For any business website, link building is at the very heart of a successful SEO strategy, and is essential to creating a successful online presence.
As search engines like Google use high quality backlinks as one of their biggest ranking factors, ensuring that your website has a top tier link building strategy will increase brand awareness online, and help your business to grow.
Read on to find out:
- Why is link building so important to SEO?
- What are the different types of link building strategies?
- How can blog writing services boost my SEO strategy?
- What is black hat SEO and how does it affect my performance in search engines?
- Why is keyword research important?
- Do I need an SEO agency to help with successful link building?
Why is Link Building So Important?
Typically speaking, sites in the #1 organically ranking position in Google have an average of 3.8 x more backlinks than positions #2 to #10.
Links from other websites to yours are like votes for your site which results in kudos or authority for your website. The effect of a good backlinking strategy is to “amplify your content” to Google, to place your content in front of its searchers.
The links from other sites are like recommendations when other people or websites cite your website as important when discussing or presenting a topic.
But not all votes (websites) are equal.
The linking site should have authority itself otherwise the link carries no kudos. The site’s topic should be relevant to yours, a gardening site linking to a car sales site may not be seen as relevant for example, think about it, if you want a recommendation about your next car, do you ask a gardener or a mechanic?
What Types of Link Building Strategies Are There?
If you’re working with an SEO agency to improve your link building tactics and backlink profile, there are a number of strategies that are likely to help you create valuable and secure backlinks.
Google notices genuine efforts to create succinct, relevant and quality content, and this is reflected in how it chooses to rank pages in search engine results.
Create High Quality and Compelling Content
As a general rule, to make sure you’re on a fast track to success, any content going onto your web pages should be high quality, and tailored to appeal to your customers, with relevant internal and external links.
For the best results, you will need to research your customer before committing pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard!). Getting your content wrong risks alienating your customers instead of drawing them into your site, so knowing your customer’s journey from starting point to checkout is monumental in helping you to create the smoothest path through your site to selling your products.
You can use tools like Google Analytics to carefully plot your customer’s intentions through your site, and easily fix any areas that have gone awry.
If in doubt, using a skilled content writing service can be instrumental in crafty content creation that will capture the needs of your target audience and sell your product or service to them while also catering to the essential SEO check boxes.
How Can Blog Writing Services Boost my SEO Strategy?
One of the biggest advantages of using blog writing services for SEO is their accessible format. They are often quick to read, packed with information, and the ideal tone for potential customers.
By keeping your content marketing accessible to customers, each blog article should contain internal linking to other pages on your website, as well as external links to other reputable sites. This in turn will increase your website’s authority.
Valuable links will help to send increased referral traffic to your website, which is essential for building trust flow.
What Makes a Good Blog Strategy?
Adding guest blogs to your site, as well as writing your own can help to boost your website’s rankings, but it’s important to remember that writing great blogs is a skill in itself.
To write exceptional blogs, you’ll want to ensure that your writing is of a high quality, and engaging. This is excellent news if you’re a talented writer yourself, but if not, you might want to lend a hand from a skilled content writer in the best blog writing services who can help you write blogs that will hit all the right SEO targets while remaining engaging for readers.
Ensure that your blog post has a catchy and engaging title that contains high ranking low difficulty keywords, and that all other keywords are inserted into your content subtly. Keyword stuffing is a practice frowned upon by Google, and it’s likely you’ll be penalised for it. The presence of keywords in your content should be natural and unnoticeable to the casual reader.
Your blog content should also be relevant to your website, and focus on communicating clearly, without being overly formal or casual, with helpful and relevant links to internal and external content.
What is an SEO Outreach Campaign?
Google uses backlinks as a ranking factor, and in order to rank highly in the Google search algorithm, a website needs a large number of authoritative bank links to prove to Google that it’s a trustworthy site. Outreach is a strategy whereby you create valuable inbound links to your website from other authoritative websites.
The most successful outreach strategies will contain well-written blog content, with naturally placed relevant links.
The best way to achieve lucrative outreach campaigns is with guest posts on another reputable website’s blog to create inbound links to your website.
