In the process of increasing the quality and quantity of inbound links to your site, for referral traffic, increased domain authority, and better search engine rankings, link building is very important because it gets you a wider audience. You acquire hyperlinks from other websites, so users can find you. Search engines too, depend on links to crawl the web. They scan links between individual website pages and links between entire websites too.
Under a larger SEO umbrella, link-building has quite an important role to play. With tight marketing budgets putting a cap on the amount you can spend on advertising, you need organic traffic via search engines, especially in competitive industries. Together with other SEO good practices like good on-page SEO, stellar content, and a lovely user experience, link-building can help drive organic traffic to your site, making your site rank higher.
Best Strategies for Link Building
The internet is flooded or rather saturated with good content. Quality, relevant and authentic sites are the need of the hour. Let’s say, for instance, you had a friend who wasn’t very good at math. You would not refer him to your boss, for a vacant position as a financial advisor in your office now, would you? Similarly, if your site is not good enough, why should others link back to you?
In order to be attractive, here are some strategies you can employ.
Be Consistent With Content Quality and Schedule
When it comes to content, good quality and consistency is the only secret to success. Only then will you have people wanting to visit, and publishers wanting to link to your website. Publish industry-relevant content, so your readers feel encouraged to share it. Who knows, they might even link it to their own website if they have one.
Help Others Too
You can’t be an expert at everything. There might be another industry contemporary, a rival even, who might know something better than you. Share their content. Link it. This might sound counterintuitive, but mutual help can be gained. A blog is a social tool, and you can use it to link to others, in a useful way so they return the favor. If you are a new market entrant and manage to find a voice with an industry leader, they might share or link back to your content, working out in your favor.
Invite The Occasional Guest Blogger
Always invite and entertain guest bloggers, by first writing a good blog post, and then sending it to others. If one accepts, they might give you an inbound link. Guest blogging helps promote expertise. A lot of media outlets seek submissions from people on pertinent topics. Start with your industry and its core areas. For example, if you are dealing with interior decorations, talk strictly about home decor only.
Curate Resource Lists
A resource list can be anything, dealing with email previewing tools, to learning new brainstorming techniques. Such lists help other bloggers link it to their own posts, instead of creating that content themselves. For example, if your blog is a digital marketing blog, you can put out a list of ways to calculate engagement rate, to be relevant among other bloggers in the digital marketing space.
Surf Popular Stories
Always keep an eye out for trending news. And, use that to your advantage. Termed ‘newsjacking’, it is a technique of capitalizing on the virality of a news story, to amplify your own marketing efforts. For example, bloggers who are the first to comment on news events, rise to the top of Google’s SERP rankings, attracting others to link your content too.
Invite Influencers and Experts
If you want legit backlinks from authoritative sources, try seeking expert roundups from influencers. Try reaching out to them again sometime later, soliciting a guest post, thanking them first for their previous role on your website.
Get Involved in Case Studies
If you make your clients look good, they will link back to your site. If you are working with companies that have proven themselves, then create a good case study with the right questions, so others can find this information useful. Alternatively, you can also be part of a case study, to get a backlink once it gets published.
Capitalize on Visual Content
Infographics are an interesting way to spread information. Share your design with your sources, and ensure your infographic embed code can be accessed easily. A professional-looking infographic can be made with free templates and free photo editing tools like Canva. People also love charts, graphs, and other forms of visual content. These are time-consuming and people would rather use your content than make their own if they have the choice.
Conduct Webinars, Archive Them, and Use SlideShare
Live interactions with interesting presentations are always welcomed. For those who miss it, they can access it if you convert your PPT into a SlideShare presentation, and embed that into a blog post, you can further embed that into the webinar’s landing page. Team up with brands and influencers and invite them to your webinar to widen your audience.
Give Out Free Tools and Shareable Templates
You can create a free tool to attract audiences to link to your site. A keyword analyzer or any industry-relevant and useful tool might help. For example, if you are an eCommerce company making glasses, you can create an imaging tool that will allow customers to view different frames on their faces before finally choosing one. Free shareable templates are also a great way to be popular. Any bookmarkable content attracts inbound links.
Press Release and Outreach Activity
Modify your existing PR strategy to an inbound one, by writing a great press release and pushing it to a big publishing house. If your project involves another company, send out a joint press release. By gaining press attention, you can build your brand visibility, boost credibility and get useful backlinks. A dedicated page for publications or journalists to see your content is a great way to keep the information updated in one place for ease of access.
Work With Industry Peers
Corporate channel partners always link to each other’s content. A partner can send traffic to your site, something you can verify using Alexa to calculate their bounce rate, keywords, traffic, etc. Perform co-marketing by jointly promoting a piece of content and sharing those results. Leveraging that relationship will help you get more links. Marketing doesn’t always have to be an expensive affair.
Ask For Reviews
If you have launched a new product, always solicit reviews and feedback. This can help strengthen relationships with vendors and buyers. Read our blog on how to get reviews to learn how to do this effectively.
Identify Broken Links
As your website gets updated over time, some links may be old or broken. You can still update them. Use tools like Dead Link Checker, and Screaming Frog to check for broken links on other websites.
Social Sharing Widgets
Always include a ‘tweet this’ button next to your content for greater search engine, Twitter stream, and news feed visibility. Your data can also be referenced in other people’s content.
Use other social sharing buttons across your marketing content so more people see, share and link it to their website.
Final Thoughts
In addition to the above strategies, you could also conduct product sneak-peaks to make customers feel important. Link building can increase quality traffic and tell search engines your website is a leading subject matter expert in a certain field, hopefully thereby boosting the number of buyers.
