Does Niche Website Builders provide quality services for website owners? That’s what I dive into in this real review after using their services for 3+ months.
I am a big proponent of doing things in-house as it is lower cost and higher quality. However, Niche Website Builders are becoming a “household” name in our industry and so I had to try it.
This detailed review covers the results they got me on a skyscraper link building campaign, an inside look into their services, and finally a Q&A with the founders.
Let’s get into it!
Case Study: 22 Skyscraper Links Obtained in 3-Months for Health Site
I ordered the Shotgun Skyscraper Link Building service from Niche Website Builders for this website in June. I ordered the “Budget” plan at $895 per month and it lasted 3 months, where the first full month in June was for planning, writing the article, and finding prospects; no links were obtained.
In the service plan, they stated I would receive the following:
- 8 links per month
- Minimum of 2 DR 30+ links
- Minimum of 2 DR 50+ links
- 1 Skyscraper article
Here were the results of the campaign
- Number of links: 22
- DR 30+ links: 13
- DR 50+ links: 4
- Average DR: 33
- Highest DR: 62
- Lowest DR: 4
- Avg. cost per link: $122
Step-by-step communication timeline
When working with any agency, communication and honesty are key. I do not care if something takes longer as long as I am kept up to date.
Here is the timeline of my interaction with this campaign:
- Late June: face-to-face phone call with their link building team
- July 16: they sent over the rough draft of the detailed skyscraper article
- July 17: I reviewed the article and asked them to add internal links to my existing articles. They said they would add links after the entire backlink campaign was over. I took the liberty of adding internal links myself.
- July 30: I reached out to the team to ask for an update on the campaign
- August 2: they sent me an update with access to a Google Sheet where they are tracking links
- End of each month thereafter they provided an update. I did keep track of the progress through the shared Google Sheet.
In my opinion, I only had to reach out once for an update. Apart from that, they were in constant communication with me. Thumbs up to the Niche Website Builders team!
Metric Breakdown of Each Backlink
Without sharing the exact URLs of the links (for privacy reasons), we can still analyze the metrics of each domain sending the link.
Here is a breakdown of the links I received from this campaign:
I categorize a good link as having high organic traffic and domain rating. Google rewards quality sites by giving them organic traffic; that’s how simple it is. I want links from such sites.
When I do manual link building, I look at sites with organic traffic and niche topic relevancy as opposed to pure domain rating.
Domain rating is easy to manipulate; organic traffic is not.
In this campaign, 7 out of the 24 links were from high traffic (i.e., more than 5,000 visitor sites and labeled as Good). Another 4 out of 25 received between 1,000 and 5,000 organic traffic per month and are labeled as Mediocre.
The remaining 13 links I categorize as Low quality. This is due to the following reasons:
- Lower than 1,000 organic traffic per month
- Some sites have a significant amount of backlinks and referring domains but no traffic. This indicates the site may have been hit by Google updates in the past
- Some sites had low traffic and low DR indicating they are starter sites
Overall, if I was doing the link building myself, I would stay away from the low-quality links altogether.
However, when doing bulk outreach as the NWB team does, they will get “low” and “high” quality sites, and will accept most of them as long as the site quality looks good. I don’t agree with this but it is what it is.
Organic Traffic Results
At the end of the day, what matters is if the site is growing or not, and how stable it is.
The site has been growing month over month. Here are the organic results from AHREFs:
The domain rating of the site has also been growing monthly. Here are the results:
Would I Use Niche Website Builders Again for Backlinks? Maybe…
If I was to do any task on my own for my site, I would do it 100 times better and would take my time. No freelancer, agency, VA, etc will be able to put that extra touch of effort.
With that said, I use agencies to save time. I used Niche Website Builders to save me countless hours of planning, outreaching, prospecting, negotiating, and landing the links. It’s extremely time-consuming and if you do not have a team/process in place, it can take up a significant part of your day.
Yes, I most likely would use Niche Website Builders again. Their communication was good enough. The article they wrote for my site to which they built links was good. While not all of the links were high quality, the ones that were of quality were amazing.
About Niche Website Builders
Niche Website Builders (nichewebsite.builders) was founded by Mark Mars and Adam Smith. They started out as experienced niche website builders who understood the work it took to make good content, get backlinks, and rank in the search engines.
