How Much Should You Pay for a Guest Post? [We Analyzed 37,542 Websites]

For some time now, we’ve been seeing hundreds of articles speculating about link building pricing.

Some were using data they could find online. Others reached out to different blogs, but, of course, their datasets were limited.

So, one day, during a brainstorming session in our content team meeting, we thought, “Hey, why don’t we collect data on guest post pricing from our inventory?”

After all, we have 115,000+ guest posting websites listed there. And these aren’t just some hypothetical pages. These are verified sites used by thousands of users daily.

Sounds like a good idea, right? That’s exactly what we thought.

That’s why today, you’re looking at this research where we analyzed 37,542 guest posting websites to find out how the market is doing.

This is a perfect read for everyone who was wondering, “How much do backlinks cost?” And also for those who want to know how DR, traffic, niches, and locations influence the price of guest blogs.

Contents

• Data & methodology
• Key insight
• How DR affects link building cost
• 1. Rapid price increase for websites with DR 11-20
• 2. Another huge price jump for DR70+ websites across all traffic levels (1K, 5K, and 10K+ organic traffic)
• How traffic affects guest post prices
• DR influences guest post pricing more than traffic
• How niche affects backlink price
• Average price range for guest posts across niches
• The cheapest niches for guest posting
• The most expensive niches for guest posting
• Guest post prices for the most popular niches
• How much does link building cost in different locations?
• Countries with the highest average guest post price
• Countries with the lowest average guest post price
• Average guest post prices in English-speaking countries
• Average guest post prices in selected European countries
• Selling vs. buying guest post prices
• Selling vs. buying guest post prices for websites with 1K+ monthly traffic
• Selling vs. buying guest post prices for websites with 10K+ monthly traffic
• Bottom line

Data & methodology

Data source: Adsy inventory

Date range: January – December 2024

Total dataset: 37,542 websites (107,834 sites for niche/industry analysis)

Selection criteria:

• Websites with organic traffic of at least 1,000 users/month, according to Ahrefs (to exclude inactive sites).
• We’ve only included guest posts (no profile links, UGC links, or other types of link placements different from guest posts).
• Data reflects the average selling price (but no worries, we’ve compared it with the buying price as well — you’ll be surprised).

Key insight

• The average guest post buying price (i.e., what people are paying) is 3-5x lower than the selling price (i.e., what the website owners are asking for). In some cases, this difference can get as high as 14x (!).
• DR influences guest post pricing more than traffic.
• The average price for a guest post on DR 11-40 websites is between $351 and $390.
• On average, websites with DR 71-80 ask $1008 for a guest post.
• Public Service, Personal Blogs, E-commerce, and Startups are among the cheapest niches for guest posting.
• Web Development, Literature, Beauty, and Manufacturing are some of the most expensive industries for guest posting.
• Switzerland, China, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Korea are countries with the highest average guest post prices.
• Mali, Guatemala, Burkina Faso, Micronesia, and Pakistan are countries with the lowest average guest post prices.

How DR affects link building cost

Domain Rating (DR) is one of the most important things that influence the price of a guest post. We knew this even before doing our research, and let’s be honest — you probably did, too.

Yet, have you ever asked yourself how much of an extra you should pay for a couple of those additional “DR points” of your donor website?

That’s a very legit question, and we’ve found out what the guest posting market has to say about it.

First, let’s see what the average cost for guest posts is based on the domain rating of the donor site:

Basically, as you see:

• The average guest post price for a DR 1-10 website is $238.
• When it comes to websites with a DR 11-40, the price ranges between $351 and $390.
• The average cost of a guest blog on a page with DR 41-50 is $462.
• Then, the price gradually increases to $540 for DR 51-60 and $633 for DR 61-70.
• As for the websites with a DR 70+, the prices increase steeply, reaching $1008 for DR 71-80, $1371 for DR 81-90, and $4530 for DR 91-94.

We’ve also compared how much guest post prices grow based on both DR and traffic (%). Take a look at the table below:

In the following chart, we’ve compared how big the price increase (%) is for different DRs and traffic levels.

How should you read this data?

For example, if you want to compare the Guest Post pricing for sites that have DR less than 10 and sites with DR 11-20, look at the first set of bars. This means that buying a guest post from DR 11-20 pages will be:

• 33.5% more expensive for a website with 1K+ organic traffic (compared to pages with DR 10 or less and 1K+ traffic)
• 39.6% more expensive for a website with 5K+ organic traffic (compared to pages with DR 10 or less and 5K+ traffic)
• 68.8% more expensive for a website with 10K+ organic traffic (compared to pages with DR 10 or less and 10K+ traffic)

Now, you can probably notice some extremely surprising trends. Here are the ones that impressed us the most.

