Building a website for your business is essential. However, just setting it up and crossing your fingers won’t cut it: your website requires dedicated effort to gain momentum, and that includes acquiring valuable backlinks to your pages to boost your search engine rankings. But how can you encourage others to link back to your website?
Let’s delve into the importance of backlinks and explore four powerful tactics you can use to enhance your backlink profile. Read on to learn more.
Why Are Backlinks So Important for Your Site?
Backlinks are crucial for a website’s overall visibility, whether that site is brand new or has been established for several years — that’s why posting high-quality content is so important. An engaging blog page that offers valuable information or insights is one easy and very effective way to gain natural backlinks, since other sites will be compelled to link to content that is comprehensive and informative.
With more external sources linking to your content, you can establish authority in your specific industry, gradually giving your site a better chance of ranking for a wider breadth of highly-competitive search terms. Other reasons that backlinks are so important for a website include:
- Backlinks add credibility to your site: When reputable and relevant websites link back to your site, search engines see it as a positive signal, indicating that your content is valuable and trustworthy. This can improve your website’s search engine rankings, leading to increased visibility and organic traffic.
- Backlinks improve your authority and domain strength: The more high-quality backlinks you have, the higher your website’s domain authority becomes, making it easier to outrank competitors and establish your online presence.
- Backlinks help index your web pages: Backlinks help your pages get discovered by search engines. That means your content reaches a wider audience, and as a result you have more visitors and potentially more leads to convert.
4 Ways of Gaining More Backlinks
Build a Content Calendar for Your Blog
One of the best things you can do when starting your own business is to invest in marketing, and this doesn’t always require a huge budget. As mentioned, starting a blog page on your site is the simplest way to build content and improve your site’s overall SEO. Blogs that generate traffic and engagement (and rank well in search engines) will more likely gain backlinks.
To help you get started, create a content calendar so you have a number of ideas or topics ready to go, and ensure you keep your blog updated with fresh content regularly. Writing blogs on industry-related topics is always a good idea: everything from guides to listicles to thought-leadership articles will keep your blog page full of informative content that others will genuinely want to share through backlinks.
Start Guest Blogging
Guest blogging can be a powerful strategy for acquiring backlinks to your website. By contributing high-quality content to other websites in your niche, you have the opportunity to include a link back to your own site within the body of the article. However, you need to post on the right kind of sites — and that means targeting websites that are not only relevant to your industry, but trustworthy.
Research has found that 93.8% of link builders say link quality is more important than link quantity. In other words, posting lots of content on spammy or irrelevant sites could actually do more harm than good, so it’s always important to vet sites beforehand. For the uninitiated, hiring a specialist link-building agency such as Seeker can help you identify relevant opportunities and ensure your links are appearing only on high-quality sites.
Contribute to the Wider Community
If you’re not contributing to the wider community that surrounds your industry, you might be missing valuable link-building opportunities. Tactics such as participating in online discussions and joining industry-specific groups provide indirect ways of gaining high-quality, highly-relevant backlinks, since doing so enables you to build relationships with industry partners who might share your content in the future.
You might already be posting great content, but often users will need extra validation in order to trust your brand. Getting your name out there by connecting with people in your industry — whether that’s attending events or networking on platforms like LinkedIn — will help you build a community that is genuinely interested in what you say, which can contribute to more backlinks.
Conduct New Shareable Research
Stats and figures provide the kind of concise and compelling information that internet users often love. Not only are they eminently shareable, but collecting your own data can help you grow as a thought-leader in your industry. When it comes to gaining backlinks, you can add your data to a blog explaining your findings or create another kind of asset like an infographic — tools like Canva offer easy to use infographic templates.
When you offer a new insight or share a new perspective, it generates interest that users will want to share, or better yet, that journalists will want to use to create news stories. Just remember, if you’re creating an asset such as an infographic, add a link to the asset itself so it’s attributed to your site wherever it’s shared. A good piece of evergreen research can generate backlinks for years to come.
Backlinks send powerful signals to Google and other search engines that your website is trusted and offers useful and engaging content, so it’s important to build your backlink profile using the tactics we’ve discussed here. Don’t worry if your site isn’t flooded with backlinks when you first start out, though. Take your time, produce high-quality content, and over time you’ll soon reap the rewards!