One of the most important steps in an efficient search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is link building. You can boost your presence in Google and maximise your Bing results or beyond with a marketing strategy that encompasses link building.
Online results are all about lead generation and therefore traffic to your website. Links on other websites help to drive traffic back to your website.
You may be thinking that your social media posts also have links so is that not enough? While it’s a good start as social media channels provide quality links back to your blog page or service information, having more quality links back from other reliable and trustworthy websites helps add further to your domain authority.
As a business owner, this is something you can start to make headway on during this time of change as we adjust to our different working environments.
Benefits of a quality link building strategy
Here’s an overview of the main reasons you want to implement a link building campaign within your SEO marketing strategy.
- Getting lots of useful and relevant links for your website will help search engines position your website in a higher level in the search engine results;
- Traffic on your website increases due to the presence of high quality links that point and refer to your website;
- Generate more leads if your website is targeted to your audience
- Prospects search for your services helping business growth, quality leads and improved customer retention.
Tips to start link building for website optimisation
To create a successful link building campaign to drive traffic to your website you need to take a considered and coordinated approach. It’s not about placing content anywhere. Key link building techniques to consider include:
Create quality content
Quality content is essential to attract your target audience. You need to solve their challenges and provide value. Achieve this through engaging content. Include noteworthy statistics (reference your source where you do), advice, tips that will help their business. It’s about quality over quantity. Make sure the website’s you target are relevant to your target audience and sector.
Be targeted
With content being key to your link building, knowing your target audience is essential. This way you can provide the quality content that they will want to read. Find out about creating an online persona for your business which will help you create engaging content for your target customer.
Be relevant
This is important for search engines. Their goal is to deliver the most relevant results for an enquiry. So, make sure your links point to the most pertinent information on your website. If visitors – your prospective customers – need to click more than once when they reach your web page you’re likely to lose them. Make sure you evaluate the landing page that you will use as the link to your site so that it has relevant information and easy website navigation to help reduce bounce rate.
Quotes and resource lists
Often websites create lists of resources at an end of an article, blog or for key topics. If you have a relevant comment that you think could add to the story or perhaps an article with top tips that you think would be a beneficial resource for the authour’s article then you can contact the authour to ask about being included in the article or offer a guest post. It’s of mutual benefit for both parties if it is relevant information for their audience as long as it’s not salesy.
Guest blogs
Keep an eye on relevant articles and blogs written by people in your industry. Can you add comments to support the story and show your appreciation? This can then lead to you asking if they are interested in a guest blog from you. Research who the key influencers are in your industry to make sure you follow on social media to keep an eye on what they are writing about.
SEO to action now
Link building is a long-term SEO strategy. If you’re embarking on optimising your website now that we are all working more closely with the virtual world, here’s a few resources at the end of the article with some top tips that you can implement now before setting out on the longer link building strategy.
Initially check the internal links you have on your website already. You may find you need to add more links to keywords – words and phrases that you want to be found for. Make sure that these links lead to your core ‘pillar’ pages. Think of it this way, if you visit a website you want seamless navigation so by placing relevant links throughout the page will help you find things quickly.
Also, ensure you have completed as much detail as you can on your Google My Business page. Continue to add images and blog content to it moving forward.
What you’ll find by actioning things like reviewing the content on your website, creating an online persona and completing any missing technical SEO on the backend such as meta descriptions, you will have set yourself up exceedingly well to get link building further.