What to ask your agency about backlinks

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on backlinks, these questions are worth asking early.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Being genuinely useful is still the most durable link strategy. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The short version

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Three things worth confirming about backlinks before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.