Are you publishing plenty of content to your website, but aren’t really seeing the results you’d expected? Chances are, your online brand isn’t developed enough, and your website is lacking backlinks.
Link building is a key function of SEO, and though each marketer has their own preference, HARO link building is tough to beat.
HARO, short for “Help a Reporter Out” is a great method of link building as it’s safe, and 100% white-hat. This means you can run a journalist outreach campaign without risking your website’s organic search rankings.
Below you’ll find a list of HARO link building agencies. We’ve thoroughly researched their services to help you to save time in choosing the provider that is right for your needs.
Table of Contents
Why Is Help a Reporter So Good?
If you’ve tried to build links to your website before, chances are it’s involved outreach. Emailing person after person, asking if they will edit their existing content, or let you publish a guest post is tough.
Rejection after rejection is common, because you’re disrupting their day, asking them to do something that they don’t really want to be involved with.
Help a Reporter Out is awesome, because it completely flips the script. Journalists and writers need help from experts like yourself, and regularly give links for that help.
Many of these links come from well established publications and authority blogs. Unlike niche edits and guest posts, they aren’t paid, aren’t manipulative, and aren’t putting your search rankings at risk.
The Best HARO Link Building Agencies
The term “best” comes with some assumptions. For the sake of compiling this list, we’ve evaluated these HARO SEO backlink services for their:
- Hassle: The less work you need to do the better.
- Link quality: Are the sites high DR with significant organic traffic?
- Price: What do you end up paying per link?
- Messaging: Do they accurately represent your personality and your brand?
- Results: Do their services actually deliver?
- Transparency: Do they communicate well, and provide you with clear reporting?
Let’s take a look at some of these premium link building service providers in more detail.
Dialed Labs: Our Top Choice
- Best For: B2B services, finance, legal & HR companies
- Average Cost Per Link: $350
- Average Domain Rating: 65
- Monthly Budget: $1,199+
While most of the HARO service providers in this list can deliver at least half decent links, the team at Dialed Labs go one step further.
Working with mostly B2B service businesses, legal firms, and publicly listed enterprises, they know that in the age of cancel culture, jeopardising your personal and corporate reputation for a backlink just isn’t worth the risk.
After signing up, they’ll review your personal LinkedIn profile, and give you feedback on how it can be improved. They don’t only want to help your business’ brand, they want to improve your personal brand as well, which is great for Google’s latest E-E-A-T standards.
You’ll receive some questions, and they will review any content you have previously written, like blog posts, books and social media posts. From this, they develop a key messaging document, which they use to ghost write your responses, just as if you did it yourself.
What We Like
- Real-Time Reporting: You get a Google Looker report that is updated in real time with the pitches they have made, as well as links won.
- Ghost Writing Ability: They won’t make any old claim to land a link. You can trust Dialed Labs to do their research and represent your company correctly.
- High Impact Links: From what we’ve seen, they land links from some of the more unique domains, with link campaigns averaging DR65+.
JollySEO
- Best For: Funded startups & enterprises
- Average Cost Per Link: $675
- Average Domain Rating: 75
- Monthly Budget: $2,000+
These guys are the veterans of this service, having been around since 2017. They boast over 350 clients and at one point were selling $100,000 worth of HARO backlinks each month.
Link quality from Jolly SEO is high, but then, so is their price. With a price per link as high as it is, it’s hard to justify getting many links from them each month unless your startup has a heap of capital to spend.
Possibly they are listening, though. They’ve recently launched a “done-with-you” HARO link building service, where you write the responses and they coach you through the process.
It’s nowhere near as time efficient, since you have to do the work, but if you want to work with them and don’t have the budget to cover their high per-link pricing for the done-for-you service, this could be your next best option.
What We Like
- High DR Average: Most campaigns from Jolly SEO will result in links averaging DR75.
- Free Assessment Call: These guys will give you a free call where you can decide if their services are right for you.
- Single Account Specialist: Your point of contact will work with you to build an effective link-building strategy.
Loganix
- Best For: Resellers & agencies
- Average Cost Per Link: $850
- Average Domain Rating: 65
- Monthly Budget: $4,250+
Well known among SEO consultants and agency resellers, Loganix offers a wide range of SEO services. One of their link building services focuses on HARO.
Let’s call it for what it is. Loganix charges eye-wateringly high prices, but for many their proven track record and benefit of being a “one stop shop” for all things SEO makes that price worthwhile.