Mark Mars had a corporate job in the tech sector with good pay but terrible hours. After many years working for Microsoft UK he started an agency and was proud of what he built, but when a partnership went south he walked away from the very agency he spent years building.
During this time he discovered Pat Flynn’s podcasts & blogs and learned to build profitable niche sites, which he dove into. He consulted on the side but really loved niche sites.
After hearing an interview with Adam Smith on a podcast where Smith discussed flipping websites, he reached out and contacted his (now) business partner.
After meeting and talking, it became apparent they shared the same struggles and frustrations.
The Idea Is Formed
As their portfolio of sites grew, they knew they had to outsource content and SEO work to keep scaling the growth. Despite trying out many well-known or highly recommended providers, it just didn’t work well.
It took too long to get a lot of content, and the quality was inconsistent and all over the place. Figuring out reliable SEO work to outsource to was even harder.
If experienced niche website builders like them were struggling to find quality options that were reliable, how much worse would it be for beginners or anyone with less experience?
Niche Website Builders Is Founded
That told Adam and Mark there was a major opportunity here and so in December 2019 they founded Niche Website Builders as both a content and link building service agency.
The growth has been very impressive in the two years since, and although there have been some growing pains while scaling up, the rapidness with which they had to hire new staff shows how much the demand has grown.
They also run a Niche Website Builders Facebook group, which quickly earned a reputation for having a wealth of great knowledge and a solid community willing to share.
Places to find them on social media include:
Niche Website Builders Review
One of the things that sticks out about Niche Website Builders is that they offer very specific services that have a large impact on a website when done correctly.
HARO services, aged domain services, and the way link building and content services are sometimes combined (via Skyscraper Method package) indicate they know what works and what site owners actually need.
Let’s take a look at each of their major offerings.
1. Link Building Services
They offer a variety of different link building services at multiple price points.
Link Building Service Packages Include:
- Shotgun Skyscraper
- Guest Posting Outreach
- Niche Edit Outreach
- Multiple “Combo Packs” for Link Building
This variety is excellent. They provide not only excellent backlinks that move the needle on SEO, but also allow a byero pick and choose what types of links they want or what type of campaigns/strategies they want used or avoided.
2. Content Services
Content can be informational focused or affiliate focused in nature.
Unlike most other services, they format the content as well, uploading it via author account to your site. This means time doesn’t have to be spent uploading, formatting, and putting in your own affiliate links. Most agencies do not offer this in their basic bundles.
3. HARO Services
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a powerful way to get strong backlinks that are very hard if not impossible to otherwise get. This can be a great resource, but it’s very important to learn how to use it correctly.
Their HARO services come in at five levels and only experienced HARO users handle HARO reports for a site owner after making sure things like the customer’s social media profiles and About page are optimized to encourage linking from major news sources.
This is a powerful outreach service and outsourcing it is definitely a timesaver, especially as so few agencies offer this exact service.
4. Done-For-You Affiliate Sites
Niche Website Builders offers Done-For-You affiliate sites that include everything from keyword research to website design to content and more. Pretty much everything but off-page SEO is included.
This is a much more thorough and in-depth service than others offered. There are four levels from basic to advanced, with the sheer amount of content being one of the major dividing points between each package.
This is the best DFY affiliate site offering that I’ve seen.
5. Aged Domain Services
This service involves building a website on an aged domain and comes with a plan for content and SEO work.
The ones available can be browsed on the site, and give a sense of how strong the site will be starting out, what the domain history was, and more.
This offers an option for seeing what is available as a new niche site project with domain, content plan, and more.
How Do They Handle Too Many Orders? Actual Reviews
Growing an agency is tough. You can get bombarded with orders (a good thing) but it can take a while to hire staff to service the content, links, DFY sites, among others.
The Website Flip runs a dedicated Facebook group for website flippers, operators, and investors. In the group, a member posted about Niche Website Builders and their frustrations.
Check out the series of posts below from the group and how one of the founders, Mark, handled the situation.
Here was the post:
It was clear there was frustration related to service quality. The post garnered over 28 comments. Here is one comment showing that frustration:
Mark Mars from NWB responded as follows:
Firstly, communication has suffered at Niche Website Builders in recent times and we are aware of this. It’s not where we want to be and this is something we’re passionate about resolving.
To be upfront we’ve been short-staffed on the Keyword Research and Content Delivery team for some time now but this has now been addressed. We are now just working our way through a backlog. This should have been communicated to Monica but sadly was not the case.