Although the outreach process is incredibly beneficial to your website, the only way to achieve persistently excellent results and to keep creating valuable backlinks is to continue to build that profile with a number of guest post opportunities per month, every month.
These outreach efforts will ensure that Google continues to perceive your site as trustworthy and valuable to searchers, and will provide you with valuable referral traffic from relevant websites. By using an SEO writing service, you will also gain the expertise of SEO experts who can pinpoint the best hosting sites for guest blogging that will yield the best results for inbound marketing opportunities.
Why is Keyword Research Important?
Keyword research is incredibly important for targeting customers with relevant content, and will also help you to target your anchor text when writing for your outreach campaign.
Keywords are the content that internet users type into a search engine to search for relevant answers to their query. The resulting search engine results pages are created from a mixture of organic results, and paid traffic, created by crafting PPC advertising, which boosts content above organically ranking results.
Keywords are the root of all organic search, knowing which ones are being used in Google searches can be the key to unlocking your website’s ranking potential.
How to Find the Right Keywords for Your Niche and Audience
By researching keywords, you can determine which ones you are likely to rank for, and which you should be targeting to get the best possible outcome from your link building campaign.
Keywords are also useful for determining the structure and purpose of your content. By researching topics through tools like SEMRush, you can see the volume of searches proportional to how difficult it is to target for. A keyword with a high search volume and low difficulty is the most ideal – you are more likely to rank faster and easier with top quality content by using these keywords, and often with little rivalry from competitors.
As well as researching individual keywords, you can also view common questions that are frequently searched for – for example, if you are an electric car company, writing a blog that will target key questions like “how much does it cost to charge an electric car?” may yield better results than simply targeting for keywords alone, as complex long tailed keywords are more likely to provide a direct high ranking result to your web page.
What is Black Hat SEO and How Does it Affect My Performance in Search Engines?
Black hat SEO is a term used to describe the act of attempting to manipulate search engine rules and guidelines in order to rank higher.
The Google Penguin update was rolled out in 2012 with a view of “attacking unnatural link building efforts like sitewide links”, and has been a regular part of the algorithm since 2016.
This was an effort to attack manipulative attempts to create an artificial picture of popularity and relevance in order to score high rankings from Google.
Black hat SEO tries to game or get ahead of Google, this can be a valid short term strategy in some high value product / service businesses, but the penalties can be sudden and impactful. As Google bases some of its rankings on backlinks, link farms were set up to try to throw link numbers at sites and to commoditise link acquisition.
Despite search engines like Google cracking down on Black Hat SEO for over 15 years, we still see SEOs trying to sell cheap links to unsuspecting clients who are hungry for links.
Steer clear from:
- Cheap links
- Comments in other blog posts or social posts
- Sites with low authority or trust
- Sites that have little traffic
- Sites that have no real purpose other than to host links
Good honest link building in SEO can take time, but your efforts will be handsomely rewarded with time and the best advice from SEO specialists. Don’t be tempted to invest in link farms, no matter how tempting the payback may seem.
Do I Need an SEO Agency to Help Me with my Link Building Strategy?
Link building is a balancing act that is dependent on a careful mix of skill and knowledge that SEO experts are used to providing.
SEO agencies have the resources to build a high quality outreach strategy for your SEO campaign that will seek to target and benefit your customers directly. An SEO expert will seek to assess your website’s link building prospects and build them up through outreach tools like a blog writing service and outreach campaign.
An SEO agency worth their salt will be able to construct a link building strategy that is tailored to your company specifically by building links that will give your website authority.
Is there anything else I can do to help Google notice my website?
Even the top ranking sites require constant website auditing to ensure that all pages are performing as expected. Constant Google updates and changes to search engine results pages mean that there is always more work to be done on a website to persistently keep it at the pinnacle of rankings.
Therefore, ensuring that you schedule regular maintenance on your site can be crucial to your success in SEO. Have your website audited frequently to check for broken links and lost links, which can have an impact on your ranking. Replace these with new links if needed, and ensure that your site uses blogs to regularly update the site content, as Google favours up to date and reliable content creation.
Do you need help creating link building opportunities?
Have a friendly chat with Maratopia today to organise your free backlink audit, and build your own successful content marketing strategy.
