There is a lot of confusion and wrong expectations among new business owners how much it costs to build a domain from 0 backlinks to a place where it generates leads.
We see hundreds (maybe thousands) of failed SEO projects because of wrong expectations per year.
As a rule of thumb, if you’re not able to invest $10,000 and wait 6 months, you should do google or meta ads.
Yes, there are people (1%) who gut lucky and found a hack that worked in the past and made a lot of money in a weekend. It’s safe to assume your site is not part of this 1%.
In the following, we share how much it usually costs to build a domain from scratch.
We suggest to build
Cost and difficulty of building a page vary significantly by:
city (big or small (>100k inhabitants))
industry (super niche or very competitive)
number of products you sell
The following is a guide on how to rank a domain in a given city (less than 100,000 people) for a niche keyword.
niche = “tailored corporate training dallas”
not niche = “personal trainer”
Depending on the niche, the city and your expertise, the cost can vary (a lot).
For this guide, we’re assuming that you are a first time business owner and a first-time marketer who has never done this before. Highly experienced marketers will be able to do it cheaper.
0.) Choosing the right domain
Before we begin, we should note that choosing the right domain name makes SEO much easier.
Google prefers exact match domains (EMD).
For example, it is MUCH better to own the domain pizza-in-dallas.com than joesplace.com.
It’s is best to front-load the domain name with the target keyword. It is better to have the domain pizza-in-dallas-at-joes-place.com than joes-pizza-in-dallas.com
Why are exact match domains so powerful?
1.) Google likes that the target keyword is in the domain (pizza-in-dallas.com)
2.) You can build links to your website with the anchor “pizza in dallas” and it looks completely natural. In contrast, building links with the anchor “pizza in dallas“ to joesplace.com, looks unnatural.
3.) You can expect a higher Click Through Rate (CTR) because visitors immediately understand what your business is about.
1.) 1,000 Foundational links ($500)
In the first month, we would build 1,000 foundational links to the domain.
I would order the links mostly in one shot.
Do you have to worry about link velocity? (apparently google rewards that links come in every month instead of 1x time link building)
We don't think so, because building 1,000 links doesn’t really mean that the links will also be discovered immediately.
Often when we build many links in bulk, they will start to trickle in months after they were built.
This client stopped building links in June and even in October new links (that were built a long time ago) are discovered. You can also see that the effects (=more links showing up and higher organic positions) of the link building occur over time.
When it comes to backlinks, foundational backlinks are the cheapest links you can ever built. If you’re tight on budget, we suggest to build 2,000 links instead since they’re the cheapest links you can ever build (50 cents per link).
2.) 5 Press releases ($750)
Press releases are a nice and affordable way to get backlinks (even if the majority (95%) of the links are no-follow).
We suggest to build at least 5 press releases (every month 1 press release) for a new domain. (better 10 press releases split over 10 months)
Press release distribution can also help to capture ai overview for niche keywords.
The screenshot shows that the press release about the long tail niche keyword captures the first positions immediately. This works for local, niche keywords, but it’s harder to nationwide, competitive terms.
In short, publishing multiple press releases over multiple months can help to appear in the AI overview.
Frequent press releases also help to shape your story with google. A client hired us for eliminate a competitor who impersonated them. The competitor bought one of their old domains and started to receive visitors (since the old domain had a lot of organic searches).
Over the course of 2 month, we published 8+ press releases announcing the rebrand.
Since then, google has removed the competitors domain and announced in the ai overview that the rebranding is completed and that the domain that was registered by the competitor is not in action anymore.
The screenshot shows the announcement of the rebranding.
3.) 40 Niche edits ($4,000)
A niche edit (or guest post) is a link from a different website that has written a blog about a your industry.
Try to find out which of your COMMERCIAL pages are ranking in the top 20.
Please make sure that these are really commercial pages.
For example, “local seo provider in Dallas” is a much better keyword than “what is seo”. Be sure to boost (/build links to) pages that are commercial.
Build links to those pages with different types of anchors.
Don’t build 20 links each with the anchor “local seo dallas”.
A natural backlink profile is 40% brand, 20% brand + service, 40% service keyword + location.
Brand: yourbrandname (“mcdonalds”)
Brand+service: yourbrandname + service (“mcdonalds cheeseburger”)
service keyword: (“cheeseburger dallas”)
Since you have a new website, we suggest to build 50% of the links to the homepage and 50% of the links to the service page until you are in the first position.
4.) High-quality links ($2,000-$5,000)
You can consider to buy link placements in articles that are ranking for “best XYZ service in CITY”. When you google “best service in CITY“, you will likely find several articles. Email them author and ask what it takes to be included in the article. These links can cost $1,000 - $5,000 a year.
These links can drive meaningful revenue. We have bought placements in listicles that drove hundreds of thousands in revenue per year.
This listicle placement has generated 9 appointments within 3 months. One appointment can result in revenue of $10,000.
