LINK BUILDING THAT IMPROVES VISIBILITY, RANKINGS, AND REVENUE FOR SEO TEAMS

We help SEO teams correct significant traffic drops and outperform competitors by getting 100s of relevant, sticky backlinks to sales pages.

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We help SEO teams correct significant traffic
Icon for years in link building and SEO
20+
years link-building + SEO experience
Icon for the number of links Citation Labs has built over the years
185,468
links built
Icon for the revenue increase Citation Labs earns for our clients through our link building campaigns
35%
average revenue increase

ONE OR TWO LINKS? PASS. TRY HUNDREDS OF AWESOME LINKS. EVERY MONTH.

University Increases Backlink Budget 5x After Clear ROI

National university results

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Content from First-Party Data Fuels Wave of Conversions

National online business results

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Unicorn Startup Earns 587 Backlinks in Two Weeks

Global subscription service results

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OUR PROCESS FOR BUILDING LINKS AT SCALE

No one needs just “one or two links”. If you want your sales pages to stand out in search, you need 100s of links every month. And to do that, you need a backlink machine.

Take a look under the hood of ours.

The Citation Labs Process

PEOPLE THINK WE’RE AWESOME!

“Most link builders give you a list of sites and their authority. Best case, you get a monthly report with a list of all the links. Citation Labs goes…beyond the extra mile…they go an extra hundred miles. They partner with you to understand your business, goals, and competitive landscape. Then, get you links that get results.

James provides a 20-page report showing the impact link building has on our traffic: improved rankings, authority, and conversions. While there’s an element of correlation, we can connect the data points to prove the ROI of our campaigns.”

Scott Eggenberger

Scott Eggenberger Director of Search, University of Phoenix

“Trying to find 500 links to a page is difficult. For the scale we had, Citation Labs provided significant links. And it felt like they did their due diligence to find higher quality links than other agencies. We set up guardrails for the links we wanted (and trusted). They delivered.”

Lorrin Nahinu

Lorrin NahinuSenior SEO Analyst, Angi

“After working with several link building agencies over six months and carefully tracking output & performance, Citation Labs was the only agency that demonstrated direct, positive impact on our priority landing pages. So I asked for a job.”

James Wirth

James WirthManaging Director, Product & Growth, Citation Labs

“Garrett French is one of the smartest people I know. An absolute A-List thought leader. If you’re not using any of Citation Labs tools, I suggest you start immediately, before your competition does.”

Eric Ward

“I brought on Citation Labs after seeing their results at a former company. We got a huge win in an emerging vertical within a few months of working with them. I got a company-wide shout-out. After that, the CEO knew my name. It helped build buy-in to our SEO program and expand our budget down the line.”

Lee Elliot

Lee Elliot Spoonflower, SEO Manager

“Working with Citation Labs has been an absolute pleasure. Their strategic advice has been invaluable, offering insights that have truly elevated our outreach approach. What stands out even more is their unwavering reliability and punctual delivery.”

Claudia Cruz

Claudia Cruz Senior Outreach Manager, Adobe

“I started working with Citation Labs in 2019. I had heard great things about Garrett and his team and was pleased to learn the reputation was well earned – these folks ‘walk the walk’. They helped us design several projects over the years and were always eager to review effectiveness and adjust if needed. I’ve always found Citation Labs to not only be both professional and effective; but a pleasure to work with as well.”

Charles Taylor

Charles TaylorDirector of SEO, Fox Corp

“Garrett French has solidified his reputation as one of the few true, authoritative, innovative link builders in our industry. There are only a handful of marketers who have mastered and cultivated the craft of link building. Garrett is certainly one of them.”

Russ Jones Principal Search Scientist, Moz

LET’S TAKE LINK BUILDING OFF YOUR PLATE

FREQUENTLY UNASKED QUESTIONS (FUQs)

Why are high-traffic and DR/DA not a guaranteed indicator of success?

Relevance, not DR/DA or Traffic, indicates success. You need content that’s relevant to your buyer, written for a publisher with a contextually relevant link. This sends numerous positive signals of a valuable link, helping increase sales page ranking.Most link building agencies use DR/DA and traffic to charge a premium for these types of links even though there is no data to back up the claim that these links are better.

Additionally, metrics can be gamed. There are plenty of irrelevant sites that are part of private blog networks and/or offer the path of least resistance for agencies and link sellers. But they are not the best option for businesses looking for relevant, sticky backlinks to their sales pages.

Our goal for clients is to find them the best websites to bring visibility to their key sales offerings. This usually means getting placement from other relevant business websites that align with their ideal buyer (not high DR/DA and traffic websites.)

How do you help us expand our SEO budget and improve company-wide buy-in?

Many SEO leaders struggle to get leadership support because SEO results take longer than paid media and are more difficult to explain. Executives want to see financial impact, not traditional SEO metrics.

Without the right story on how SEO impacts sales metrics, leadership teams see SEO as a cost rather than a growth driver.

Citation Labs fixes this by:

  • Aligning link-building efforts with core business objectives
  • Providing clear reporting that connects links to revenue impact
  • Positioning SEO as a competitive advantage within the organization

By shifting the conversation from “we need links” to “we need to increase organic-driven revenue,” it becomes easier to justify and grow the SEO budget.

