Whether you’re an inexperienced or seasoned entrepreneur, you know the importance of search engine optimization. Consumers have switched heavily to online shopping. SEO makes your website more visible, so there are more opportunities to transform prospects into customers.
Link building remains one of the most effective tactics. Search engines like Google regard links as recommendations for the linked target page. A high number of internal links pointing to a particular website lets Google know that page is important. Link building might be one of the most difficult and time-consuming SEO tactics, but it’s extremely effective, especially when combined with other strategies.
There are several link building strategies, such as content creation, collaboration with opinion leaders, forum and blog comments, and replicating competitors’ backlinks, to name a few. Having a strategy is crucial because it helps you stay on track. It’s basically a plan for establishing an Internet presence through organic search. You can orchestrate different tactics so that you can achieve your business goals.
A clear link building strategy adds focus to your efforts and builds on what’s already working. Here are the fundamental steps to building a solid strategy. Your team is part of the process, so work together on this one.
Get To Know Your Audience Better
If you want more people to visit your website, learn more about your target audience. This will help you figure out what content they care about. Plus, you won’t waste marketing spend on inappropriate mediums that your customers don’t use or rarely engage with. Review any data you’ve collected. You’ll have a starting point to work from when getting to know your audience at a deeper level. See what information is missing.
It’s paramount to know where consumers spend the most time online. What websites do they visit and what social media platforms do they prefer? You can create a questionnaire asking existing customers where they spend time online. Also, you can create email survey campaigns that ask subscribers for their social media preferences. The younger generations are interested in platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Run A Content Audit
Content is seldom revisited and reused. This is a mistake because repurposing existing content is one of the most efficient link building strategies. You don’t have to write every post, video, or infographic from scratch. With some minor changes, the articles can become a target for quality backlinks. Time is an invaluable Internet resource. You can’t create content day in and day out.
Take inventory of your content. You can audit different types of content, such as video, PDF, or interactive content. Sort articles around the same topic so that you can generate additional opportunities to target a specific keyword. You’ll have to recover information from multiple sources and add it manually to a spreadsheet.
Ideally, your content should get a lot of organic traffic. If you’re not getting any, that means there’s a problem with your link building strategy, how you’re distributing the articles, the content type, and the content itself. Maybe you need to start all over again. You’re missing out on valuable traffic sources. Try to find similarities between underperforming blogs. They could simply be missing proper subheadings.
Come Up with A List of Sites That Appeal to Your Audience
Make a list of websites that appeal to your audience. Writing and publishing content on your own site isn’t enough. You must share your content on niche or industry platforms so it gets seen by more people. Of course, you don’t want a link from every website there is. Some links can damage your website at scale. A link from a spammy website will lower your website rankings.
If the domain rating is high, that means the website get links from many good sites. Opt for a DR of 90 or above. An authoritative site gets people talking. If you manage to get a link from a site with a DR of 90+, you’ll improve your SEO and bring in more organic traffic. The robots will trust the website and, most importantly, people will trust the website. Unless you’re an already-established business with good rankings, high-authority links will take a long time to build.
See What Link Building You Can Do Yourself
You can do most things yourself without venturing into spammy territory. There’s a limited amount of time and productive hours to cover everything, so consider hiring link building services. You can hire the experts to do the extra work. Results will be visible soon enough. You can monitor the progress and hold the vendor accountable for mistakes (if any). The best thing for you would be to focus on growing your business.
Make sure you outsource to the right person. A link building agency focuses on improving your search engine rankings and performance. You have access to a ton of expertise. There’s nothing stopping you from taking a DIY approach, but just because you can, that doesn’t mean you should. A link building agency will take the time to understand you and your industry. They’ll know what websites are worth building relationships with.
Start Conducting Outreach
Reach out to a website and ask them to link to your content. You can send an email, but social media like Twitter is a better way of contacting the site administrator. You’ll see better responses to direct and succinct messages. Often, you won’t get a reply at all. If payment is the way to building links, pay ahead of time. Once you’ve established a contact, cultivate your relationship. This will increase your chances of getting that backlink.
You can offer some anchor texts to make it easier for the website administrator. The anchor text should use descriptive keywords that outline the idea you’re linking to. If you find that several sites are linking to your web page with the same anchor, carry out an outreach and ask them to change the anchor text. The last thing you want is to be penalised for spammy behaviour.
Last but not least, share your new content on social media. When people like, share, and talk about your articles, you get more links.