Unlike some other vendors in this list, they only use the HARO and ProfNet media platforms, meaning you’ll miss some of the more unique opportunities that can be found elsewhere.
When it comes to guarantees, these guys prefer to use the more easily manipulated Domain Authority score from Moz instead of what has fast become the industry standard… Ahrefs’ Domain Rating.
What We Like
- White Label Spreadsheet: Every campaign comes with a Google Sheets report which can be white labeled with your agency’s brand.
- Additional Link Availability: On top of your monthly retainer price, you can top up for $850 per additional link.
- Well Researched: Each quote that the Loganix team writes is detailed, accurate and well written.
HARO-SEO.com
- Best For: Affiliates & small businesses
- Average Cost Per Link: $325
- Average Domain Rating: 50
- Monthly Budget: $975+
A great option for those of you on lower budgets, HARO-SEO.com offers one-time projects and smaller monthly retainer options. Their minimum qualifying link metric is DR30, which is lower than some of the other options.
That’s not so bad though, especially if the link is relevant. Unfortunately their FAQ section states that:
“We cannot offer industry relevance for every client. We have expertise in business and marketing—our pitches get a good inclusion rate, and you will sound like an expert.”
It’s our experience that this amount of relevancy is actually very common for a lot of HARO backlinks. What we don’t like is that they will charge you for 3 different links from the same domain.
What We Like
- Ready-to-Paste Quotes: Their writers will send quotes that can simply be copied and pasted into the journalist’s article.
- Don’t Pay for Low Quality Links: If a link doesn’t meet their DR30 minimum criteria, you’ll get it for free.
- Small Scale: These guys are only a small team. If you only need 3-5 links per month, they could be the right fit.
LinkBuilder.io
- Best For: SaaS Businesses
- Average Cost Per Link: $415
- Average Domain Rating: 70
- Monthly Budget: $2,999+
Though not a true HARO-only link building service, LinkBuilder.io do use HARO and other media platforms in their backlink campaigns.
This type of service provider is better suited to businesses looking to completely outsource their link building to a third party.
The negative of getting LinkBuilder.io to build links using other methods like niche edits and guest posts is that you’re no longer working with pure white-hat link building. Many of these ‘placements’ will involve payments to the website’s owners.
Still, they’re likely to pack a punch, which is ultimately what you want.
What We Like
- A High DR Average: The links you’ll get from one of their monthly packages will range from DR50-90.
- They Reply Fast: Any good HARO link building agency will need to respond quickly. LinkBuilder.io knows this and puts a lot of energy into a fast reply.
- Filtered Opportunities: LinkBuilder.io don’t respond to all queries. They filter on relevancy and the publication’s name first, before writing their response.
How to Choose a HARO Link Building Service
On face value it might seem like all of these companies are doing the same thing, but there are some differences that could affect your decision.
You might want to consider:
- If you want to pay per-link, or on a monthly retainer basis: Per link is more common among SEO freelancers, but can be a short term view. If you’re going to get results, you’ll need to build HARO backlinks for at least a few months, if not a year. Given the long time for links to get published, waiting for the first batch to get published before ordering more might not be the best approach.
- Long lock-in contracts: Though you’ll want to mentally commit to investing for multiple months in order to improve your rankings, you shouldn’t need to lock yourself in for the long-term. If the agency you choose isn’t working out, you’ll want to switch to another that can get the results you need.
- Ghostwriting experience: A lot of agencies tout “fluent English writers”, but just because someone can write in English doesn’t mean that they get you and your company. Look for more than English, look for writers that can represent you well in the media.
- How nofollow links are handled: Though nofollow links are natural and likely send some good signals in Google’s direction, they may not get significant results for your website. If you’re paying per link, or getting a guarantee, do nofollow links count?
- Link metrics: Do you prefer to use Domain Authority or Domain Rating? DA used to be the industry standard but now DR is more in favor. Is the vendor you’re considering guaranteeing a minimum amount of organic traffic as well? Get clear on the metrics that are important to you before choosing which agency to go with.
A quality link building service that uses digital PR is a great method to improving your organic search traffic. High authority links should help your blog content and website’s pages into the top results of Google.
The agencies in this list each have their pros and cons, but one thing is for sure, Help a Reporter Out is a great option, and with the right process, you’ll get the results you’re looking for.