Having a good looking website and an active presence on social media will only get you so far, and it doesn’t mean you are going to see traffic to your website. Link building, on the other hand, is an effective strategy in improving your rank on Google and your website’s authority, with consistent results that last longer than any other paid activity. Link building services are a core service of any good SEO agency, and it’s not necessarily out of the grasp of a marketing all-rounder who is willing to put in the time and effort. Let’s understand what’s involved in link building and why it is so successful.
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What is link building, and why do it?
Link building is the action of creating a number of quality inbound links to a website, which increases the website rank and the rank of the page being linked to. If you are the owner of ExampleBusiness.com and are not ranking well for your target search term ‘example business Melbourne’ then you would be looking to do some link building. You would contact an SEO agency to find websites that have a lot of authority, craft engaging content to be posted on that website with the target keyword embedded in the content which is linked to your website. Voila, a new and reputable link exists that improves your rank.
You might be wondering where link building sits in the hierarchy of digital marketing. The benefit of link building over other activity is that it’s evergreen content that exists online, making it more valuable than promotions you might put into the market but ultimately become outdated and timestamped. It’s not only the content that is evergreen, but all the ‘link juice’ is evergreen too which means the efforts you put in today, will still be helping you in five years time, and even more so as most websites gain more authority over time. When compared to a Google Ads campaign, social campaign or other activity – you are in a better position as other strategies eventually expire and you are back to your net position.
What makes a good prospect?
Now that you are sold on the benefits of link building, we can start to look at what sort of prospects are going to be an ideal choice. This will look different for every business, and so you want to be shortlisting websites that operate in your niche or are broad enough to house content that relates to your offering. You also want it to look good and have sound functionality, and you can test this by visiting a few category pages, looking for social media handles and even checking out the ‘about us’ page to check out who owns the website and whether this looks credible.
Now that we have covered those vanity metrics, you want to look at the technical prerequisites that will actually determine your success in link building. This includes a high Domain Authority (DA) which captures the authority of the website, Trust Flow (TF) which depicts the quality of the websites linking to this website and Citation Flow (CF) which shows the impact that is able to be passed on to other websites through links. These metrics will be scored as a number. This is where an SEO agency can provide incredible value in securing quality prospects that yield effective link building.
What should you look out for?
It’s all well and good to identify an attractive prospect, but if that placement does not meet your budget then that’s another story. Most agencies would recommend it is more worthwhile to attribute budget to one quality prospect over 4 inferior prospects for the same spend, so consider this option. You also want to make sure that the website is not a content farm, as they can present some good looking Domain Authority (DA), but the Trust Flow (TF) and Citation Flow (CF) can sometimes give them away.
If the website has a strict submission guideline, you will want to familiarise yourself with this before you submit the content as the high-quality websites are more particular about what they post (which is a good thing). If the prospect is perfectly within your market niche, why not see if they want to shake up the blog format and do a Q&A, case study or explore another way of housing your content and link that works for you and the website host.
Link building does sound complex if this is new territory, which is why you will find that SEO agencies provide fantastic value here in systematically identifying quality prospects, crafting great content and having them published to these websites. Nothing will have a greater impact on your and SEO growth than link building.
