Running a business is like playing a competitive sport. In every sector of commerce, companies are duking it out with everyone in their market for supremacy. Digital marketing has risen to the level of traditional advertising in terms of scope and effectiveness, and that's due in large part to search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is a set of digital marketing tactics that aim to help businesses gain credibility with search engines and climb the search results rankings. Link building is one of the most effective SEO tactics, and it's a great way to build your customer base and form partnerships with other businesses. Continue reading to learn some of the many ways link building can give you a competitive edge over your industry rivals.
Link building is a great way to build advantageous business relationships.
As a business owner, you know networking is essential to growing your brand. The more you're able to connect with potential customers, investors, and business partners, the better it is for your bottom line.
One of the greatest things about link building is that it provides opportunities to form symbiotic relationships with other business and website owners. Even though you'll be forming relationships for the sole purpose of building links and increasing your organic traffic, the partnerships don't have to end there.
Reciprocal link building is one of the most effective link-building techniques. Reciprocal links are built when website owners or bloggers agree to put hyperlinks in their blog posts that link to the other's website or blog. Offering to reciprocate backlinks is one of the best ways to attract inbound links to your own webpage.
As previously mentioned, trading backlinks is an excellent way to form lasting business relationships. You may start out swapping hyperlinks with a website owner who has a relevant website and end up guest blogging on their webpage or collaborating on content creation. In short, the reciprocal link-building strategy is a great way of building relationships with the right people.
Link building is a great way to improve your domain authority.
Adding valuable content to your web pages is a great way to drive traffic to your site, but if your brand awareness is low, it may not help as much as you'd like. So, how can your content creation increase your domain authority and yield higher search engine rankings?
When creating great content isn't enough in and of itself, adding editorial links with keyword anchor text to your content is a great way to manifest higher rankings. Editorial links are high-quality links that direct readers to authoritative websites.
When you're creating blog posts, you should use authoritative websites for research and references anyway. Inserting editorial links to those sites increases your credibility with search engines. You can spot a high-quality link by its MOZ score—the higher the MOZ score, the more domain authority the link has.
Google's algorithms have been geared by webmasters to seek out great content that links to other pieces of content on authoritative websites. So, in a way, you get the benefit of the domain authority of the web pages to which you backlink.
Link building increases brand visibility.
Once you've found your target audience, it can be easy to get complacent and never grow your customer base. However, through link building, you get to reach your partner's target audience as well.
Imagine a piece of new content from a lifestyle website giving teens advice on how to spend their summer after graduating from high school. Placing a hyperlink in the content leads to another piece of content that gives tips on how to choose medical programs. Everyone who was reading about how to spend their summer will be redirected to content teaching them how to choose the best school for their career goals, and the writer of the blog on medical programs will gain a new audience.
Link building isn't something that will grow your business overnight. It's a long-term strategy, but it's a proven one. If you're trying to drive traffic to your own site, now is the time to start linking up with other business owners for your good and theirs.
