I see this all the time. Pest control owners get Facebook ads promising 10,000 backlinks for $100 and think they’re getting a deal.
They’re not. They’re buying a penalty.
I run Pest Control SEO, and I need to be blunt with you: backlinks still matter 100%, but most people are doing them completely wrong. Let me show you what actually works.
Do Backlinks Even Matter for Pest Control?
There’s a lot of people that even ask me this. Backlinks do still 100% matter. I hate to break it to you.
But backlinks, you can think of them, first off, if you don’t know what they are, it’s essentially a link from someone else’s site to your site. That will particularly be a link on one of their pages on their site.
That will be maybe in the text of their page, or that could be a button. And then it goes to one of the pages on your site.
That’s what a backlink is.
Why They’re So Powerful
The reason why it’s so important is because it essentially acts as a vote of confidence.
Everything in SEO is about building authority and trust.
When a very trustworthy, authoritative person links to your site, that acts as what people call in SEO a vote. They are giving you a vote of confidence.
Maybe I write an article about pest control marketing and I link to your website because I’m talking maybe about Facebook ads.
And I’m like, “Well, if you want to learn about Facebook ads for pest control, definitely check out Jake Sheldon.” And in Jake Sheldon, I could link to your personal site and that would be a vote of confidence saying, “Hey, I clearly endorse this person or this site overall, this entity.”
That’s why it’s so powerful.
Why Bulk Links Are Worthless
In the other respect, it’s not so powerful when it’s from smaller sites that have no authority or relevance or trust.
I’ve seen this before, that some people will pay, or at least I don’t know about people paying, but I’ve seen ads on Facebook that say “Buy 10,000 backlinks for $100,” and I’m sure some people actually find that attractive.
But the key with backlinks is that they are from a relevant, authoritative, trustworthy source.
Actually, 5 to 10 really quality backlinks, even you could argue one, is better than 10,000 really bad backlinks.
Because they just don’t matter. Google doesn’t place any relevance from those links.
It actually could work to your detriment that you are doing bad SEO.
Honestly, in Google’s guidelines, they actually say don’t buy any links. It should be completely natural that your pages should be so good that people naturally link to them.
That won’t be the case all the time. I still actually do recommend that people buy links to at least a certain extent. That might even just be local sponsorships.
But that still should be kind of the philosophy around your content, that it should be so good. Like even the content that we’re making here.
I hope that this is so good that people end up sharing it on social media, and they might message me, or they might make a post about it, or they might even make a blog about it and link to it, because all those things are the same thing. It’s all people talking about you.
A backlink is kind of just the furthest extent of that because it’s really hard to acquire a great backlink from a great company.
The Most Valuable Backlinks for Pest Control Companies
I’d argue one of the most valuable ones is local links.
I first talked about trust and authority, but part of that also plays into relevance.
Same thing with the internal linking which we talked about in another post. When you internally link to other pages that are similar, that shows relevance. This company clearly does pest control in Illinois and they serve all of these different cities in Illinois.
If you also get backlinks from different companies in Illinois, and ideally that might be home service companies, then that is kind of an affirmation that you are a home service company in Illinois.
Not only that you are one, but that you are a trustworthy one, because it’s hard to get a backlink.
When you get backlinks, especially the more authoritative and trustworthy companies, then that is a signal to Google. Like, dang, this has to be somebody.
The same way you have someone on a podcast, or you co-create a book with someone, it is a vote of confidence when you link to someone, when you have them on a podcast, any of these different signals.
We really like to prioritize local links. We’ve seen those work tremendously.
Authoritative Links Matter Too
Outside of that, we ideally want some authoritative links as well. So it shouldn’t be all local. We like to get a good mix there.
Authoritative links should also be somewhat niche relevant. So ideally, a great one would be like PCT magazine or anything regarding pest control.
But maybe it’s a pest control product instead because ideally it’s not a competitor, but maybe you have a pest control company in California and you have a buddy who has a pest control company in Florida.
