Link building is a fantastic marketing method for driving traffic to your website. It builds your reputation as a trustworthy brand and boosts your performance on search engines including Google. But what exactly is link building, how does it generate better engagement with your content and what are the challenges that may arise when creating an SEO plan?
Read on to discover more about how to successfully direct new readers to your website. Let’s dive in and start by establishing exactly what link building is.
What Is Link Building?
While a link is simply a means of accessing another web page, either internal or external, link building is the process through which your website is accessible from another. It’s a popular marketing process to help drive traffic to your website. You’ll have spotted them before when you click from one website to another.
Many businesses are creating a link building plan to boost traffic to their website. Plus, the more places on the internet that contain links to your website, the more likely it is that search engines will see you as a reliable source of information and a credible company worthy of promotion. This causes search engines like Google to rank your website higher than your competitors, which boosts your sales and puts you in a better position to become an industry leader.
How Can Link Building Drive Engagement?
It’s tough getting noticed on the internet these days. With billions of web pages currently in existence on the internet, encouraging people to choose your site above others can be a huge challenge. Fortunately, the processes of link building and SEO management can help.
You should create effective SEO strategies to ensure the best possible results for your website. This plan should be shaped by you and your team and identify suitable websites or social media pages to place links to your own. The document should also set clear objectives about what you hope to achieve, namely increases in website traffic, favourable brand recognition and improved trust data. This is beneficial as people are two times more likely to stay loyal to brands that they trust.
With an effective SEO and link building strategy being executed, you’ll see improved traffic to your website, better sales and more opportunities to get advertisers on board.
Outside of boosting website engagement, link building has the additional bonus of helping you harness the potential of better business relationships. To achieve fruitful relationships, identify companies that are within your niche but not a direct competitor. This means that you’ll be able to collaborate to your mutual benefit. Better relationships improve your reliability in the sector, which will drive further engagement.
Challenges To Address
Link building is a great tool for gaining additional traffic to your website, but what are the challenges to the process that trip up many brands?
Changing SEO Algorithms
SEO algorithms are changing all the time and staying abreast of these developments is crucial when it comes to link building. You should always be prepared to adjust your strategy at a moment’s notice to ensure that you achieve boosted visibility in search engine results.
Savvy Competitors
It’s also useful to regularly research what your competitors are doing. How are they using link building to develop their brand and relationship with site visitors? How is your industry as a whole developing new SEO tactics? Which of your competitors are ranking highest in search engine results and what are they doing to achieve this?
Broken Links
Link building is a useful tool for SEO purposes, as well as driving traffic to your website from other places on the internet. But one of the biggest blunders with link building is changing the URLs of your web pages.
For example, you may have an About Us page that you use in your link building strategy. You may successfully place it on 50 other websites, but one day you change the title of the page to About Our Brand. This may automatically change the URL of the page, rendering those 50 backlinks completely useless.
Always remember to retain information about the URLs you backlink and ensure that a change of page name doesn’t change the link.
Backlink Locations
If you include a backlink on too many low-authority websites, search engines like Google will see you as being untrustworthy and will push you down search listings as a result. Select websites through a strategy that prioritises legitimacy. Slow and steady wins the race when it comes to selecting websites.
It’s also important to avoid exchanging links with websites, whereby you include links to them and them to you. Search engines consider this behaviour to be highly suspicious and will punish your website accordingly.
