James Dooley Podcast

James Dooley: Best link building marketplaces for SEOs. Today I'm joined with Charles Floate.

Now obviously you're going to be a little bit biased here because you're a big shareholder within PressWiz, but first and foremost, can you explain genuinely why you think PressWiz is the best link building marketplace?

Charles Floate: For sure.

I've worked with a lot of link companies and agencies and I've actually owned two in the past that I ended up selling.

The number one bottleneck I think all of them had was speed to delivery.

If you put an order in, the average delivery time for years has been around 28 days.

Now if you're running an SEO campaign, 28 days is a huge amount of time to wait for a link to go live.

During that time, if you've ordered 100 links, they could all be published on the same day. They could all go on the same set of PBNs. It creates unnatural patterns that can hurt your rankings.

Those could be the best links in the world, but if they all go live together, the pattern itself becomes the problem.

PressWiz was one of the first link marketplaces to implement AI agents into the delivery system.

Once publishers are onboarded into the marketplace, the AI agent validates the order as soon as it comes in.

If the target page is not live yet, unless you specify otherwise, it will not send the order to the publisher.

Once validated, it automatically emails the publisher with the exact instructions, whether it is a guest post or niche edit, the exact sentence, anchor text and surrounding content.

As soon as the publisher replies with the live URL, the AI validates the link again to make sure it is live and correct, then sends it back to the client dashboard and email.

In some cases we have had links go from order to live in two minutes because the publisher was already active in their inbox.

The only real bottleneck is the human publisher side, and honestly you still want that human layer because plugins and automation footprints can become detectable by Google.

A lot of agencies and marketplaces still cannot implement that same delivery system because the technology stack is far behind.

We also made sure our prices are cheaper or at least equal to the rest of the market.

We run on roughly a 20 to 30 percent marketplace fee.

A lot of agencies are charging 50 percent minimum markups and in some cases 300 to 500 percent markups.

There has been limited inventory and high demand for years, so some agencies have taken advantage of that.

We also built our own tool suite and educational ecosystem around the marketplace.

We do free webinars, conferences and educational sessions to help clients actually understand how to build better links.

James Dooley: So if someone is looking at top link building marketplaces and they want alternatives as well, who would you say the main competitors are?

Charles Floate: There are definitely marketplaces that are stronger in certain geographies.

For example, RocketLinks is probably the strongest player in France.

They have the local language knowledge and have dominated that market for years.

When it comes to international marketplaces, there are only a few serious competitors.

You have Bazoom, Authority Builders and maybe Loganix, although some of those are more agency style than true marketplaces.

James Dooley: So compared to somebody like WhitePress, are you saying the speed and pricing are generally better with PressWiz?

Charles Floate: Yes.

We recently had a client compare 100 links across several providers.

PressWiz was cheaper on 95 out of the 100 links.

Our average delivery time is around 18 hours.

I think the nearest competitor is around six days average delivery.

James Dooley: If someone is not SEO savvy and wants a done-for-you approach, can they come to PressWiz and say, “Here is my website and budget. Build me a strategy”?

Charles Floate: Absolutely.

We do free strategy calls.

You do not even need to spend money with us first.

Our SEO team can analyse your competitors, existing profile and budget and help put together a strategy.

If someone wants fully managed services, there is a minimum spend of $5,000 per month.

That includes everything. Audits, anchor planning, site sourcing and management.

Most agencies charge additional fees for all of that work, but we include it within the spend.

James Dooley: So for anyone watching, what is the difference between a traditional link building agency and a link building marketplace?

Charles Floate: Transparency is probably the biggest difference.

If you use PressWiz, you know exactly what publisher and domain you are buying from before placing the order.

If you use a lot of traditional agencies, you do not know where your links are going until after they go live.

For a lot of SEOs, transparency is essential because they need to understand whether the website is actually relevant and whether the content strategy makes sense for that specific site.

You do not want generic content published everywhere.

You want content matched to the niche and context of the website.

James Dooley: Can users get all different types of backlinks from marketplaces?

Guest posts, niche edits, tier twos and other variations?

Charles Floate: It depends on the marketplace.

Some only specialise in guest posts.

Others only specialise in niche edits.

PressWiz supports guest posts, niche edits, unlinked mentions, tier two links, entity stacking and pretty much everything else.

The only things we do not really focus on are forum profiles and similar low-value tactics because they have limited impact now.

James Dooley: Recently there has been a lot of talk around consensus building for AI visibility.

Can people upload listicle-style articles into link marketplaces?

Charles Floate: Yes, absolutely.

As long as the publisher allows custom content uploads, which most do, you can upload listicles and comparison content.

The content still needs to meet editorial standards, but generally you can publish almost anything reasonable.

James Dooley: We hope you enjoyed this podcast episode on the best link building marketplaces.

Make sure you check out the links in the description because there are more episodes where me and Charles Floate discuss AI visibility, backlink strategies and modern SEO tactics.

Charles Floate, it has been an absolute pleasure.