Link building should be a crucial part of your overall SEO efforts. Most business owners don’t know about this piece, yet it can truly be the most important aspect of their campaign.
This is a small tidbit from our full training session titled 5 Steps to Digital Dominance
Transcript
Link building. So first of all, link building, as I said, really the biggest thing that business owners don’t do online when they’re doing their own SEO or when they’re trying to optimize. And even some SEO firms don’t really do this because it’s a lot of work, but building links on other websites pointing back to yours is a huge way to really increase your exposure online. It sends positive signals to the search engines, so other websites are linking back to yours and Google basically considers that like a vote for your website. So the more links you have, the more votes you have, the higher you’re going to rank just by having these other links on other properties.
So an easy way to do link building is joining your local chamber or the Kiwanis or any of these different organizations that have websites and they have business listings, things like that.
Joining those, if you get a link back from those, is fantastic because they’re very local that are very centralized and they link back to you in the same geographic location, which is just fantastic. So, that’s an easy way to to do that.
Of course, optimizing your Google My Business profile, which we did a webinar in the training session at wtmarketingpros.com/training. You can see our entire training specifically on Google My Business and optimizing your Google business profile. So that’s big, and there is an opportunity to put some links in there as well, so having links from Google is a pretty good sign for your business.
And there are some other things. One of my favorites is guest blogging. So guest blogging is basically reaching out to bloggers in industries that are related to yours. So, maybe there’s an interior designer that has a blog and what you can do is reach out to them and say, “I’d like to provide you with a great article on something related to interior design. And in exchange, I would like a link back in that piece of content to my website.”
So the the blogger is gaining basically a free piece of content so they don’t have to write something that week or that day and you’re getting a link back from an industry-related source. So this is a huge way to go about really improving your overall exposure, your authority online.
Here’s an example. This is one that we actually published on the 4th. So just you know, a week or so ago. It’s on a website called Business Advice Guide and it’s top 12 Conversion Rate Optimization Tips to Getting Quality Leads for Your Business. So this is something, you know, we wrote the content, gave it to them, gave them a nice little picture to put in there. And in the middle of the article we actually have a link that links back to our agency.
So they got the content, we got the link. And of course, you know, it makes sense, it’s on a business advice related site. So it’s industry-related to what we’re trying to do. We wouldn’t want to put an article like this on a construction blog, right? Or a one on raising cactuses or something. We wouldn’t want to do that. We really want to have it … So you don’t just want links just to have links. You want links that are industry-related that have quality from websites that are somewhat visited. The more visited they are obviously, the higher that they rank in Google and they push more authority towards you, which is fantastic.
So, this is how to do kind of like a guest blogging thing. Pretty easy thing to do. It just takes time, really. The biggest part is writing the article. That’s probably pretty easy because you know, your industry and not hard to sit down and pound out, 800, 1,000 words or pay somebody to write that article for you.
The hard part really is getting those connections with those influencers and those bloggers and part of it is the fact that they are pitched fairly often for different things, so figuring out how to get in, talk to them, not just leaving a comment, like some sort of a spam comment on their site. They’re not going to pay attention to that. So there are ways to do it, but getting this content posted on somewhere else and having that link pointing back to your website is fantastic. It’s very much the missing piece to a lot of SEO-related campaigns.