When trying to establish a presence for your brand and website, standing out from the competition can be challenging. You want to ensure that you are visible to your target audience, but the internet is overwhelmed by other companies trying to do the same.
While establishing yourself as an industry expert and trustworthy business can take time, it's not as impossible as you may think.
A link building strategy is one of the most beneficial techniques in digital marketing. If done correctly, you could earn a better position on search engine results pages, gain more site traffic and even increase sales.
In this article, we'll look at how link building can benefit your business and the improvements you could see as a direct result.
Effective link building could improve your website's ranking on Google, which can consequently attract more organic traffic. In turn, this can help to generate more sales and revenue.
Link building can help improve your company's credibility and allow your business to develop an authoritative voice. Your brand's visibility may also improve, which can help you to build more relationships within your niche and potentially offer collaboration opportunities.
Below is a breakdown of some link building benefits and how they can help your business.
Improve Google ranking
Over 70% of people don't look past the first page of Google when they use the search engine. As such, if you want to increase traffic to your website, you need to improve your ranking on Google.
Search engines base their rankings on factors such as reliability and authority. If your website has a large volume of backlinks, this will go towards establishing your website as a good source of information. It shows other websites trust yours and find your content informative.
Suppose a website with a good domain authority links to your website. In that case, Google will interpret it as a vote of confidence and will be more likely to consider your website reliable and authoritative.
Increase organic website traffic
When a person uses a search engine to look for something and clicks on a result, this is considered organic website traffic. The user has made their own decision about what website they want to look at and hasn't been influenced by other factors such as Google ads.
If other websites and blogs link to your company, you'll attract more organic traffic. It provides more opportunities for individuals to find a link to your website, which will increase your website's authority and potentially its position on Google. This will increase the likelihood that your website will appear on the first page of Google results.
If your website has earned a good rank and domain authority on Google due to link building practices, you are more likely to attract organic website traffic. Targeting niches and specific audiences through high-quality content will help to improve your ranking on Google and increase the volume of organic traffic.
Improve Domain Authority
Domain authority indicates how trustworthy and reliable a website seems. It can indicate where your website will rank on Google search results based on a user's search query. However, it isn't directly used by Google as a metric.
If a number of websites have created backlinks to your site, it shows that your website is more trustworthy because lots of other sites reference it. If a website links to your website and its domain authority improves, it can benefit your website because the backlink's quality improves.
Multiple factors influence a website's domain rating, such as the quality and relevance of backlinks, the quality of your content and the website's SEO (search engine optimization) performance. The domain authority runs on a 100-point scale, with scores above 60 viewed as excellent and 40 to 60 as average.
Improve credibility
A user will be more likely to visit your website if another high-quality website with a good domain authority links to it. The backlink acts as a vote of confidence from another website, which will encourage the user to visit your website to find more trustworthy and valuable content.
Link building can establish both your brand and website as credible sources. Users will be more likely to trust your content and return to it in the future if multiple sites reference and link to it.
Build an authoritative voice
Internet users want to find content they can trust amongst the saturated results and adverts on Google and other search engines. Backlinks can help establish your brand and build a good reputation for it. Lots of other websites linking to your website act like a spotlight shining on your content. Not only does it work well with Google's algorithm, but users will also see your website mentions and will be more likely to think that you're an established brand with authority in the market.
Established and well-respected brands have more sales and revenue than brands that are virtually unknown. Backlinks equal visibility, which is just one of the ways that you can make your brand and website stand out amongst your competitors.
Reduce bounce rates
A bounce rate is when a user clicks on a single page on your website and then leaves without taking any further action. This risk is reduced if you give your users a reason to stay on your website and make them want to visit another webpage or make a purchase. You could also add internal links so that they can easily navigate to other web pages.
A quality backlink should be relevant to your website and content. For example, if a user is visiting a finance page and finds a link to a cooking blog, the chances are they will leave the cooking blog straight away because it isn't relevant to what they're looking for. However, if the backlink instead sent the user to a blog on investments, the user would be more likely to spend time on the blog and potentially navigate to other pages on the site.
Backlinks should be natural and relevant. It doesn't matter if you've got a large volume of backlinks if they're from low-quality websites unrelated to your website's content; this can negatively affect your site's ranking.
Generate more sales
Good search engine ranking and organic traffic to your website increase the chance that you'll generate more sales and revenue. If your website has many good-quality links, you'll likely have a better ranking, leading to more traffic and potentially more customers.
High-ranking websites deemed reliable and authoritative have better access to opportunities such as paid promotions, sponsorships and Google AdSense. These streams of revenue can open up new sources of income and exposure for your business.
Build brand visibility
Each website is visited by a different group of users, even when they're in the same niche. When a website creates a backlink to your website, it exposes your brand to new users who may not otherwise have been aware of your website.
A competitor website might attract users from a different geographic location or of a different age group. By collecting multiple backlinks, your website and brand can be brought to the attention of unlimited demographics from what your content usually caters for. This is especially helpful if you hope to expand your business to cover different niches or geographic areas.
Increase referral traffic
Once a backlink has been created to your website, you should get regular traffic from it (especially from evergreen content). On the other hand, if you bought a series of ads, you would only get links for as long as you paid for the adverts to run.
High-quality backlinks ensure that your website will attract traffic from third-party websites for a longer period of time. This helps maintain your credibility with Google, which in turn should result in good ranking positions on the search engine.
Build relationships within a niche
Google recommends that you build relationships that are relevant to your industry niche. You need to reach out to websites and blogs that also operate in your niche with the aim of getting more backlinks. This collaboration should result in relevant links that provide website visitors with valuable content and establish your brand as a respected source within the industry.
As well as bringing in more traffic in the short-term, link building within your industry niche should help your brand become well-regarded within your field. This in turn should help you earn more backlinks in the future, boosting your Google rankings and hopefully encouraging more site traffic.
You should use a link building service when you have established your brand, website and marketing strategy. At this point, you can reach out to us here at Prime Content to help you earn quality backlinks.
Before you start link building, you need to put engaging content on your website to provide users with valuable information and give them a reason to return. You should be able to create a good base of content after two or three months, which is when you can turn your attention to earning links.
The best way to earn links is to create content that other websites want to share. Content such as infographics and data are especially appealing as content writers can reference the information when they're making a point. Online tools and calculators earn a lot of links, as do detailed how-to guides and tutorials.
There are a number of things that you should avoid when link building, such as:
- creating large quantities of low-quality content
- discounting nofollow links
- repetitive linking to the same webpage
- linking to websites with a bad reputation
- forgetting user intent
You shouldn't choose quantity over quality or become so fixated on getting backlinks that you forget that the content should serve a purpose for your customers and website visitors.
Below are some link building strategies that often prove effective:
Guest posting
You create content and contact relevant blogs in the hope that they'll share your content and add a link to your website. This can increase your website's exposure and build your backlink portfolio. You can also return the favour by linking back to the blog on your website. You can add a link to your website in the About Author section or in the body of the content.
Social media
Although these types of backlinks aren't effective on their own, you can build your brand image by providing links to your website on social media. Your followers on social media will be more likely to visit your website if there is a link featured on your profile.
Press releases
You can provide online publications with relevant research in the form of press releases and ask them to link back to your website if they publish a piece and reference the information. You could present them with an expert commentary based on your industry niche or collect data that is newsworthy.
Building links is extremely beneficial when trying to improve your website's ranking on Google and your brand's credibility. When done effectively, link building can bring an increase in organic traffic to your website, generate more sales and build brand visibility, among many other benefits.
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