We’re desperately aware that we’ve been falling short lately (and it hurts!) so let me share what we’ve been working on to make sure we have first-class customer service now and in the future:
This will be replaced soon by a dedicated ‘client services’ team whose only responsibility will be client communication and project management.
Firstly, we took the decision last week to have one person from the team dedicated to providing updates to clients communicating the status of their project and letting them know of any potential delays
We’ve more than doubled our KW research team and we’re ‘overhiring’ many more writers so that we can deliver content in a week or two (whether big or small orders) instead of taking a full month (or more as has been happening recently).
We’re still the same people trying to deliver the best service available whilst navigating the growth of Niche Website Builders the best we can. We WILL fix communication issues.
Our goal is first-class services + first-class client communications. This is the top priority for us right now.
Mark Marks, Founder of Niche Website Builders
Interview With Founders from Niche Website Builders
When was Niche Website Builders founded? Why did you want to start an agency?
The agency was founded in December 2019.
We started the agency because we were frustrated that there were no quality options for content creation or link building in the content publishing space.
As website investors ourselves we ended up resorting to places like Upwork to get people to work on our portfolio but this is a minefield in which you need to trial 15 people to find 1 good person. And even when you found someone good then they were not always reliable.
Adam and I, fed up with the same challenges, decided to build a small team that was dedicated to working on our own portfolios with a view to sharing the costs. The advantage was that we could train these people to be excellent content writers or link builders specifically for niche sites, unlike freelancers who might be editing a book one week and writing social media copy the next.
We also built a team to provide a full end-to-end service from KW research to content uploading and publishing. Once we’d built this out we were pretty proud of the results we were getting so we decided to offer it out to other people within the content publisher community.
The rest is history. It seems we were not the only people who needed this itch scratched and our services have been very popular.
For link-building services, what software/tools does your outreach team use?
We’ve tested a lot of tools over time, from high end to free tools.
Right now we’ve settled on:
- Ahrefs for prospecting, research, and due diligence
- SEMRush for research and due diligence
- Mailshake for outreach
- Hunter for email discovery
- Google Suite for mailboxes
- Google Sheets for prospect management and reporting
How custom is your link-building outreach?
Good question. This varies depending on the type of outreach we use. Much of what we do is build links at scale and therefore we can’t personalize every email because for one customer we are likely to send out hundreds of emails. That said, we do try to make these emails as personable as possible.
However, these emails are targeted to a specific niche and those sites that have shown interest in linking to similar content in the past.
We compliment this outreach at scale with personalized emails where we think this will work best particularly for high DR or more respected publications.
How often do you provide updates to clients?
We share a Google sheet with our customers so that they can see the progress of any link-building campaign live whenever they wish.
We also provide a summary once a month and there can be as much or as little communication as needed throughout the month.
What if the client does not like a specific backlink built?
With our Niche Edits, Guest Posts and Link Packs you are able to pre-approve any links that we place for a small additional fee. We use a 17 point checklist and our experience to carry out due diligence on any link to make sure it’s safe and going to add value to your site.
On the rare occasion a customer does not like a link, we’ll get it replaced.
What if a backlink gets taken down? Any guarantees in place?
Yes, if any link gets removed within 6 months, we’ll replace it free of charge
Are you primarily doing niche edits or guest posts?
Primarily we do shotgun skyscraper, which is a very popular service but we launched that service first. Our guest posts and niche edits are becoming more popular but we only launched this service about 9 months ago.
Who pays for the administration fees a blog may charge for a backlink?
We pay the admin fees. This is included in the price of all our link building services.
My Verdict
For an agency, Niche Website Builders does the job. Can I do a better job? Definitely but you need to assume that an agency will never do a better job than the owner of the site; that’s just a given.
The content they produce for websites will rank (it’s not A+ content) and the content will be tailored towards the needs of the buyer whether informational or affiliate. The formatting is a nice touch and allows them to take care of on-page SEO to help optimize the chances of success.
The multiple options for link building from Skyscraper to HARO are appreciated. Can they obtain better links? Yes, some were very poor links. But again, it’s an agency and they do bulk outreach to meet your minimum requirements. If you want A+ links, you will need to do it yourself.
Niche Website Builders have multi-tiered pricing allowing newcomers and experts to work with them. It’s an option you can look into.
