. It is slow, it fails often, and it is priced by effort rather than by unit, because you cannot promise an editor will say yes. What you get is links from places that would never sell one, which is precisely why they count.

Link supply looks like a menu. Fixed prices per link, tiers by domain metric, guaranteed volumes, fast turnaround. Google's spam policies describe buying and selling links for ranking purposes, large scale article campaigns with keyword heavy anchors and low quality directory placements as link spam. Whatever the short term effect, you are paying monthly for an asset you would have to disown if it were ever examined closely.

What we record about the agencies in this comparison

Our index records what each firm publishes: stated services, published starting prices where they exist, disclosed minimum engagements and named clients, each with the date checked. Where a firm publishes no price, that is recorded as an absence rather than filled with an estimate. In this category the published number is unusually informative, because a very low per link price implies a supply relationship rather than outreach.

Do not read a published price as a verdict on quality, in either direction. Read it as a scope signal, then ask the questions above. The firms worth shortlisting will answer them in one reply, and the ones selling inventory will send a case study instead.

How to judge whether it worked

Ranking movement on the pages the links point at, over quarters rather than weeks, plus referral traffic and enquiries from the placements themselves. A link on a site with real readers occasionally sends real customers, and a link on a site built to host links never does. That single test, checked in your own analytics, quietly separates most portfolios.

Agree in advance that the report names every placement with a live URL, and check a sample yourself each month. Placements disappearing after a few months is common with paid supply and rare with earned coverage, so the persistence of last quarter's links is itself a measurement worth taking.

Questions people actually ask

How many links do we need?

That is the wrong unit. What matters is whether the pages you care about are cited by sites your customers and their industry actually read. Ten relevant, genuinely earned mentions usually beat two hundred purchased placements, and cost the same or less once you count the retainer months spent maintaining the purchased ones.

Are guest posts still worth doing?

When the publication has real readers, an editor who says no sometimes, and an audience overlapping yours, yes. When it is a site that publishes anything for a fee, you are buying link supply with extra steps. Google's spam policies specifically call out large scale article campaigns with keyword heavy links, so judge the outlet rather than the format.

Can off page work damage a site?

It can. Aggressive purchased links with commercial anchor text are the classic cause of a site losing visibility it previously had, and cleaning it up is slower and more expensive than earning links properly would have been. Ask any candidate what they would do if a previous supplier had left that behind, and listen for a plan rather than reassurance.

Should we disclose paid placements?

Yes, and mark them appropriately. Google's documentation sets out attributes for qualifying links that are paid or otherwise not editorial endorsements. A firm that treats disclosure as optional is making a decision about your risk on your behalf, without telling you.

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