1. Rapid price increase for websites with DR 11-20

At first, this might make no sense, but it actually does.

When comparing websites with DR below 10 and DR 11-20, we’ve observed one of the highest price jumps (33.5% - 68.8%).

The highest premium (68.8%) is observed for DR 11-20 when traffic exceeds 10K.

This is quite logical because many (way too many) websites have low DRs (0-10) by default. Yet, raising a page to DR 11+ requires some extra effort beyond simply buying a domain and filling it with default WordPress content.

So typically, when a site reaches both DR 11+ and 10K+ traffic, the website owner wants to recover investments, which leads to significant price increases for guest posts.

2. Another huge price jump for DR70+ websites across all traffic levels (1K, 5K, and 10K+ organic traffic)

Websites with DR 71-80 also see a sharp price rise. Compared to pages with DR 61-70, the average cost of a guest blog increases from 51.9% to 69.5% (depending on traffic). This is the highest growth we’ve observed across all DR ranges.

What’s the reason for that?

It’s likely due to the long-standing perception in the SEO community that DR 70+ sites are "high-quality" backlink sources. This is, of course, true because growing a website to this level requires lots of effort.

Still, it’d be interesting to compare how different the effects are with a backlink from a DR 61-70 and DR 71-80 websites. Will they be up to 69.5% better?

Let’s leave this question open for our next research.

How traffic affects guest post prices

Now, everything is quite clear when it comes to DR, but how does traffic influence the price of a guest post?

In the following table, you can see how guest posting costs grow on average based on traffic.

What’s interesting here is to analyze how much traffic growth actually affects pricing. That’s why we’ve compared the average price difference for websites with 1K+ traffic and 5K+ traffic vs. 5K+ traffic and 10K+ traffic.

Let’s take a look at the chart below.

• The blue bar represents the guest posting price difference for sites with 5K+ traffic vs. sites with 1K+ traffic.
• The red bar represents the price difference between 10K+ traffic sites vs. 5K+ traffic sites.

Note: We’ve discarded all the pages with DR 91+ because there aren’t many sites (if any at all) with less than 10K traffic.

Now, what do we see in this chart?

1. The highest guest post price growth (%) based on traffic occurs when analyzing DR11-20 websites.

If you take another look at the chart above, you see that if you want to get a guest post from a page with DR11-20 that has 5K+ traffic vs. 1K+ traffic, you’ll have to pay almost an additional 30%.

And if you want to go further and get a 10K+ traffic site, you’ll need to spend an extra 11.6%. These are some of the highest price increases across all DRs. Why?

The answer is actually quite trivial. Simply because most (if not all) of the sites that have DR lower than 10 and the monthly traffic that is 1K or less are low-quality.

As a result, backlinks from these pages won’t bring any link juice (aka value). That’s why the link building prices are also much lower.

2. The price increase for guest posts from sites with 5K vs. 1K traffic is higher than 10K vs. 5K traffic sites across all DRs.

When you think about it, it actually makes sense. 5K+ organic traffic in most cases means that the website is “alive.” We can all agree that getting this amount of organic traffic for a super low-quality page is quite complicated, if not impossible.

That’s why when it comes to pricing, pages that have 5K+ traffic are much more expensive (for some DRs, the price growth can get up to 28.3%).

At the same time, the quality difference between 5K+ and 10K+ traffic pages typically isn’t that drastic. That’s why the price difference is also lower. After all, the amount of traffic mostly depends on the SEO efforts to get the website ranking higher for more queries.

Note: We aren’t saying that 10K+ websites aren’t worth it. Of course not. Generally speaking, the higher the DR and traffic, the better. Yet, this doesn’t mean that websites with 5K+ traffic aren’t good enough, especially when it comes to some very specialized and narrow niches.

So, based on the data above, we see that:

• On average, when traffic increases from 1K to 5K, you have to pay an extra 17%.
• At the same time, the price differences between 5K and 10K traffic levels are less significant, averaging 7.2%.

This brings us to the next finding.

DR influences guest post pricing more than traffic

If you take a look at the chart below, it becomes clear that the defining factor in the guest post price increase is domain rating (DR). Meanwhile, traffic doesn’t play as big of a role here.

Yes, you can clearly see that websites with higher traffic cost more than those with the same DR but lower traffic. But when it comes to price increases, the tendency is identical across all traffic levels.

Meaning that we don’t see any rapid price growth for pages that have 10K+ organic traffic. Yet, we do see that steep increase when it comes to DR 70+ websites.

How niche affects backlink price

What have we discovered when looking into different niches? A couple of very interesting things, actually. Let’s see how your industry compares to others when it comes to guest posting prices.