How does your work help me ace my annual review?

SEO leaders are often measured on organic growth, revenue impact, and alignment with business goals.

Citation Labs structures its link-building strategy to ensure that:

  • Organic search performance improves in measurable ways
  • The impact of SEO efforts can be clearly communicated to leadership
  • Reporting ties directly to revenue, making it easier to demonstrate value

Instead of reporting solely on the number of links built and those page metrics, Citation Labs helps clients show how new backlinks contributed to business outcomes.

This makes it easier to gain recognition and career advancement for your efforts.

How do I pitch link-building campaigns to my CMO?

SCMOs focus on revenue and growth rather than SEO-specific terminology. When pitching a link-building campaign, the conversation should center on:

  • Competitive advantage: “Competitors outrank us because they have stronger backlinks.”
  • Revenue impact: “More links to high-intent pages lead to higher rankings and more sales.”
  • Risk mitigation: “Google prioritizes authoritative backlinks—if we don’t invest, we fall behind.”

Citation Labs provides reporting that translates SEO metrics into business outcomes, making it easier to secure buy-in from executive leadership.

What are link-building KPIs my CFO will want to see?

CFOs are concerned with financial impact rather than SEO performance metrics. Instead of discussing domain authority, an SEO strategy should be evaluated based on:

  • Cost efficiency: the return on investment for link-building efforts
  • Revenue impact: how links drive qualified traffic and conversions
  • Organic growth trends: improvements in rankings for high-value search terms

Competitive positioning: whether the company is outperforming competitors in search
By presenting link-building as a revenue-generating initiative rather than a marketing expense, it is easier to secure long-term investment in SEO.

What if our leadership team doesn’t fully understand link building’s impact?

Most executives expect PPC-style reporting, where results are immediate and quantifiable. However, link-building contributes to SEO growth over months, not days. And it’s not always clear and easy to illustrate this.

We’ve built a custom reporting tool that provides clear, revenue-tied reports to help you communicate impact to leadership. These comprehensive reports can be easily shared or cut up into smaller overviews for your leadership team.

How do you ensure the links you build remain valuable over time?

Google exists to help get people the best information in the fastest possible way. The way it does this is by finding and sharing the most relevant, comprehensive answers to questions based on real experience and data.

Over the years, search has evolved. But this core tenant remains the same.

Knowing this, we create contextually relevant, expert content with publishers that showcase your brand and solution. By earning links this way, we future-proof our links against algorithm updates and evolving ranking factors.

Our retention rates for links are: 94% after 12 months and 85% after 24 months.

How do your links impact sales, not just rankings?

Our goal isn’t to increase the DR/DA of your website. We also don’t usually target content pages for backlinks.

Instead, we analyze your website against competitors to determine which pages need backlinks to increase their visibility and how many links they need. From there, we prioritize pages based on budget and business goals.

These are links to sales pages. They increase the visibility of your key offerings in search and in LLM tools, making it more likely that prospective customers will find your solutions on their buyer’s journey.

How do you handle industries with strict compliance or link restrictions?

For businesses with heavy compliance and legal guidelines, we focus on our unbranded outreach. This approach allows us to conduct outreach, negotiate link placement, and create content without having to run every asset through complex approval processes.

How do we defend this investment when other teams prioritize PPC or social?

Leadership teams want to allocate appropriate resources to the right channels to drive new business. Without showing the potential impact of any initiative, it’s very difficult to justify the budget for those activities. This is challenging with SEO as results are often delayed.

To defend your SEO budget from the start, we map out the potential link impact on your sales pages using our Link Impact Report. Each month, we update your team on the results of our campaign and show the impact of those links on the sales pages. We also use a control group to ensure the data we report is accurate.

As leadership teams see the value of link building, they are more willing to defend that budget. In several cases, CMOs have even increased this budget (as much as 5x by one client).

How do you ensure our internal teams (content, PR, devs) align with link-building?

Enterprise organizations have very complex team dynamics and difficult internal politics to navigate. Without care, SEOs and their vendors can derail the momentum of campaigns. This hurts the internal stakeholders and negatively impacts the team’s perception of that vendor.

This is why we’re very careful with where our efforts end and your other teams’ efforts begin. We are highly collaborative because we understand that momentum matters, so we work to build it with your team.

Having successfully navigated several complex internal relationships for large clients, we’ve gone on to support other teams within the organization—becoming the preferred vendor across the business.

Why do some agencies sell links at a fraction of your cost?

Many vendors that sell these links have an existing network of publishers who will automatically add links to irrelevant content, creating the path of least resistance and the highest margin for them. They do this at scale and with no regard to strategy or business outcomes.

These cheap links are often low-quality with minimal (if any) relevance to the business, product, or customer. It’s simply a backlink. And you get the link you pay for.

Our strategy starts before the first call. Using in-house tools, we run reports on your website to determine the best sales pages to target and the number of links needed to increase visibility.

After our engagement starts, we meet regularly with our champions to provide current insights, new ideas, and support. From helping SEOs get critical sales data to better calculate ROI to support budget requests to experimenting with new approaches to link building, we help our champions exceed the expectations for their role.

The kind of links and results we get for our champions get them notoriety within their organization, promotions, and more budget for new campaigns.

WE’VE BEEN FEATURED IN:

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