A backlink budget for many towns, worked through at $500 and $1,000
Both plans below are made-up examples for a fictional firm. Use the shape of the thinking, not the figures.
The example firm
Imagine a fictional garden-services company with crews in nine towns. Three are busy and well supported, three are mid-sized, and three are new. Nobody real is described here, and no real results sit behind the figures, so treat them purely as an illustration of how the thinking goes. Pure invention.
Prices in the marketplace run from $1 to about $500 per link, so a small budget buys a handful of modest placements, not a sweep across nine towns. That constraint is useful. It forces a choice.
What we would do with $500
| Town tier | Share | Amount | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Town A (page already shows impressions) | 50% | $250 | Three or four placements at a moderate price |
| Town B (busy crew, thin visibility) | 30% | $150 | Two placements after a page rewrite |
| Reserve | 20% | $100 | Held until the week-eight review |
| Six other towns | 0% | $0 | Pages improved, no links yet |
Three rules the plans share
Rank first. The tiers in the tables come from the town decision tree, not from gut feeling, and if you skip that step the percentages below mean very little to anyone.
Cap each town. A written ceiling in dollars stops a hopeful month from turning into an overspend, and it turns the quarterly review into a short, calm conversation instead of an argument.
Review on a date. Put the eight-week mark in the calendar the day you pay, because if nobody looks at the data on that day, the reserve just sits there doing nothing at all. Dull, but true.
What we would do with $1,000
| Town tier | Share | Amount | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Towns A, B and C (top three) | 60% | $600 | About $200 each, two to four placements per page |
| Head office service page | 15% | $150 | One or two placements to lift the main service page |
| Mid-sized towns | 10% | $100 | A single low-cost placement each for two of them |
| Reserve | 15% | $150 | Held for the second review |
Reading the plans
Money held back is not money wasted
Both plans keep a reserve on purpose. After eight weeks you know which page moved, and a reserve lets you follow the evidence instead of a forecast.
- Never spread evenly across all towns
- Hold 15 to 20 percent for the first review
- Stop funding a page that stays flat after a second round
Where the money should not go
Do not buy one expensive placement just because the donor looks strong. A $500 link is a bet on a single page. Two or three at modest prices, spread across the pages you ranked with the town decision tree, tell you far more. Spread the risk.
Do not fund towns whose pages are copies of each other. Fix them first with the doorway page fixes, wait a few weeks for the crawl to catch up, and only then buy. Order matters.
Use Ahrefs or Semrush if you want a second view of each donor's strength, and expect their figures to differ from the numbers in our rows. Different crawlers see different slices of the web. Neither is wrong.
Keep a simple ledger. One line per placement works well, with the town, the target URL, the donor, the price, the date paid and the date live. After a quarter, that sheet shows the real cost of each town, which is something an early estimate never can.
Prices run from $1 up to about $500, so even a $1,000 plan buys a few placements at the high end or a dozen at the low end. Neither is right in general. The page you are funding decides.