A Dutch agency with 12 clients: the one-hour month

This is a worked example of a typical first month for a Dutch agency with twelve clients, not a customer story, and every figure in it comes from our own delivery data. The agency is a type, not a name. The budgets are chosen so the arithmetic is easy to follow. The mechanics are exactly what runs on every order.

The agency

A Dutch digital agency with twelve retained SEO clients, most of them online shops and service businesses selling in the Netherlands. Two people on the SEO side, both of whom also do content and technical work. Link building has so far been done in-house by whoever had a free afternoon, which means it has happened in bursts and stopped whenever a client project got busy.

The fear

The fear is not that the links will be bad. It is the time. Twelve clients means twelve candidate lists, twelve rounds of outreach, twelve sets of publisher replies, briefs, articles and invoices. Most suppliers solve their half of that and hand the other half back as a list of sites to approve every week. Approving sites for twelve clients is its own job, and it is the job the agency was trying to get rid of.

So the question this month has to answer is simple. How much of the agency's own time does link building take when the supplier makes the decisions?

Week one: twelve clients, twelve budgets, set once

Each client is registered with the things we need and nothing else: the domain, the market and language, the pages the links should point at, and any words that must never appear in an anchor. A monthly budget is set at the same time. That is the whole brief, and it does not have to be repeated next month.

For the arithmetic, take 1,000 euro per client, 12,000 euro across the portfolio. Our average paid link is about 210 euro, with publisher quotes ranging from 30 to 1,200, and our fee averages 30% with the article included. So a 1,000 euro budget buys about three to four links a month, and the portfolio about forty. Those are averages, and the live number moves with the quotes that come back for each client's topic.

Before any publisher is contacted, candidates for each client's topic go through the five checks: organic traffic of 2,000 or more a month measured in the Netherlands, a spam score that was actually returned and is under 40, numeric relevance of 40 or more, no operator footprint across the portfolio, and no rented links. Across our sourcing one candidate in twelve clears all five. Own-locale traffic removes the most. Dutch-language sites that pick up most of their readers in Belgium look strong on a global number and fall out when the filter is set to the Netherlands.

Agency time in week one: registering twelve clients at about three minutes each, roughly 36 minutes. The budgets are set in the same step.

Week two: outreach the agency does not see

Outreach runs under our name, never the agency's and never the client's. Publishers are told what to write and where to link, and nothing about who is behind it.

The response figures below are from our campaigns as a whole, not from any single portfolio: 303 publishers contacted, 598 emails sent, 27.4% replied, 13.5% came back with a price we could work with, and 4% bounced. The quotes that come back are what make a flat price list impossible. Thirty euro and 1,200 euro are both real prices for a real link, and the job is choosing between them against the budget.

Agency time in week two: none. There is nothing to approve, so there is nothing to read.

Week three: decisions, with the reason written down

Every order is decided by us and carries its reason: why this publisher, why an insertion into an existing article rather than a new guest post, why this target page, why this anchor. The reasons are written for the agency to forward, not for us to file.

The split between insertions and new articles follows the pages that are available. An insertion into a page that already ranks for the subject carries the link from the day it goes live. A new article is written natively in Dutch, never translated, and is included in the fee.

The publisher invoices the agency directly for the placement. Our fee is a separate line, 25 to 40% depending on the market and the work, averaging 30%. Nothing is marked up inside the publisher price.

Agency time in week three: none.

Week four: live, checked, reported

Links go live as publishers deliver, which is why month one is never evenly spread. Every placement then enters twelve months of weekly checks across nine failure states, from removal and nofollow to a redirect or an altered anchor, with replace or refund if any of them trips. A placement not indexed within 60 days is replaced or refunded as well.

At month end, twelve reports are generated under the agency's name, one per client. They list the live URL, the anchor, the target page, the publisher's own-locale traffic and the reason for each decision. Nothing in the file, the footer or the metadata points to us.

Agency time in week four: opening and forwarding twelve reports, about two minutes each, roughly 24 minutes.

The numbers

• About 36 minutes to register twelve clients and set twelve budgets, once.
• About 24 minutes to read and forward twelve reports.
• Roughly an hour of the agency's time in total, and the first month is the long one because it includes the setup.
• One candidate in twelve through the five checks, with own-locale traffic the check that removes the most.
• About three to four links per 1,000 euro of budget, at an average paid link of about 210 euro plus a 30% fee with the article included.

The time figures are estimates for each action. The actions themselves are the complete list. There is no weekly list to approve, no publisher to chase and no invoice to reconcile between the supplier and the publisher.

What the client saw

A report with the agency's name on it, a set of live links on Dutch sites with Dutch readers, and a plain reason next to each one. Client domains are on a suppression list that our prospecting reads in code before it builds any campaign, so the client never receives an outreach email from us for anything else.

Where it stands after month one

Twelve budgets are set and will run again next month unchanged unless the agency changes them. Every live link is under weekly monitoring for the next twelve months. The agency's recurring work is the 24 minutes of forwarding, and the questions a client asks about a link are answered by the reason that is already on the order.

That is the whole month. The honest caveat is the one we put on every worked example: this is how the mechanics run for a typical agency of this type, with real aggregate figures, and it is not a story about a particular client.