Why not link to each other? Because you guys both own pest control companies. Those are both super relevant links.
And if they have a lot of SEO power, that would be super helpful for your website and ranking.
How to Actually Get Quality Backlinks
Most people can’t do this. Most people don’t even really get to this stage.
The Local Sponsorship Strategy
One of the ways that we like to get those local links I was talking about was reaching out to local sponsorships, slash donations, slash charities.
There are plenty of these kinds of organizations that will allow you to become a sponsor. The result of that, of you sponsoring them or donating, might be a social post about you. They might put your logo on their banner at their event for a little bit, or they might give you a link on their site.
That’s ultimately what we’re looking for.
But really, when we’re talking about legitimate off-page SEO, building backlinks, a big part of that is PR.
I actually heard someone talk about this at a pest event, that they have one of the biggest companies in PR and they’re talking that their company name is everywhere. They sponsor the local baseball team and everything.
I actually didn’t get to ask them this question because we ran out of time. But I wanted to ask, “Are you getting links from this, though?”
Because that is the full circle. If we could get those links from local companies in the area that people trust, and a lot of these local sponsorships actually have a good amount of SEO power and they’re obviously local, if we can get some links from those, that would be huge.
The Outreach Process
In terms of actually reaching out to those, first you have to identify them, which you can do a search of, like, Chicago sponsorships, Chicago donations, whatever.
Find those sites. A lot of them will have a contact form or at least some kind of contact information, and they might even have some kind of packages already fleshed out of like, “Hey, you can pay $500 for a link on our site.”
And it’s like, boom, okay, you already know, and you can just either buy it right there or you can message them and say, “Hey, I’m interested. I want to buy the link.”
Or a lot of them will just offer some kind of social posts and that will be it. But we do want to get the link here if we’re really trying to boost our SEO here.
You want to go to that contact form, you want to message these people and you can say something pretty nice, just like, “Hey, I was looking to donate to your company. I really believe in the cause, or whatever. It’s for handicapped people or for whatever. Really love the cause. Would love to get involved. I have a pest control company in town. I would love to help out. I saw that you guys have different packages and different things. I was wondering if you guys provide any opportunities regarding your website.”
You can kind of say something nice there. Don’t directly say, “Hey, can we get a backlink? How much does a backlink cost?”
Don’t be too aggressive. But they know. They know. Any website opportunities, they know what that means.
A lot of these people will respond because this is their whole thing is getting donations and sponsorships.
Then you can kind of go from there and depending on the power of their site, depending on how local they are and such, then it might make sense to pay up to, I mean, if they are really authoritative, it would make sense to pay like $1,000 for a link.
But less authoritative, smaller company, maybe $200 to $300. It depends on the site.
Low Quality vs. Risky Backlink Strategies
A good general principle here is that the harder a backlink is to get, the better it is.
The ones that are super easy, the ones that you can just click a button and buy 100,000, those aren’t quality links.
Again, that’s a good general principle. If it’s really easy to get, it’s probably not that good. The very good ones are probably going to be expensive.
What’s Actually Risky
In terms of the ones that are actually risky, overall, buying those low quality links is going to be risky.
Google doesn’t like seeing that, especially if they’re not relevant or authoritative in any way.
If you are a pest control owner and you buy a ton of links and let’s say those links are for, I don’t know, buying and selling tables, and also the site was built yesterday and they’ve also given links to 100,000 other sites.
What? How is this relevant at all? This actually makes us doubt you more because Google is looking at all the things that you’re doing.
Also, if you have a ton of AI generated pages on your site, it’s not only that those won’t rank, but it’s actually that Google trusts you less because they’re looking at every single thing you’re doing, even the backlinks.
Google knows, I mean, they weren’t born yesterday. They’ve been around for a while, and now they have all of these AI bots to assess what’s going on with your site and all the backlinks coming in and such.
They can see very clearly if you are doing some scammy risky things and all of the other people that are doing scammy risky things too.
Really beware of buying those bulk packages of links. Really for clients, we just aim to build 3 to 5 really quality links every month.
