How to Build Backlinks on a Tight Link Building Budget (Tips + Tools)

Want better rankings but don’t have a big link building budget? You’re not alone. Many businesses face the same challenge: how to grow without overspending.

The good news? You can build valuable backlinks even with a small budget. In this guide, we’ll show you affordable strategies to help you improve your SEO and online visibility.

Ready to make the most of what you’ve got?

Link Building on a Budget: 4 Strategies That Work

Here’s a breakdown of affordable link building strategies that can help you increase the online visibility of your business.

Turn Unlinked Brand Mentions into Backlinks

Unlinked brand mentions are online references of your brand or company or anything related to your brand, like products or services, without a link to your site. 

For example, a blog might mention your product, but they don’t include a clickable link. Even though this improves your brand awareness, it doesn’t help with SEO.

The good news is, you can reach out to these websites and ask them to add a link to your site. This is easier to do if you’re a larger company, but even smaller businesses can try this strategy and see results.

Here’s how to do it:

• Track brand mentions with SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush
• Contact the website and ask to add a link to your site
• Offer some value to the site by explaining how they could benefit from linking to your website.

With these simple steps, you can build backlinks without spending a lot of money. Amazing, right?

Analyze Competitor Backlinks to Find Link Opportunities

Up next is competitor backlinks analysis.

The idea is simple: if a competitor got a backlink from a particular website and it became broken, there’s a good chance that the same site would be willing to link to you, too, especially if you have similar content.

How it works:

Step 1: Run a competitive backlink analysis using Ahrefs to find your competitors’ broken links
Step 2: Find relevant content or a page on your site that could replace the broken link
Step 3: Reach out to the decision-maker, whether it’s the website editor or admin, or content manager, and ask them to replace the broken link with a link to your content.

While this strategy sounds promising, it’s not always practical. You may need to contact at least 20 websites to convert one broken link into a backlink for your site. Plus, you’ll need to provide a mutual benefit to make this happen (e.g., offering them additional content or something else that would be valuable for their audience).

Analyzing your competitor’s backlinks can open up some good backlink opportunities. But remember, it takes time and persistence. 

Try Direct Exchanges (The Right Way)

Direct link exchanges or A-B exchanges are when two websites agree to link to each other. 

It sounds easy, and technically, it works. You link to my site, I link to yours. Simple, right?

But, there’s a catch. Google isn’t a fan of excessive link exchanges. They’re seen as a link scheme, which is against its guidelines. Plus, its algorithms are also pretty good at spotting direct exchange patterns, and if they catch you doing it in a spammy way, your site could get a penalty.

Still, if you’re ready to give it a try, at least do it the right way. Don’t link to each other from the same pages. For example, you can link to their blog post from one of your product pages, and they can link to your homepage from a completely different blog post. The key is to make it look natural.

The bottom line? Direct exchanges are risky, and we don’t recommend making them a core strategy. But if you decide to use this tactic, be cautious and make sure your links provide value to users, not just each other.

Use A-B-C Exchanges to Build Backlinks Safely

A-B-C link exchanges are like an upgraded version of direct swaps. It works like this:

Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links back to Site A. This makes it harder for Google to detect them, making it a safer link exchange strategy to build backlinks.

However, if you’re doing this on your own, you’ll need to be part of some link building community and have a third website to offer a backlink to your partner. And if you’re starting from scratch, it will take time and resources, and the cost per link won’t be as cheap as you’d expect.

That’s why many businesses choose to outsource link building. Agencies already have trusted connections and automated systems in place, which keeps the link building cost lower and makes the process much faster.

And if you’re looking for an agency that gets results without blowing your link building budget, we’re here to help. Our link building pricing is a great place to start—simple and affordable. Check it out!

Building Backlinks on a Budget? Don’t Make These 4 Mistakes

Trying to build backlinks without spending a fortune is totally doable, only if you avoid these common traps. Let’s walk through four mistakes we’ve seen many budget-conscious businesses make.

Mistake #1: Learning link building only from blog posts

Yes, blog posts are helpful, especially when you’re just getting started, but they don’t give you the full picture of how SEO works. Even if you’re reading guides from industry giants like Ahrefs or SEMrush, they cannot help you fully.

What we believe is more useful is to talk to real people, connect with experts on LinkedIn, and ask questions. A quick chat or consultation can also teach you more than hours of reading.

Mistake #2: Buying cheap backlinks from shady websites

A $2 backlink sounds like a good deal for many businesses that aim for cheap link building until it hurts their site. A lot of cheap backlinks come from poor sources like random directories, spammy forums, PBNs, news, and magazine sites. 

These are the types of backlinks that often do more harm than good and can even lead to penalties from Google. So, they’re totally not worth the risk.

Mistake #3: Building backlinks from non-indexable parts of a website

If Google can’t see the link, it has no SEO value. Some people build links from places that never get indexed, like niche forums. For example, many people see a big name like WordPress and think a backlink from a community forum related to WordPress is automatically valuable. 

But it’s not the actual WordPress.org website, and these forums are often not indexed by Google. So, while it may feel like a good backlink, it does nothing for your rankings․

Mistake #4: Getting backlinks from subdomains

Be careful with backlinks that come from long and suspicious subdomains (e.g.,  blog.example.site.com). 

While many businesses with a small link building budget build backlinks from such domains, these aren’t real websites but random subdomains. Moreover, Google can easily identify such subdomains a mile away, and those backlinks won’t do much for your website’s growth.

When you have limited resources, every backlink matters. So, make sure you’re building the right ones and not wasting time or money on tactics that don’t work.

Top 3 Free Link Building Tools

Free tools can be a lifesaver when your link building budget is small. Here are three that can help you automate different parts of your backlink campaign, from backlink outreach to text edits, making the processes much easier. 

Tool #1: Clearbit: Clearbit Connect is a free extension that enables you to find decision-makers and get their email addresses—perfect when you’re doing cold outreach for backlinks.

Tool #2: Snow.io: Another handy tool for businesses with a limited budget. It also has a free LinkedIn email finder extension that allows you to find email addresses right from LinkedIn profiles. It’s especially helpful when you’re trying to build an accurate email list for link building outreach.

Tool #3: ChatGPT: And then there’s ChatGPT—your new favorite assistant. With the SEO Link Insertion Pro, you can easily make relevant and highly natural text edits for your link insertions. All you need to do is provide a keyword and some text, and the tool will do the smoothest keyword integration.

These link building tools can make everything easier, so you can focus on growing your business without emptying your wallet!

Real Results on a Small Budget: Link Building Case Study

Having a tight link building budget doesn’t mean you have to settle for small results. Here’s how we helped one of our clients grow without spending a fortune.

The Strategy

We started by identifying target pages for link building. These were the most important landing and blog pages on the client’s site. Then, we chose low- to medium-difficulty keywords, which could help us easily rank higher on Google.

The Results

We saw a huge improvement in key link building metrics, even with the small budget:

• Domain Rating (DR) jumped from 48 to 56
• Traffic increased from 2.1K to 2.5K

Plus, as the screenshot below shows, most referring domains had much stronger metrics than our minimum benchmarks (50+ DR and 1,000+ traffic). This gave the SEO performance an extra lift.

This proves that even limited resources can make a big impact. The key is picking the right pages and keywords, and making every link count.

Final Thoughts 

Small link building budget. Big results. That’s the kind of strategy businesses expect to achieve. With a smart strategy and tools, it’s quite possible to move the needle.

But if you’d rather skip the trial-and-error and get expert help that fits your budget, we’re just one call away. Contact us today to see how we can help your website grow without blowing your budget.

FAQ about link building budget