When can an SEO company start link building campaigns?

Preparation can start on the first day. Outreach for new links should start when the pages those links will point to can be indexed by Google and are good enough that another site would want to cite them. The start of a campaign is therefore a condition rather than a date: on a site in good shape it is met early, and on a site with serious technical or content problems it is met only after those are fixed.

The condition for outreach

A link sends people and attention to one specific page, so that page has to be ready. Two things make it ready. Google has to be able to index it, and it has to deserve the link. The first is easy to check. Search Console’s URL Inspection tool “provides information about Google’s indexed version of a specific page, and also allows you to test whether a URL might be indexable.” A company planning outreach to a page should be able to show you that check for every page it intends to promote.

The second is a matter of judgment, and it also decides how outreach goes. The people asked to link, such as editors, writers, and owners of resource pages, look at the page they are being asked to cite. A thin or unfinished page gives them a reason to say no, and every refusal uses up a contact who might have said yes to a better page later.

What can start on day one

Several parts of the work do not depend on a finished site. The company can review which sites link to your competitors, build a list of relevant sites to approach, and find places where your business is mentioned without a link.

It can also recover links you have already earned but are losing. When a page is deleted or moved without a redirect, links pointing to it lead nowhere. Google’s Page indexing report explains, for pages that return a not-found error: “Google might have discovered the URL as a link from another page, or possibly the page existed before and was deleted.” Matching those addresses against the pages other sites link to, and redirecting each one to the most relevant live page, makes those links lead somewhere useful again without any outreach at all. On an older site, this can be quick work, because the links already exist.

What should wait

Large-scale outreach for new links to specific pages should wait until those pages pass both tests. Starting earlier means asking people to link to pages that may change, may not be indexable, or may not be worth citing yet.

When the site needs work first

On a site with serious technical problems or very thin content, the foundation work takes longer, and outreach starts later. How much later depends on what the audit found, so the timing should come from the audit, not from a standard package that starts link building in the first month regardless of the site.

Checking the order of work in a proposal

Ask the company to explain its order of work, to name the pages it plans to promote and why they are worth linking to, and to show that each one passes the URL Inspection check. Ask what it will do in the meantime, including whether it will look for lost links to recover. A proposal that promises a fixed number of new links from the first week, without mentioning the state of your site or the pages the links will point to, has not answered the question of when to start.