Average price range for guest posts across niches

First, let’s address the average price range per guest post across industries:

• For traffic 1K+: $350 – $600
• For traffic 5K+: $345 – $1,000
• For traffic 10K+: $300 – $1,600

You can see a pretty wide range above. That is because guest posting costs vary greatly depending on your niche.

Typically, prices grow gradually based on the traffic levels of a website (from 1K to 5K to 10K) across most categories. There are some exceptions, but they’re rare.

The cheapest niches for guest posting

One of the questions we had before gathering the data was what industries are the most affordable for guest posting. So, of course, we’ve looked into this.

Here are the niches with the lowest average prices for guest posts:

• Public Service — $306 per guest post
• Personal Blogs — $323 per guest post
• Places — $338 per guest post
• E-commerce — $354 per guest post
• Startups — $380 per guest post

If you take the time to analyze the niches above, you’ll start finding more and more logic in this.

• Many niches on the list are simply too generic and have a low demand because of it, while the offer (i.e., the number of similar sites) is huge. Industries that fall under this category are Personal Blogs, Places, Lifestyle, etc.
• Other niches (i.e., businesses operating in these niches) typically don’t prioritize SEO, resulting in lower guest post prices. Here, we’re talking about Public Service, Agriculture, Environment, etc.
• Surprisingly, Marketing & Advertising is among the cheapest categories. Yet, this is likely due to the fact that the competition for guest posting sites is insane in the industry. Besides, because of the niche popularity, there are many newly emerged sites (typically with low DR and traffic) that lower the average price.

The most expensive niches for guest posting

Now, what are the industries with the highest average prices for guest posts?

• Web Development — $1096 per guest post
• For Men — $1010 per guest post
• Literature — $849 per guest post
• Beauty — $813 per guest post
• Manufacturing — $808 per guest post

What are the key insights here?

• Web Development has the highest guest post prices. This is easy to explain based on the high demand for SEO services and often higher marketing budgets. Besides, the competition is intense, which leads to companies trying to outrank each other. And one of the methods to do that is link building, which includes guest posting.
• There are also a number of niches that are in the upper price range thanks to high consumer spending and fierce competition. These are For Men, Beauty, Fashion, For Women, etc.

• News & Media is a category closer to the mid-price range thanks to the fact that it is a "universal donor," meaning that it fits many industries.

Guest post prices for the most popular niches

We’ve seen the most expensive and the cheapest categories. But what about the most popular niches?

Note: When we say “the most popular,” we refer to the categories that have the most guest post offers during the analyzed period.

The top 5 most popular categories are:

• Business with $555 per guest blog
• Sports with $629 per guest blog
• Technology with $510 per guest blog
• Health with $512 per guest blog
• Finance with $638 per guest blog

The most obvious observation is that all the niches that have the highest number of guest posting offers aren’t among the most expensive ones. In fact, most of them are in the lower- to mid-pricing range.

This is a quite typical trend when both the demand and offer are high.

How much does link building cost in different locations?

Generally speaking, location isn’t always a defining factor for a guest post price. Still, there are some interesting tendencies we’ve discovered.

Countries with the highest average guest post price

If you look at the countries with the highest average guest posting cost, many of them are relatively small markets (e.g., Switzerland, Sweden, UAE, Denmark, Finland, and Netherlands). Yet, all of these countries have a high purchasing power.

Besides, they have a relatively strong digital marketing space, which might lead to higher backlinks price, especially considering a lower offer in many cases.

The top 5 leaders when it comes to the average cost per guest blog are the following countries:

1. Switzerland — $1218 per guest post

2. China — $1094 per guest post

3. Sweden — $1049 per guest post

4. United Arab Emirates (UAE) — $1025 per guest post

5. Korea — $993 per guest post

Countries with the lowest average guest post price

On the contrary, when we look at the countries with the lowest price per guest blog, the situation is different. In the chart below, you can see only developing countries, which is most likely a primary factor that influences the price.

Besides, all of these countries have low- to medium-purchasing power and less active marketing and SEO markets, which all result in lower average prices per guest blog.

Top 5 countries with the lowest price per guest post:

1. Mali — $45 per guest post

2. Guatemala — $65 per guest post

3. Burkina Faso — $67 per guest post

4. Micronesia — $137 per guest post

5. Pakistan — $149 per guest post

Average guest post prices in English-speaking countries

When it comes to English-speaking countries, we’ve observed some trends that are also worth your attention.

1. Guest posting prices in Ireland are among the highest in English-speaking countries.

The average price per guest blog in Ireland is $800, which might be quite surprising. Yet, if you think about it, Ireland is a popular European tech hub thanks to its taxation system.

