High quality backlinks will help you grow your business.
You probably have questions like “What are backlinks?”. We’re going to cover that, and:
- The importance of backlinks
- How backlinks impact SEO and digital marketing
- How to get quality backlinks
- How to build a backlinking strategy
That’s a lot to cover, so let’s dive in!
What is a backlink?
Backlinks are links from another website to your website. They’re sometimes known as inbound links (while links from your website to other websites are called outbound links).
These backlinks are comprised of two elements:
- The anchor text, which is the clickable text element (though, rarely, an image will be used as an anchor instead)
- The link, which tells the browser where to go when the anchor text has been clicked
Backlinks are an essential piece of the digital marketing puzzle. Let’s take a look at what backlinks do to boost your online presence.
How backlinks benefit your company
Backlinks grow your audience
The most obvious benefit of backlinks is that they bring audiences from a website that isn’t controlled by you to your website. That means more page views, which means more people in your sales funnel, which means (optimally) more sales.
One takeaway is that it’s important to try to get backlinks to high converting pages if your goal is to increase conversions. We’ll talk more about which pages to prioritize for backlinks in a later section.
Backlinks build site authority
The less obvious benefit of backlinks is actually the main reason digital marketers care about them: they build site authority.
Search engines use links to determine how important or worth visiting a given webpage is. This was, in fact, one of Google’s first innovations: the PageRank algorithm.
In essence, the PageRank algorithm looks at the quantity and quality of the links to a page to determine its value. Other search engines have long since incorporated this innovation into their algorithms, and all of the most popular modern search engines use links to determine the value of a page.
This means that if you want to improve your site’s ranking position in any search engine, you’ll need to build a lot of high-quality backlinks. We’re going to teach you how.
Before we do, however, here’s why you care: when people want to find companies to buy from, they use Google and other search engines. Anyone clicking a link from a search engine is likely to be a high-quality lead. That’s why a company’s online marketing efforts should be focused, at least in part, on search engine optimization (SEO).
Backlinks are key to SEO, and SEO will help you make more money. With that in mind, we’re going to teach you how to build backlinks.
How to build backlinks
List your website in directories
The easiest way to gain backlinks for your website is to add it to directories.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of directories that fit the bill. Yelp, Foursquare, Better Business Bureau – and of course, Google Business Profile. The list goes on – HubSpot has an excellent guide to 50 local business directories you should check out.
Local businesses should consider getting listed with their local chamber of commerce, business improvement area, and other relevant regional directories.
These backlinks are great, but they’re not enough. Oftentimes, directories offer what are known as “nofollow” backlinks – without getting too technical, this means they don’t signal nearly as much value to search engines as “dofollow” backlinks.
We’re going to have to do a little more work – but it’ll be worth it.
Make high-quality content
We’re not going to dive deep into how you make high-quality content – that’s way out of scope for this article. (If you’re interested in an article on this topic, leave a comment!)
In order to get backlinks, you will need great content. This content will most often be in written form (blogs are great for backlinks), but videos and infographics can work, too.
Reach out for backlinks
Once you’ve got great content on your site, you’ll need to reach out to other site owners to get backlinks. You’ll want to find sites that are:
- In your industry
- In your area
You won’t always be able to find both – other sites that are both in your industry and in your area will probably be your competitors, and they might not be so keen on offering you links. Basically, you’re trying to find sites that might be interested in the content you’re creating, pointing them to your content, and asking them to link to it.
This might seem hard at first, but there are tools to help you get the job done.
Use SEO tools to find backlinks opportunities
You don’t have to find backlinks by Googling random sites in your niche and asking them to link to you. There are a ton of SEO tools designed to help you get the job done more efficiently.
Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs allow you to find broken links – that is, links to pages similar to yours that aren’t working. You can then ask the owners of the sites hosting the broken links to link to your page instead.
These tools will also help you find which sites have backlinks to your competitors. You can ask them to link to your own site, find directories your competitors are listed with, and more.
Some tools even have built in email functionality, so you can message sites directly from the tool you’re using.
These tools are invaluable to any link building effort.
Guest blogging
Another invaluable tool in the link building arsenal is writing blogs for other sites.
The strategy is simple: write a guest blog for websites in your niche or location that take submissions. You include a link to your own content (either in the body of the content you write or in an author bio). Once the post goes live, you’ve got a backlink – simple as that.
Help a Reporter Out
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a service you can sign up for to get requests from journalists for feedback on a variety of topics. When you’re an expert on a given topic, you can respond to these requests.
HARO backlinks are often very powerful, because they can come from very well respected newspapers and other high-quality publications. They’re not always easy to get; but if you can, they can be a boon to your link building strategy.
Creating a backlinking strategy
Understanding which pages need backlinks
Not every page is worth linking to. You’ll want to get backlinks to any page that:
- Has a high conversion rate
- Links to a page with a high conversion rate
- Is informative and shareable
Typically, your backlinks should chiefly target your homepage and services pages. You will, however, want to link to your best blogs – these pages are often directly linked to home and service pages (so long as you’re building your internal linking structure properly).
Think carefully about which pages you want your website to rank for, and work to get high authority sites to link to those pages!
Finding high authority sites
High authority sites are any sites that Google and other search engines consider to be high quality. Low authority sites, on the other hand, tend to be spammy.
Basically, where one website might be worth linking to (and earning links from), another website might actually lower your authority (and your ranking on search engine results pages) with a backlink.
You can find a site’s domain authority by using tools like Ahrefs Authority Checker. A website with a high score is likely to help you achieve a better inbound link profile, while one with a very low score might be a shady directory or another disreputable website designed to game Google and other search engines.
Link building with Raptap
Now you understand the importance of backlinks, how they improve your search engine ranking, and their overall role in digital marketing and SEO strategy.
You also know how to build these links – as you can probably tell, it’s a lot of work.
Let us do the work for you. We’re masters of SEO in San Antonio – we’ll build the links and grow your leads, so you can grow your business.
Recent Comments