The importance of SEO link building – Advice from a marketing agency Dorset
As a business owner, you probably understand that SEO (search engine optimisation) is one of the most important marketing techniques to get right, in order to be successful online. One crucial part of SEO is building credible links back to your site.
The good news is that if you’re unsure of what this is, or how to get this started for your business, our guide will walk you through what link building is, why it’s important and how your business can involve our marketing agency Dorset to help you implement it.
What is link building?
To start with the real basics, a ‘link’ is what a user follows to travel around a website to find additional webpages. Links are also used by search engines such as Google, to evaluate the content on a page to identify two crucial things; authority and relevance (we’ll explain the importance of these later).
This means that ‘link building’ is the process of getting other credible websites to link back to your website. This is all done with the hope of building the website’s authority on the search engine, so you can rank higher for your desired search terms.
Why is SEO link building important?
Now you know what link building is, it’s important to understand why it’s crucial in helping you achieve your marketing objectives. Google emphasised the importance of link building in SEO by making it one of its top ten ranking factors, along with others like mobile-friendliness, page speed and optimised content.
It is also important to note that with link building, quality over quantity is always best. In fact, Google will even penalise you for buying spammy and low-quality links, so it’s best to manually build links, on credible sites, with great quality scores.
What does it mean for my website?
The more valuable links you can get to your website, links that are relevant to your industry, products/services and location, the higher your website’s authority will be. Yes, it’s that simple.
Tracking your authority or the value of the links may be the difficult part. If you’ve outsourced your marketing to an agency, this would be something that should be shared with you in a monthly report. If you’ve built valuable links on credible websites, you should notice a difference in your site score and rankings.
If you need help getting started with your small business marketing strategy, read our article here >>
How to build links
There are several link building strategies used to get external websites to link to yours:
- Content promotion – Create compelling, unique, high-quality content that people will naturally want to reference and link to, and tell people about it. You have to spread the word before you can expect anyone to find your content and link to it!
- Reviews – Put your product, service, or site in front of influencers in your industry, such as popular bloggers or people with a large social media following.
- Manual links to directories and forums – There are loads of online directories and forums that allow you to list a business profile, with a link back to your site. This can be a great, easy way to build your SEO link building.
Recommended directories
If you’re looking for some easy, free sites to gain backlinks from, here are SemRush’s recommendations for the UK:
- 192.com
- Yelp
- Foursquare
- My Local Services UK
- Yalwa
Don’t forget about internal linking!
Link building isn’t limited to just external backlinks, you can also improve your SEO strategy by simply adding internal links within your webpages.
Internal links are links between the various pages of your website, they can be in the form of text, buttons or images. They have proven to be important for visitors to your website, who use them to navigate from one page to the next. However, they are also important to search engine crawlers.
For best practice, you’ll want to consider the following:
- Adding links when fresh content is created – When you create new content, you want to make sure you add relevant internal links throughout, to improve a customer’s user experience. For example, if you write an article about SEO, you’ll want to link that keyword back to the service page, to help people learn more.
- Less is more – Although it’s important to have some internal links, you don’t want to overcrowd your text as it can become difficult to read. Add a few relevant links when they’re needed.
- Don’t always link to the same pages – When you add internal links to your posts, don’t reuse the same couple of pages over and over. This can sometimes look unnatural and won’t have much relevance to the reader.
Contact CW Marketing, your local marketing agency Dorset
Even though this article has given you a good overview of how to start or improve your SEO link building, you must understand that it can take a while to build a lot of links. Be patient, and remember that shortcuts like buying links are against Google’s guidelines and can be devastating for your SEO. Don’t take chances.
If you need some additional help or guidance with SEO link building, why don’t you contact our marketing agency Dorset? We help many of our clients build credible links back to their sites as part of our full-service marketing offering, which you can learn more about here. To start the process, why don’t you give us a call on 01202 888200 or email info@cwmarketing.co.uk, where we can discuss your requirements and organise a free meeting?
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