For a long time, any SEO campaign could be summed up with two general goals:
- Produce better content
- Find quality backlinks
The need for great content will never change, but what about backlinks? Link building isn't simple, so is it even worth getting into for a small business that needs to manage its resources more wisely than ever? The short answer: yes. But let's dig a little deeper.
Do you need backlinks?
If you're looking to improve your SEO, one of the best things you can do is focus on building backlinks. Backlinks are essentially votes of confidence from other websites, and they help show Google that your site is authoritative and trustworthy. The more backlinks you have, the better your chances of ranking in the search engines.
Of course, the million-dollar question is: how many backlinks do you need to rank? Unfortunately, there's no easy answer to that. It depends on a number of factors, including your niche and how competitive it is. The best way to find out is to conduct your own experiment.
Start by identifying an important keyword term in your niche. Take that keyword and plug it into a backlink checker. You'l quickly see the number of back links that it takes to make page one.
It will also be obvious that pages with the most backlinks don't necessarily rank the highest. There isn't a correlation between the two. In fact, some of the lower-ranked pages may have more backlinks than the higher-ranked ones. That's because Google looks at the quality of backlinks, not just the quantity.
How important is domain authority when backlinking?
When starting a linkbuilding campaign you'll generally have two goals:
- Get new links to the specific pages you want to rank for to boost their rankings
- Get new links to your domain to increase your domain authority
Getting links to specific pages is straightforward enough. But what about domain authority?
Domain authority is meant to measure the overall quality and quantity of links pointing to your domain. The higher your domain authority, the more likely your pages will be to rank for competitive keywords.
And yet over and over again, Google says they don't consider a domain's total link count when ranking pages.
And when you do your backlink checks you will definitely find evidence of that everywhere.
So how important is domain authority for backlinks?
For small businesses we suggest it's not a metric to worry about. Trying to build links to your entire domain in an effort to increase rank on specific pages isn't going to work.
How to Build Links Naturally without Going Crazy in the Process
One of the most effective—and simplest—link building strategies is publishing great content on your website and then promoting it through social media and email outreach. By creating informative blog posts, infographics, ebooks, and other types of content that solves problems or answers questions your target audience is searching for, you can attract attention from other website owners who might want to link to it.
To give yourself the best chance of success with this strategy, make sure your content is truly outstanding—well-written, researched, and relevant to your target audience. Once it's published, share it across your social media channels and reach out to influencers in your industry or niche who might be interested in sharing it with their audiences as well.
When you contact them, just be sure not to sound like a self-promoter; focus on how your post could benefit their readers and make sure you personalize each message as much as possible. If everything goes well, you should start seeing natural links start rolling in.
Guest posts
If you're looking to build links to your website, guest posting is a great strategy to consider. Guest posting involves writing an article for another website in your industry, in exchange for a link back to your own website. This can be a great way to get high-quality links, but it's important to approach guest posting the right way.
When done correctly, guest posting can be an effective way to build relationships with other industry leaders, drive traffic to your website, and boost your search engine ranking. However, if you're not careful, guest posting can also become a time-consuming and frustrating process.
To make the most of guest posting, it's important to:
- Only submit articles to high-quality websites that are relevant to your industry.
- Take the time to write well-researched and engaging articles that will appeal to the website's audience.
- Make sure that each article includes a link back to your website.
By following these tips, you can make guest posting a valuable part of your link building strategy. Guest posting is time consuming and it's a great reason to consider hiring an SEO company.
Conclusion:
Link building can be a great way to improve your small business website's SEO and drive referral traffic. However, it's important to approach link building the right way. Guest posting and creating great content are two solid strategies to get started with.
Are you interested in an SEO strategy that gets you backlinks and doesn't require you to lift a finger? Our managed SEO service could be your answer. Connect with us to learn more, and to grab a free SEO audit.
