What one link actually costs, and why ₹1,000 is a liability
Almost nobody in Indian SEO will tell you what a single link costs them to produce. It's the most useful number in the whole discipline, so here's ours.
None of these figures is a payment to the publisher. We don't buy do-follow links — that's a direct violation of Google's link spam policy, and the difference between paid links and earned links tends to surface in a core update two years later, when you've forgotten you agreed to it. What you're paying for is research, a pitch worth reading, an asset worth linking to, and the eleven follow-ups that produce one yes.
| Placement type | Landed cost per link | What the money is actually buying |
|---|---|---|
| Niche blog or small trade site | ₹8,000–₹12,000 | Research, a genuine pitch, and usually a piece of content the site's editor wanted anyway. Low authority, real readers. |
| Established industry publication | ₹12,000–₹18,000 | A relationship, an editor who says no most of the time, and an audience that overlaps with your buyers. |
| National business or tech masthead | ₹18,000–₹25,000+ | A data story, a named spokesperson, and about three weeks of pitching. Most attempts fail. The ones that land pay for the failures. |
| "Unlimited backlinks, ₹5,000 a month" | ₹50–₹200 per link | Do the division yourself. At that price it's automated comments, expired domains and a network Google fingerprinted years ago. |
You approve every domain before we send an email
This is the part most agencies won't do, because it slows them down and it exposes the quality of their target list. It's also the only thing that stops your brand appearing on a site you'd be embarrassed by.
The flow is the same every month.
- We build a scored prospect list. Relevance to your sector first, then traffic and link profile, then whether the site has ever published anything a human read. You get the sheet.
- You veto. Strike any domain, no reason needed. Competitors, ex-employers, that publication that ran a bad piece about your category — all fair. Most clients strike three to five.
- We write the asset and pitch it. You see the pitch template before it goes out, and the full email thread is in the shared folder if you ever want to read it.
- The link goes live and we send you the URL. Live URL, anchor text, the page it points at, and the link attribute — do-follow, nofollow or sponsored. All three get reported. We don't quietly count nofollows as wins.
- Monthly report. New referring domains this month, cumulative count against your day-one baseline, and what died in outreach and why.
What's included in the retainer, and what isn't
Link building at Last Agency sits inside the SEO retainer rather than being sold as a separate package with a link quota. That's deliberate: quotas are what push agencies towards the cheap end of the table above.
| Included | Not included |
|---|---|
| Prospect research and a scored target list, refreshed monthly | Any payment to a publisher in exchange for a do-follow link |
| Outreach, follow-up and the complete email thread, visible to you | Guest posts on sites that exist only to sell guest posts |
| The linkable asset — data piece, tool, guide — written by us | Press-release wire blasts counted as "links" |
| Your veto on every domain before the first email | Directory and profile-link padding to inflate the count |
| Anchor-text plan plus the internal links that make a new link work harder | Reciprocal link swaps between our own clients |
| Monthly report with live URLs and link attributes | Any promise about a specific ranking position |
| Toxic-link audit and a disavow file if you've inherited a mess | Cleaning up a penalty from a previous vendor for free — that's penalty recovery |
The four things we won't do, even if you ask
We've lost pitches over this list. That's the trade.
- Private blog networks. A PBN is a set of domains someone owns for the sole purpose of linking to clients. Every one of them eventually gets deindexed as a group, and everything they pointed at goes with them. "Our own network" and "we have relationships with 500 sites" mean the same thing.
- Link farms and mass directory submission. Two thousand links from sites with no readers doesn't look like authority. It looks like a signature.
- Sitewide footer and blogroll links. One paid footer link on a 40,000-page site is 40,000 identical links with identical anchor text. It reads as exactly what it is.
- Paid do-follow placements without disclosure. If money changes hands, the link should carry
rel="sponsored". Plenty of Indian publications will sell you a do-follow anyway. We'll tell you the price they quoted and then decline for you.
How many links a month is realistic — and what that does to the budget
Referring domains, not links, is the number worth tracking. Fifty links from one site is still one site. Here's what we'll commit to by site profile, and the honest budget each one needs.
These are targets we set and report against, not averages from a study. The variance is real: a fintech with proprietary data outperforms a services business with none, in the same month, at the same spend.
| Your site today | New referring domains / month | Link budget that buys it |
|---|---|---|
| New domain, under 12 months, no coverage anywhere | 2–4 | ₹25,000–₹45,000 of the monthly spend |
| Established site, roughly 50–300 referring domains | 4–8 | ₹45,000–₹90,000 |
| Known brand with active PR and a spokesperson | 6–12 | ₹75,000–₹1,50,000, usually with a digital PR campaign carrying it |
What we guarantee, and the thing no one can
Our company guarantee is about leads, not links: we freeze your trailing-90-day qualified leads from organic search on day one, and if we haven't beaten that number in 90 days we keep working free until we do. That's the promise on every SEO engagement.
On link building specifically we add a second frozen number — your referring-domain count on day one — and commit to a monthly target against it, in writing, from the table above. You'll know by month two whether we're hitting it, because the live URLs are in the report.
What we will never do is guarantee a ranking position. Not first, not top three, not "page one in 90 days". Nobody controls Google's index, Google's own guidelines warn against exactly this promise, and an agency that makes it is either buying links or planning to be somewhere else when it doesn't land.
Full pricing, including where SEO starts for smaller sites, is on the pricing page.