Last updated Jan 14, 2025.
Great backlinks are built, not bought. This means the best backlinks come from manual link building outreach.
At Ranko Media, we have over 10 years of experience offering manual link building services. Generally, we focus on content strategies that attract backlinks with both active outreach and passive (free!) link acquisition techniques.
Sometimes, however, our strategies aren’t the best for your business. If that’s the case, the list below can help you find a service that fits your needs better than our digital PR or link building services.
This list is built based on feedback about these companies that we’ve gotten from our current clients, so we can verify the legitimacy of their tactics.
Here are the 5 best manual link building services that use white hat link building strategies to acquire backlinks.
1. Ranko Media
Location: 100% remote, enabling us to source talent globally and build the best, most creative team in the world!
Industries: Industry agnostic
Recognizable clients: Webex, Twilio, Writer, Binance, Oak Street Health
Pricing: Custom pricing
While we have a stellar manual link building team working constantly to secure high-quality backlinks for our clients, we also have a content and outreach system that’s designed to attract backlinks passively, with no outreach at all.
This process involves creating content that’s designed to appeal to bloggers and journalists in your niche, pitching it to them, and then ranking for keywords that bloggers and journalists use to find this content later.
When they find it on their own and the asset is helpful to their story, they link to it on their own with no pitch required!
Manual link building alone works for many clients, but our new and improved process guarantees that every piece of content we make means to gain valuable links from high DR sites — without using up as many resources for outreach.
Don’t believe the hype? Check out this case study about how we did this for IRC Sales Solutions to win backlinks from places like HubSpot, Entrepreneur, and more!
So yes, we’re putting ourselves first on this list for our unconventional methods of attracting backlinks with manual outreach and content.
2. Page One Power
Location: Boise, Idaho
Industries: Advertising and B2C
Recognizable clients: Intuit QuickBooks, Hyatt, and Lucidchart
Pricing: Custom pricing
Page One Power is a link building agency specializing in manual link building and strategic content creation. With over 13 years of experience, they focus on helping businesses enhance their online visibility and search engine rankings with manually acquired backlinks.
Campaign types can vary, but they often leverage content pitching as a method of acquiring backlinks, but they are relatively flexible in the types of campaigns they can build.
The company also offers in-depth technical audits to make sure your website is well-positioned for link outreach before a campaign begins.
Their services include keyword research, content marketing, technical SEO audits, and white-label solutions for agencies. Known for their transparency and dedicated project management, Page One Power emphasizes manual outreach practices to build high-quality backlinks and improve organic search performance, making them a trusted partner in the SEO industry.
Finally, Page One Power can create on-site linkable content for clients before beginning manual link acquisition. Effective content creation is a key factor that separates legitimate manual link building services from the rest.
3. uSERP
Location: Denver, Colorado
Industries: SaaS, information technology, and services
Recognizable clients: monday.com, Copy.ai, and Mailshake
Pricing: $10,000 – $30,000 per month+
uSERP is a manual link building agency that specializes in white-hat, manual link building as a means of acquiring backlinks for their clients.
Their comprehensive approach includes manual outreach for backlinks, brand mentions, and digital PR palcements. By focusing on creating impactful content and securing mentions in relevant publications, uSERP helps clients significantly boost their online visibility and organic traffic more quickly than if you were to buy the backlinks.
uSERP claims its quality over quantity approach is the faster, more affordable way to outrank competitors. We tend to agree with this. They often drive results driven with content gap analyses, URL analyses, and link reclamation for brand mentions.
uSERP is a manual link building service that’s trusted by large and mid-sized brands. They deliver tailored SEO strategies that drive growth in organic traffic. Plus, their guest posting services can help you build relationships with high-authority outlets.
4. BlueTree
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Industries: SaaS and technology
Recognizable clients: CreditDonkey, FreshBooks, and Dooly
Pricing: $5,000 – $10,000 per month
BlueTree leverages manual link building via digital PR to get editorial mentions for their clients. These editorial mentions fuel increased domain authority, which improves rankings across an entire domain. This is an effective way to scale your brand in the mid-to-long term.
While BlueTree does leverage manual outreach, they also focus on maintaining strong relationships with more than 300 tech-focused publications. This can result in higher success rates from manual outreach, which can work well in the short term and within specific industries, but as the campaign ages, success rates may drop if they start reaching out cold. That said, they do manual link building, and even if their list runs out, they can continue to manage solid campaigns.
BlueTree’s team acquires backlinks by creating topically relevant content for these publications where links to clients, services, and products are naturally and seamlessly integrated into first-class, long-form copy. This is a lot like guest posting, but with a PR focus. BlueTree’s goal is to ensure clients reach their target links in a way that’s completely hands-off for them.
5. Sure Oak
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Industries: B2b, SaaS, fintech, education, insurance, e-commerce, and healthcare
Recognizable clients: SideChef, United Van Lines, and American Red Cross
Pricing: $2,000 – $10,000 per month
When it comes to manual link building tactics, Sure Oak leverages a strategy that provides prospective link partners with an equally valuable resource to the one they’re promoting — increasing the chances that you win a backlink placement from manual outreach.
So it’s a combination of creating on-site content to get the backlink, and off-site content for the publication to publish. It’s a bit of a content marketing approach.
When it comes to manual link building services, Sure Oak offers a variety of campaign types depending on your website’s specific needs, including:
- Editorial link insertions
- EDU or scholarship link building
- Resource page link building
- Network links
- Link reclamation
- Digital PR
- White label link building.
Most websites leverage different link building strategies, depending on their business objective and the client’s needs and wants. With Sure Oak, you can work with them to find the right strategy for your business objectives.
Get Backlinks With Trusted Manual Link Building Services
Manual link building outreach is an under-prioritized part of the SEO game. 75% of link building agencies and freelancers simply pay for backlinks, so by leveraging white hat, outreach-focused approaches, you can differentiate your strategy from what others are doing.
f you’re looking to work with one of the best link building services, these agencies can guarantee that links are the name and building them is the game.
At Ranko Media, our team of content marketing, PR, and link building outreach professionals are ready to help you scale your website traffic with backlink acquisition. Whatever the size of your company, whatever your industry, we have subject matter experts ready to tackle your project.
Contact us below to get started on a link building strategy for your website!