How to Measure Backlink Quality and Progress
I don’t necessarily have an answer that’s easy because SEO takes time, right?
We can measure that on a longer time frame. But that’s not something that’s going to happen right away.
Honestly you need to hire an SEO person that you trust or an SEO agency that you trust. And they will quantify this for you, but it’s not going to be like Facebook ads, where you know you’re making money for every dollar you spent.
Think of Backlinks Like PR
Really, again, you need to start thinking about backlinks more like PR. This is a branding opportunity.
We are building our reputation. We are going to pay $500, $1,000, whatever for this link. And we might not get any results from it for three months, six months.
But this is going to be something that is long term, that is going to build our reputation and authority.
There’s not necessarily certain measurement or KPIs to track. But overall you need someone that you can trust that is in charge of these things.
That has you still building a good amount of backlinks, not just only building the free ones or only building the cheap ones. This definitely needs to be part of your SEO strategy.
Where Do Backlinks Rank in SEO Importance?
Let me reframe this. SEO is a game of competition.
It’s not so much how important this thing or the other is, but it’s more so are you better than the competition or not.
That goes for every aspect of SEO.
Really you could actually measure your competition instead and see, okay, let’s say your top three competitors, they’re all five out of ten on on-page SEO, five out of ten on technical SEO, five out of ten on off-page SEO.
Then you should ideally be a six out of ten on all three of those or better.
It’s not like you have to be perfect. You don’t have to totally crush it.
But this is the overall concept of SEO. You don’t have to be perfect and you can’t be perfect. But we need to take a look at the competition and just do better than that.
Hypothetically, if your competition isn’t building any backlinks, then you might not even need to. But if they’re building a lot of backlinks, and a lot of companies are starting to, then you probably need to. It’s really important.
Should You Hire an Agency or DIY?
This does get a lot more technical when we’re talking the backlink side of things.
I think you have to hire an agency or hire an SEO person, VA, whatever.
All this stuff gets really complex. And this is just one component of SEO. There’s so many different things that go into it.
Generally I would recommend finding a trusted expert, but you still should have some baseline knowledge, which if you’re reading this, then good on you. You’re building this baseline knowledge now.
But I don’t think it should be something that you do yourself. You should have an understanding of SEO and of PR, but you should have a PR person. You should have an SEO person. You should delegate these things.
Especially because they’re so complex.
When to Actually Invest in SEO
Honestly, I’ll be completely transparent. SEO is something that you should invest in once you have more capital because it is a longer term strategy.
When you’re just starting out, if you’re even under $500,000 a year, then do more of the short term strategies that are going to generate revenue basically right away.
The Facebook ads where we can see that we’re getting customers, we have a $100 cost per customer or whatever, or local service ads or Google ads.
Versus SEO, it might take three months to get results. If you’re starting from zero, it might take 12 months to get results.
It’s not instant.
I don’t think that’s something you should do as a beginning pest control owner. I think you should focus on more of those short term tasks.
As you get to sub million, a million plus dollars a year, then start looking at SEO. And you’re a busy person at that point. You’re hiring someone to do that for you.
What You Can Focus On Now
The main thing you should be focused on to start is pest control company local SEO, which is everything to do with your Google Business Profile. Fill it out and get tons of reviews. That will help.
But past that, you might want to consider hiring an agency to do all this. It is pretty technical.
But like I was saying in the beginning, you need to be focusing on the things that you can focus on that bring pretty quick returns.
If we’re going to be spending money on advertising, we want it to get pretty quick return.
But for those of you reading who are doing a few million dollars a year and you don’t have some of these things dialed in, you probably should.
When you start getting that big, that’s when you really start looking more into branding, into SEO, into PR and all of those things. That’s really when you should.
You’ve probably built a successful company. You have a lot of employees, there’s a lot of content you can gather, and you have the capital to pursue that. That’s when you really get into it.
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Stop buying bulk backlink packages. Build 3 to 5 quality links per month and watch your rankings climb.