At the same time, the offer is much more limited compared to the US, for example. As a result, its guest posting price is the highest in our English-speaking countries selection.

2. Guest posting prices in Australia and the United Kingdom are higher than in the US and Canada, on average.

When it comes to Australia ($741 per guest post) and the United Kingdom ($713 per guest post), the price is still higher than in other English-speaking countries.

Most likely, we see this effect thanks to strong economies and a very well-developed SEO and marketing space. Besides, the business competition is quite intense, while the guest posting offer is typically lower than in the US.

3. Guest posting prices in the US and Canada are relatively low compared to most other English-speaking countries.

The average price per guest blog in the US is $583, which is quite similar to the Canadian rate of $605.

This mid-range is quite easy to explain. Both markets are well-developed and big, with high SEO popularity.

Still, this creates both a high demand for such services and a more competitive guest posting environment. After all, there are millions of American web pages that accept guest blogs.

As a result, all these factors lead to mid-range guest backlink costs that aren’t too high but aren’t too low either.

4. Guest posting prices in New Zealand are the lowest among the English-speaking countries.

As for New Zealand ($322 per guest post), the lowest price in this English-speaking selection makes sense, thanks to a smaller market and a much smaller demand.

Average guest post prices in selected European countries

Below, you can see the average guest posting costs for the selected European countries. If you pay attention to the data, there are some distinctive patterns.

1. Nordic countries have some of the highest prices. For example:

• Finland — $934 per guest post
• Denmark — $964 per guest post

This is easy to explain by higher purchasing power, strong marketing and SEO industries, and a lower number of high-quality websites (or any local sites, for that matter).

2. Strong European economies tend to have higher guest posting prices. For example:

• France — $756 per guest post
• Germany — $821 per guest post

Generally speaking, stronger economies have higher demands for marketing and SEO. Besides, typically, businesses in these countries can afford to invest in these initiatives.

3. Eastern and Southern Europe has lower average prices for guest blogs compared to Northern and Central Europe. For example:

• Hungary — $253 per guest post
• Romania — $259 per guest post
• Poland — $353 per guest post
• Spain — $455 per guest post
• Italy — $470 per guest post

Lower guest post prices in Eastern and Southern Europe can be explained by lower prices in general for many services and products (especially compared to Nordic countries).

Besides, SEO might be less popular, and companies might not allocate the budget for organic search promotion. As a result, lower demand leads to lower prices.

Selling vs. buying guest post prices

Get ready for one of the most mind-blowing discoveries.

No matter what DR, niche, traffic, or country you take into consideration, the average guest post buying price is 3-5x lower than the selling price.

This basically means that, on average, businesses aren’t ready to pay the price websites are asking for guest posts.

Selling vs. buying guest post prices for websites with 1K+ monthly traffic

On average, a page with 1K+ organic traffic and DR 41-50 asks for $406 for a guest post, while users, on average, are paying $59 (!) for this type of backlink.

The higher the DR, the bigger the difference gets. For example, for a website with DR 81-89 and traffic 1K+, an average requested guest post price is $1,258. Yet, what people are realistically paying is $153 on average.

Yes, we couldn't believe our eyes either. But you know what they say — numbers don't lie.

Interestingly, we’ve observed the same trend for any range of websites, whether those have 1K+, 5K+, or 10K+ organic traffic.

Selling vs. buying guest post prices for websites with 10K+ monthly traffic

Here is the difference between average selling and buying prices for websites with 10K+ organic traffic:

As you can see, the difference between what websites (with 10K+ organic traffic) ask for and what people are actually paying can get up to 14x:

• The average asking guest post price for websites with DR 71-80 is 4x higher than the average paying price ($1,066 vs. $269).
• The average asking guest post price for websites with DR 81-89 is 6x higher than the average paying price ($1,433 vs. $234).
• The average asking guest post price for websites with DR 90-92 is 14x higher (!) than the average paying price ($4,595 vs. $318).

Of course, this doesn’t mean that no one is paying the average selling price. Yet, here, we’re reviewing the overall situation to see a general picture of the guest posting market.

Bottom line

This research was never meant to set some sort of benchmark. Instead, we wanted to see how the guest posting market is doing and what its main tendencies are.

We don’t know about you, but we’ve discovered many absolutely unexpected insights. Hopefully, this research will give you a better understanding of the current industry trends and cost of link building to make your SEO efforts more effective.

What were the most surprising findings for you?

P.S.: We’ll make sure to share the new data for 2025 with you, so following us on socials like LinkedIn, X, or Facebook is a good idea :)

Either way, stick around and let us know if you’d like to see any particular insights. Is there a niche that interests you the most? Or maybe a country? We’ll do our best to include that information in our new research.