About Joe Davies
Joe Davies has worked in SEO since 2006. He co-founded fatjoe, a link building and SEO fulfilment platform for agencies, in 2012 and is its CEO. Link Building Guide is where he explains how link building actually works, without the jargon, the hype or the upsell.
Who writes this site
Joe started in SEO in 2006 as a junior internet marketer and worked his way up to Head of SEO at a UK agency. The team there was small, sales were good, and link building and content were eating everyone's time. Outsourcing at the time meant freelancer marketplaces, forums and spreadsheets, with no consistency and nobody to call when it went wrong.
So in 2012 he co-founded fatjoe to fix it: a platform where agencies could order SEO deliverables cleanly, predictably and at scale. Every guide on this site draws on that experience of building links for other people's clients, day in, day out.
| In SEO since | 2006 |
| Previously | Head of SEO at a UK agency |
| Now | Co-founder (2012) and CEO of fatjoe |
| fatjoe | Productised link building, digital PR, content and local SEO for agencies, with 200,000+ campaigns delivered |
| Community | Runs Scalers, a free Skool community for SEO agency founders with nearly 2,000 members |
| Free tools | Built FATRANK (a Chrome rank checker), a blog title generator, a nofollow highlighter and an infographic embed code generator |
| Speaking | Regular guest on SEO and agency podcasts (below) |
Podcasts and interviews
A selection of conversations where Joe talks link building, productised SEO and building fatjoe.
| Show | Episode | Watch or listen |
|---|---|---|
| Joe's own channel | How we went from $0 to $70m: the journey of fatjoe | YouTube |
| Jordan Doughty | Building a $70M SEO marketplace | YouTube |
| Charles Floate | Building a $10 million productised SEO agency | YouTube |
| Online Performance Podcast (The Affiliate School) | Build in public | YouTube |
| Performance (ArticleX) | E3: Joe Davies, founder of fatjoe | YouTube |
| The OMG Center | Episode 10: Joe Davies, fatjoe | YouTube |
| The SEO Entrepreneur Show (Nathan Gotch) | The journey of building fatjoe | SoundCloud |
| Niche Pursuits | How Joe Davies built a $12 million company with a team of 15 | Niche Pursuits |
| Growth Boss (Gerrid Smith) | How to productise SEO to $12M a year | Podbean |
| Unscripted SEO | Building a link building empire | Unscripted SEO |
| No Bullshit SEO | #15: Joe Davies, fatjoe CEO | Spotify |
| SEO Buddy | My SEO Journey #34 | SEO Buddy |
| Collaborator | How to scale link building | Collaborator |
More on Joe's YouTube channel.
How the guides are written
- Every guide is written for the reader first, not for a sales page
- Claims about Google are checked against Google's own documentation, and the guides say so when something is opinion or a rule of thumb
- Data comes from named sources (usually Ahrefs or Google Search Console) with the date it was pulled
- Guides are reviewed and updated when something changes, and the updated date is shown at the top
How vendors are reviewed
Reviews and comparisons assess every company against the same criteria, fatjoe included. They are based on publicly available information (each company's own site, published pricing and terms), and each review says when that information was checked. Where something hasn't been tested first-hand, the review doesn't claim it has.
| What we look at | What it means |
|---|---|
| Link quality | Relevance, real organic traffic and editorial standards of the sites used |
| Pricing | What you pay and how clearly it's shown before you buy |
| Transparency | Whether you see the site, metrics and live URL before or after placement |
| Turnaround | What turnaround is promised, and whether it's guaranteed |
| Reporting and support | What you get back and how easy it is to get help |
| Fit | Who the service suits, and who should look elsewhere |
Disclosure
Joe Davies is co-founder and CEO of fatjoe, so this site has an obvious interest in link building services. fatjoe and Bazoom are also owned by the same parent company. Every page that covers fatjoe or Bazoom carries a note at the top saying so, and both are assessed against exactly the same criteria as everyone else, including the places they fall short.
Get in touch
Spotted something wrong or out of date? Corrections are welcome. The quickest way to reach Joe is on LinkedIn or X.