The benefits of link building can be huge. They add value to your website which in turn improves search positions and overall authority online.
Link building is defined as the process of acquiring hyperlinks (links) pointing from another website to your own.
Every website has links within them. It is a simple way for your website visitors to navigate between pages, content and other sources on the internet.
Search engines use links to crawl the internet; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites. They do this to help provide the most relevant content for their customer’s search enquiries.
There are various techniques and processes for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, most SEOs will agree that building links is one of the most challenging and most time-consuming parts of their job.
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Why is link building so important?
Link building can help your website and business achieve higher organic visibility on a search engine result page (SERPs). The higher your positing or ranking, the larger percentage of organic traffic your website receives.
If you have links pointing to you from a quality and relevant website, you develop and build trust for that relevant piece of content with a search engine.
Sadly, it is not just a numbers game as the number of links alone does not measure link popularity.
Another critical factor is the context (relevance) of the links you build. In other words, if your business is within the cybersecurity sector, your website would require links prominent IT blogs, firms and industry bodies. This will mean that both quality and relevant links are built to your website.
What are the benefits of link building?
Good link building is time-consuming, but investing in SEO and a supporting link building strategy can see some big and long term benefits for your website and business.
Build a trusted reputation
When you have authoritative websites linking to you, your website becomes trusted. This is a huge signal online, the better trust and reputation you can build, the more powerful your domain becomes improving ranking for various keywords and phrases.
Get targeted traffic
Did you know the first ranking page on Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2-10?
When your links are in the right places online, you will start to see increases in organic traffic to your website. Here lies the cross over between website design and link building.
If your website is designed with a good UX (user experience), you can expect to see this increase in traffic convert into eCommerce sales, leads or virtual event signups.
Easy right?
The task of building good quality, relevant and related links is time-consuming.
In fact, 65% of digital marketers state that link building is the hardest part of SEO and 41% of SEOs believe that the cost to acquire new backlinks will increase further in the future as competition becomes tougher online.
The outsourcing cost varies enormously, and hundreds of different metrics can often determine the price point for link building. The metrics of most importance are domain authority (DA) and industry.
To build links from authoritative sites, you must find the websites with a top search engine placement.
It is also a good thing to keep an eye on your competitor’s websites—monitor what they are doing and where they are doing it. Look at the sites they have built links with and approach them yourself if relevant.
There are lots of different ways to be effective at link building.
The best value links are built through establishing relationships and contacts, which we already know, takes time.
The best practice is to contact the site owner directly with an explanation of why they should link. Every email you send should have a personal touch, and not a part of a bulk email push.
You need to carefully explain why you think they should add a link to your website. It would be best to include a statement to help convince them why you think your site would be an excellent resource for the visitors on their website.
Always follow up on relevancy and quality statements in any outreach.
If you want to build quality links, you are going to need quality content too.
Search engines have placed a significant emphasis on quality content. If you have relevant and informative content on your site, you stand a good chance of building backlinks and high SERP positioning.
A high authority website will only build a link to you if you have a good quality article related to that niche. Articles that provide value for their readers will stand a much better chance of being accepted.
For example, an in-depth write up of emerging cybersecurity threats will get you links from relevant authority sites.
Another reactive way to generate some external links is to write about a news story that’s impacted your industry. Giving a fresh perspective and adding relevancy about its impact is key.
Some other content related ideas include:
- Writing guest blog posts
- Detailed articles that cover a topical subject in greater detail
- PR and media outreach
Outcomes
Link building is an ongoing process which takes time, skill and attention to data and detail to get right. It is part of a more effective SEO strategy, which can evolve continuously.
The essential factor for effective link building is to make your site’s content high-quality for relevant and authority sites to trust you enough to link with you.
Sound like a lot of work?
Building top-tier backlinks are virtually impossible on your own without the experience of years of developing connections and refining outreach techniques.
We have only touched the surface about the benefits of link building in this article.
SEO and link building are not quick-win marketing solutions. They require time, effort and budget to drive results for your website. Sure, some less competitive keywords will see improvements quickly, but these will not deliver long term results or much traffic to your website.
We provide link building strategies that are bespoke and tailored to our clients’ needs. If you are looking for support or advice, we would love to discuss this with you. You can contact us directly here – or use the chatbot in the bottom right corner.
