Building backlinks (getting other websites to link to yours) is arguably the most challenging part of SEO. While on-page SEO is mostly in your control, enabling you to make changes to optimise your search ranking, backlinks are an off-site SEO factor - which means others need to find your content valuable and helpful.
In this article, we'll look at what backlinks are, why they are important, and how you can use them to boost your search engine rankings.
Backlinks are links from other websites that point back to your site. They are an essential factor in how search engines such as Google determine the relevance and authority of your site.
The more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your site, the more likely your site will rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs). As we discussed in our previous article on Technical SEO, early search engines ranked results simply by trying to find a page that had the most instances of a search term.
For example, if you searched for 'Nike Tennis Shoes' on Yahoo! In the year 2000, the top results would have likely been pages stuffed with those words, sometimes making them completely incoherent. Google was the first company to look at how many others linked to a webpage and use that as a measure of validity, authority and trust. This became a game-changing algorithm and launched arguably the most successful internet company of all time.
Today, Google uses over 200 factors to determine where to rank your website in search results, but backlinks are among the most important.
Here are a few tips for building high-quality backlinks for your business.
One of the best ways to earn backlinks is to create engaging, informative, and valuable content for your audience. Content such as blog posts, articles, infographics, videos can get a lot of interest from your target customers and industry peers. The more engaging and informative your content is, the more likely it is that other websites will want to link to it.
As a B2B business, you have a lot of knowledge in your industry. Use this to your advantage by creating content that showcases your expertise and provides valuable insights to your audience. Consider writing linkable industry reports, whitepapers, case studies, or other content demonstrating your knowledge and experience.
Social media is a great way to promote your content and earn backlinks. Share your content on your social media channels and encourage your followers to share it with their networks. Doing this can help increase your content's visibility and make it more likely that other publishers will find and link to it.
Many opportunities for building backlinks can come from your relationships with other companies. Getting links to your site from your partners and loyal customers can be a great place to start.
Here are a few other ideas:
It's essential to regularly monitor your backlink profile to ensure that you are only earning high-quality backlinks. Several tools available can help you track and monitor your backlinks, including Ahrefs and Moz. Use these tools to regularly check your backlink profile and remove low-quality or spammy links.
Building backlinks takes a lot of effort, but acquiring and retaining high-quality backlinks to your website provides you with a competitive advantage and will pay dividends for years to come.
By creating high-quality content, leveraging your industry expertise, building relationships with other companies, using social media to promote your content, and monitoring your backlink profile, you can start to earn high-quality backlinks and improve your search engine rankings.
If you need resources to boost your backlink profile, we can help. Our team specialise in creating valuable content and getting others to notice it. Drop us a line for a no-obligation chat about taking your SEO to the next level.
