The SEO strategy of a small business must include link building.
It should be a priority, particularly if you wish to thrive in a competitive market. Do you know the reasons?
- Google crawlers bring those websites on the first page of search results that are talked about more. As a result, having more backlinks helps your website rank higher on Google.
- In the long term, more clicks from potential customers will result in more sales and higher revenue.
- The more backlinks you own means the more authoritative your website is.
- Your source will be preferred for its reliability of information and credibility in the industry.
What to Know Before Building Links?
Before you start building links, it’s important to know the following things:
- Know who your target audience is. Create your content according to the demographics, age group, gender, behavior, and interest of your audience.
- Analyze whether your website is worth linking to or not. Fill in the gaps by posting missing information.
- Do thorough keyword research and create your content according to it. The content should be informational and should solve the problems of the audience. These may include:
- How to articles
- News
- Latest trends in the industry
- Entertainment and educational content
- Go through the existing content and edit it if necessary.
- Enlist target sites you want to outreach to (for building links).
- Contact link building services, if needed.
5 Actionable Link Building Tips
In the early days, link building was all about quantity. The greater number of backlinks was directly proportional to the chances of a website appearing on Google SERPs. Google’s algorithms are updated on a daily basis. These have become smarter now. Consequently, they focus more on quality backlinks than the number of links.
To ensure you don’t get penalized by Google, it is important to follow white-hat backlinking tactics. In light of this, let’s learn some useful and straightforward tips for earning links. These can help your website perform better in search engine optimization:
1. Build Strong Connections in Industry
The easiest way to earn natural links in a competitive market is to connect with other businesses in your industry. You may look for certain businesses that offer complementary services or products to yours. Build a strong relationship with them by helping each other out. You’ll be linking to each other’s websites naturally in the process.
You can also reach out to small websites and bloggers that are related to your business. These websites should be relevant to your brand, industry, or target market. Sort these websites according to their importance and authority in the industry. Make sure you start with the most credible ones.
You can also earn links by registering with local business directories. People these days prefer to get all the information they need in one place. As a result, it is not surprising that every market has at least one online directory. Ensure that your local business directory includes you too. You must link to your website from the relevant directory. This way, you’ll also get to connect with other professionals in your industry.
2. Effective Guest Posts and Answers
Guest posting on industry-relevant sites is the most commonly used strategy in link building. It’s a kind of win-win situation for you and the host. What you’ll do is update the host website’s blog with an informational piece of SEO-optimized content. You’ll include your author bio and hyperlink it with your website’s URL. The host’s audience will get information through your post, and you’ll get links in return.
Make sure to post only on relevant websites. Irrelevant and mass guest posting is equivalent to spamming. It leads to your website being penalized by Google. Let’s quickly go through some tips for guest posting:
- Get approval from the host by demonstrating your writing abilities.
- Write a strong pitch to communicate effectively with the host.
- Analyze the target audience and design your post accordingly.
- The post must be SEO-optimized.
- Keep the post brief and to the point, avoid fluff.
Another natural way to earn backlinks is by posting answers to your industry-relevant questions. You can simply search for questions on forums like Reddit and Quora. Then write an appropriate and detailed answer with a link to your website for more information.
3. Submit Case Studies or Testimonials
You can earn natural backlinks from authorized websites by featuring in their case studies or testimonials. For this purpose, you need to enlist the most preferred brands or websites in your industry. From the list, pick out those whose products or services are the best and you have used them yourself.
Go to these websites and check if they post any case studies or testimonials. If you can’t see anything, try searching for “testimonials” or “case studies” in the search box on their homepage. If you find any testimonials or case studies, contact each business on your list. Ask them to include you in a case study or mention you in a testimonial. Don’t forget to link it with your website.
4. Support the Community
Support your local community by contacting charity organizations and fundraisers. These nonprofit organizations are always looking for sponsors, and you could be the one. In their list of sponsors’ websites, a backlink to your website will help you get some traffic.
Apart from conventional charity organizations, you can work for any cause in the local community. Think about planning some fundraising events. Offer scholarships to high school and college students. When you support a cause in your community, the word rapidly gets out that your company is involved in it. It helps you get better recognition in the society.
5. Turn to Social Media
Engagement of your business with social media enhances your online presence in a competitive market. Share stories and informational pieces of content on different social media platforms. You can also create some attractive infographics for this purpose. Post these on your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages with short captions below. The captions must contain links to your website. It is possible that people will share your post. It’ll bring you more link-building opportunities in the long run.
Conclusion
If you have already built some links, make sure to check them once in a while. Claim unmentioned links by googling your website name like “this”. Alternatively, type intext:{website-name} and search. It will show all the blogs that have mentioned you. If any such blog hasn’t linked to your website, request it to do so. Moreover, keep track of all links and fix all broken links.
We hope this article has helped you understand some key tips for link building and that you are no longer intimidated by this process now. All you need to do is apply these tips and wait for their magic with perseverance.
