A link building strategy takes six steps: pick the URLs you want to rank, audit your backlink profile and your competitors', set a budget, choose the outlets, decide anchors and pace, and measure before you buy again. The 10,723 posts bought in 2025 in our link building study give the benchmarks: a post cost €189.82 on average (the median was €57), and a Growwer buyer ordered 11.6 posts a year, almost one a month.
The strategy in one table
| Step | What you decide | Benchmark |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Goal | Which URLs to push, for which searches | URLs already ranking between positions 5 and 20 |
| 2. Starting point | Which links you and your competitors have | Outlets linking to two or more competitors but not to you |
| 3. Budget | How much a year and per link | €2,212 a year on average; €81 to €697 per link depending on outlet traffic |
| 4. Outlets | Where you publish | Related topic, real and growing traffic, your customer's country |
| 5. Anchors and pace | How many links a month, with what text | Two or three a month per URL, with varied anchors |
| 6. Measurement | Whether the URL moved | After six weeks, in Search Console |
1. Set the goal and the URLs you will push
A link does not lift a whole site: it lifts specific pages. Start in Search Console with the business URLs (categories, services, product pages) already ranking between positions 5 and 20 for searches with buying intent. That is where a good link shows; a page at position 60 needs content first, not links.
Decide what you are after, because it changes the outlet: rankings (topical blogs and outlets with a dofollow link), traffic and customers (outlets your customers read), brand authority (news sites) or showing up in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews answers (the outlets AI cites, where the mention counts even if the link is nofollow).
2. Audit your backlink profile and your competitors'
Before you buy anything, check which links you have and which links the three sites beating you have. The clearest opportunities are outlets linking to two or more competitors but not to you. You can do it for free with the backlink checker, the competitor backlinks tool and the backlink audit, which also flags toxic links worth a look.
3. Set the budget with market data
What explains a link's price best is the traffic of the outlet that publishes it. These are the 2025 averages for Spanish-language outlets:
| Outlet organic traffic | Average price per post |
|---|---|
| Up to 20,000 visits a month | €81.25 |
| 20,001 to 75,000 visits a month | €167.18 |
| 75,001 to 200,000 visits a month | €307.68 |
| Over 200,000 visits a month | €697.26 |
At those prices, two links a month on mid-sized outlets come to about €300-350 a month, and the average Growwer buyer spends about €185 a month (€2,212 a year). The full breakdown is in how much link building costs.
4. Choose the outlets: topic, traffic and country
A good outlet for your strategy ticks five boxes:
- A related topic to the page you link, not just to your industry.
- Real, growing organic traffic: check it with the website traffic checker. Be wary of authority without visits.
- Your customer's country and language: a link from a Mexican outlet does little for a store that only sells in Spain.
- Few outbound links per article and no whole sections of sponsored posts.
- The right format: a new article, or a link insertion in an article that already ranks, which costs less.
Mix news sites and blogs. News sites bring authority and brand mentions; niche blogs bring topical relevance at a good price. Growwer lists more than 40,000 outlets with each one's price, traffic and country shown, and suggests the ones that fit your keywords.
5. Decide anchors and pace
A natural backlink profile grows little by little and with varied text. As a benchmark, two or three links a month per URL, with a mix of brand, URL and generic anchors ("in this guide") and, now and then, a partial keyword. Avoid packs of dozens of cheap links at once: they are the easiest footprint to spot.
Plan with the real lead time: in 2025 a post took 5.04 days on average from purchase to going live. If you have a key date (a launch, Black Friday), buy three or four weeks ahead.
6. Measure after six weeks before you buy again
In Search Console, filter by the URL you pushed and compare position, impressions and clicks in the six weeks before the first link with the six weeks after. If it moved, repeat with the same kind of outlets; if it did not, review the page's content and intent first. If your goal was AI visibility, check with the AI visibility checker whether ChatGPT and Google now name you.
Tactics that work well alongside buying links
- Press releases on news sites you choose, when you have real news: publish press releases.
- Unlinked brand mentions, which count for AI: the brand mentions strategy.
- Broken link building: offering your content to sites linking to a page that no longer exists.
- Content with your own data (studies, surveys), which earns links without paying for them.
Common mistakes
- Buying on authority (DR) without checking the outlet's real traffic.
- Always linking to the home page instead of the pages that sell.
- Repeating the exact keyword in every anchor.
- Spending the whole budget in one month and never buying again.
- Not measuring: without the six-week comparison you cannot tell which outlets work.
Frequently asked questions
How many links do I need a month?
It depends on how competitive your searches are, but two or three a month per URL is a pace that shows and looks natural. The average Growwer buyer orders 11.6 posts a year.
How much should I spend on link building?
In 2025 the average was €2,212 a year per buyer and €189.82 per post, with a median of €57. A local business can start with one or two posts a month on outlets in its area.
How long until a link shows results?
The post goes live in about five days on average. Measure the ranking effect from six weeks on; it depends on how close the URL already is to the top 10.
Can I hand the strategy over?
Yes. With Growwer's managed service, from €500 a month with no management fee, an account manager proposes outlets within 48 hours and runs the campaign once you approve it.
