How would you spend 500$ on links?

I bought a 10 year old domain (european extension targetting a specific non-english country) with almost zero backlinks.

I build a Woocommerce store on it.

I have a 500$ budget for SEO to get me traffic/sales.

How would you spend 500$ on links for longterm succes? (please be specific, you can give direct BHW marketplace links)

first start posting

then buy a guest post for the post that gets google views

If the site already has good content on it or you will write/update it yourself, that's $0 for your content budget (which would involve a bit of internal linking). If the site needs new content and you can't create it, hire a freelancer to write 2-3 articles per major keyword/topic to serve as your pillar content. One post gets published on the site, the other one on a high metric property (free or paid), a third (if necessary) on a relevant guest post site.

Per 10 major kws/topic, the freelancer or gig writeups should cost you $100-150, good free properties $0, and good guest posts another $100 or so if you just get them from Fiverr/Seoclerk. The rest of the $500 could be sent on 2 or so guest post on 'bigger deal' domains. From that backbone, work on forums, comments, social posts, that you can find from general searches, or a variations on the old 'Google Alerts' methods of getting free links.

maildigger said:

I bought a 10 year old domain (european extension targetting a specific non-english country) with almost zero backlinks.

I build a Woocommerce store on it.

I have a 500$ budget for SEO to get me traffic/sales.

How would you spend 500$ on links for longterm succes? (please be specific, you can give direct BHW marketplace links)

Click to expand...

Very less budget. You would not get anything worth making any difference.

Build good content, buy some gest post from related website and buy some legit link from good site.

I have a site that has one social media backlink. Yesterday, it reached its best day of 90+ uniques, and 650+ page views. After just over a month of launch. TBH i think all these backlink sellers are at the ham. lol they all advice you you NEED backlinks. But i don't think you do. 21% of my visitors are direct. All these people pretending that they knew about how the google algorythumn works, yet the've never worked for google, or been invited to their offices. They just have a bloody WP blog with AI articles! lol like every other noob that wants to be internet famous and make those kagillionz.

TLDR

What if backlink sellers are just selling you nonsense?

I know links work.

I want to spend a small amount to get a backlink foundation for this new website that can give it an initial boost in Google.

That is not much to work with in terms of backlinks.
You will get like 4-6 decent, clean links for that.
Not much to go on.

You could get more if you go for PBN links but that's not recommended either. Too soon for that.

At this stage I would focus on content.

Once you see some traction and maybe a sale here and there your budget will grow.
Then you can slowly start continuously building links to the homepage to grow overall authority.
And later on few strong direct links to winning pages.

I'd start by splitting the $500 between a few solid niche edits and a couple of guest posts on relevant blogs. Look for sellers with proven metrics (real traffic, aged domains, and clean link profiles). Also worth keeping a bit aside for some local citations or country-specific directories, especially since you’re targeting a non-English market. Quality > quantity for long term gains.