As a business owner, you may understand why good SEO is essential, but you probably don’t know the ins and outs of a beneficial SEO campaign. Most people outside of the industry believe that simply stuffing keywords into a piece of content is enough to rank for any product or service that they offer; this simply isn’t the case (not anymore, anyway!).
Link building is one of 3 SEO fundamentals that should be within every single SEO campaign, the other 2 being technical, and content. Think of it as giving your business a little bit of T.L.C.
What Is Link Building?
To put it simply, link building is the action of getting links from other websites to your own. Easy, right? Well, not so much. It might seem easy enough to post links pointing to your domain everywhere on the internet, but this approach will not boost your rankings much, if at all. Google is extremely smart and knows when sites are trying to ‘pull the wool’ over its eyes by acquiring spammy links. The sites linking to your own should be relevant to your industry in some way, ideally, be talking about a relevant topic, and link naturally to your website within the content. Guest posting is one of the best ways to do this, and it is extremely straightforward. Basically, you will provide content to a blogger, who in return will give you a backlink to wherever you need it. This allows you to cherry-pick the sites that you want a link from, and also ensure that the content is going to be relevant to you.
So, The Benefits…
1. Good Links Make You Credible
Good, relevant, authoritative links give your website credibility within your specific industry, as they kind of act as an ‘online recommendation’ in a way. The more quality links that are pointing to your site, the more Google believes you to be a credible source of information. As I mentioned above, Google is very smart and believes that good publishers and bloggers will link to your content because it enhances their own user experience, which is one of the main things that Google cares about.
It is also important to think about the number of domains that are linking to you; it’s a lot better to get 10 links from 10 different, credible websites than it is to get 10 links from just 1 website.
2. Helps With Rankings
By ignoring link building, you’re not even considering a large chunk of the ranking factors that Google deems important. If you have no links pointing to your domain, Google simply won’t care about your website, regardless of how great the content is. Practices that Google look upon favourably, such as creating good, relevant backlinks, and providing relevant information that is useful to consumers, are vital to any SEO strategy.
3. Improve Site Metrics
Domain Rating (DR) and Domain Authority (DA) are just two site metrics out of many that help you to determine how good the backlink profile of your domain is. Ahrefs allows you to see the DR of your domain, and also allows you to see your entire backlink profile, complete with broken links and ones that you have lost over time. Moz also has a brilliant domain analysis tool, which provides a plethora of information about your website, such as the Domain Authority and spam score (both have a handy Chrome plugin that is free to download too!).
4. Continuous Referral Traffic
When you have acquired a permanent backlink on a website that is an authority within its niche, you should receive traffic from that site going forward. Relevant traffic being driven to your site is important, and it is something that Google considers when choosing which website to show for a specific user search.
5. More Revenue Opportunities
Better site metrics and more relevant traffic means a lot more opportunities for you to generate revenue from your own site. When you have given your website the T.L.C. that it needs, you should eventually appear higher within the search results for your targeted terms, which leads to more potential customers visiting your website and purchasing your products and/or services.
In Conclusion
So, your SEO campaign has made your website rank for your products and services, but what now? Well, I’m sure that you’ve heard the phrase “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”, and this is true in this discussion as well. If your website looks bad and isn’t user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing, people will simply close it and find another one. This is why it’s important to choose a web design agency that is capable of creating a visually pleasing website that complements search engine optimisation, regardless of whether it is an e-commerce website or not.
I hope that this article has given you more insight into link building and why it is an important part of any digital marketing strategy.
