Link building is the biggest line item in SEO budgets
Editorial.link's 2025 budget benchmark, drawn from agency and in-house responses, finds that link building is the single largest line item inside the average SEO budget at 32.1 per cent, ahead of technical SEO, content production, on-page work and tooling. Agencies allocate proportionally more to links than in-house teams, who tend to push a larger share into content production they own end-to-end. The dominance of link spend reflects a return to first-principles ranking factors after several years of speculation that on-page signals or AI-generated content could displace backlinks as the lead ranking signal. They have not, and the budget mix proves it.
Methodology: Editorial.link 2025 budget benchmark from agency and in-house responses; link building share of the average SEO budget. About LinkPanda.
What does typical SEO budget allocation look like?
In Editorial.link’s 2025 benchmark, link building is the single largest line item in the average SEO budget at 32.1%, ahead of technical SEO, content production and on-page work. That makes the link building share of SEO budget the biggest single component of SEO budget allocation in the dataset. If you are setting a marketing budget for links, the 32.1% figure is the allocation benchmark, and the monthly spend bands translate it into dollars. Our link building services cover the full tactic mix the benchmark spans.
Why do links take the biggest share?
The benchmark places link building ahead of every other category, and it lines up with the 56% of practitioners planning to increase link investment in the same year’s outlook data.
How should I split the rest of the budget?
The benchmark ranks technical SEO, content production and on-page work behind links. The right split depends on which constraint your site hits first.
