As the online markets have become more sophisticated and saturated, link building for small business has become a necessity more than an addition. A brand needs link building to increase its ranking in search engines and consequently increase website traffic.
This article talks about what link building actually is, why it is imperative for businesses, and what are some fundamental and simple tactics to build potential links for your brand’s website.
Here is our complete guide to link building to help you take your small business in the right direction.
What is link building for small business?
When you have a small business, you need to craft a website for your brand to increase its online presence. Link building is a process that helps to increase the number and quality of inbound links on a webpage.
The ultimate aim of link building is to increase the search engine ranking of that particular website. Link building is done by acquiring hyperlinks from websites other than yours to your own site.
The search engines use links for basically these two reasons:
- For discovering new web pages.
- For determining the ranking of web pages.
Why is link building important for small businesses?
If your marketing structure doesn’t include link building techniques, you are surely missing out on potential customers. These strategies are a part of high-quality SEO marketing campaigns that can help to grow your business.
Here are a few reasons, enough to convince you about the importance of link building for small business:
Increased Website traffic
Referral traffic is a great way to boost activity on your website. When you have a lot of external sites that link your website in their content, you rank higher on the search engines.
Also, when your target audience browses a relevant website and finds a link to your site in that content, it becomes a new source of traffic for your brand’s website.
Network building
When you want to build your links, you have to reach out to other businesses and collaborate with them. You have to get several websites to mention your site’s link in their content.
This collaboration helps to build trust between different business owners and hence helps them to build relationships and network.
Brand visibility
Brand awareness is the consumer’s knowledge of your brand’s existence. Link building can make you stand out among your competitors and make you more visible in front of your target audience.
Also, if you wish to reach out to a new target audience in some different geographical locations, increased brand visibility with link building can help you to reach a new audience and market.
Brand reputation
A majority of links are built through blogs. So, if you can write well-researched and informational articles, this can establish your reputation as an expert in that particular field.
Also, you can add links to your brand’s website in the blogs that you publish. This way, you can convert the readers of your blog into a potential source of traffic for your website.
Increased conversion rate
When you are selling a product or service through your website, increased traffic towards the site can help to bring potential customers on your page. Higher website traffic opens up new opportunities for the generation of revenue.
This can also aid in expanding the conversation rate, that is, selling more of your brand’s products or services. Also, it can even make lifelong customers for your brand.
What are some link building tactics?
Although link building is not an easy job to do, there are some tactics that you need to follow, all together, to build inbound links to your website.
These tactics are quite simple and require an intermediate level of technical knowledge to be implemented.
- Guest posts are a great way to increase traffic for your site, and they provide even better than backlinks. All you have to do is to write an excellent post for some other website. Your post must be relevant to your target audience.
- Broken link building is a technique where you find a broken link, recreate the content on that page, and then add your website link on that earlier dead website.
- There can be websites that mention you in their content without including a link. You have to reach out to them, and reclaim unlinked mentions.
- Good quality content can convince an external website to build a link with you and make an exciting read for your visitors. The best quality of content has the following features:
- Well-researched facts, figures, and statistics.
- Supplemental images, videos, graphs, or infographics.
- Is complete and up-to-date at the time of publishing.
Bad linking Vs. Good linking
When you are building links, you have to make sure that they are natural, and it doesn’t seem like you are trying to manipulate Google’s search algorithm.
- Do not link excessively as this can be counted as bad reciprocal linking. The topics on which you link should make sense from a user standpoint.
- When guest posting, do not stuff anchor texts excessively. This can seem very unnatural. Instead, you can use brand keywords and navigation phrases.
- You should add your website to only the best directories. A good directory always provides useful information for your potential customers.
So, here was our ultimate guide to link building for small businesses. Search engines are continually evolving and want only the highest quality content websites to be on top-ranked. As a small business, you need to strive hard to make an online presence, but with these tips and tricks, success is not far away.