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What is a Link Building Strategy?

Link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs. is an essential component of good SEO, no matter what business you run, or what size you currently are. Whether you are a startup looking to…
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Link building is an essential component of good SEO, no matter what business you run, or what size you currently are. Whether you are a startup looking to find your first customer or a fully-fledged company looking to grow its audience, a link building strategy can help you do both well. But just what is a link building strategy?

By the end of this guide, you will be able to understand precisely what link building is and how it will benefit your business.

What is link building?

To understand what a link building strategy is, you must first know what link building is. Link building is probably one of the easiest areas of SEO to understand, but it is one of the hardest jobs because it is always changing. However, if you are able to master link building, you will ensure that you can get ahead of your competitors. It is all about increasing the volume of traffic you experience on your website by acquiring links on external sites. These hyperlinks will take the audience from the current site they are on to yours. Sounds easy, right?

Many businesses will make the mistake of creating as many links on external sites as possible, in the hope that they will be increasing their customer and audience numbers. The trick to link building, however, isn’t about getting as many links as possible. It is about finding those high-quality ones that Google will deem to be good.

You see, link building isn’t just about getting more traffic to your site; it can also be a great way to boost your ranking on the search results pages. When searching for something online, it is common for people not to explore beyond page 1. At most, they might click onto page 2, but many will not go further than this simply because they don’t think it is trustworthy.

Trying to achieve that spot on page 1 is a goal for many businesses. They want to show their customers that they are a company to trust, and so the key to seeing success in this regard is to focus on quality, not quantity. Having only a few high-quality links as opposed to hundreds of low-quality links is what will work in this case, and this is why a link building strategy is essential.

Image Source: Moz.com

What will a backlink strategy focus on?

Experts in SEO call the strategy for link building a backlink strategy. When forming this strategy, there are many different ways you can approach it. There are, however, four main areas that you must focus on:

  1. Who is your audience?

You must get to know who your audience is. You need to know who they are, what they are interested in, and how you can reach them. There is no point in including a link for your services that is not relevant to the people reading the content. Always think about your audience, and you will find success.

  1. Keyword Research

Link building requires a link, but it also needs keywords. Search engines such as Google uses these keywords to identify which websites are relevant to a search. For example, somebody might search for ‘good quality shoes London’ because they want to find good quality shoes in London. Even if you have exactly what the customer is looking for, without the keyword, Google might not recognise this, and instead, it might bring up a competitor.

Therefore, conducting keyword research is a vital step in building your backlink strategy. Using the tool on SEMrush will enable you to view what your competitors are ranking for and how popular a keyword is. These keywords could be a phrase, as shown above, or it might be individual words. Make sure that these keywords are relevant to your business to ensure that it is deemed a high-quality link.

Image Source: mindgyd.com

 

  1. Finding publishing sites

This all comes back to how much market research you conducted in the beginning regarding knowing your audience. You need to be putting links on publishing sites that people are going to find useful.

However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds, and often requires the help of a blogger outreach team. You need to find publishing sites that are of a high-authority domain, and you will find that not all the sites will be willing to accept the content you are asking them to post. While most will be more than willing to accept your content, there will be many that, just like you, want to ensure that they are ranking well in the SERPs. If they are posting content that is not aiding their audience, then this could affect their position.

Only approaching sites that have a high-authority domain and are relevant to both you and the publishing site is something that professionals will have no problem doing, and will ensure that you are posting on the best sites available.

  1. Produce exceptional content

Now that you have your link, keyword and publishing site, you have to ensure that you are producing outstanding content. You want to post content that has the audience in mind, has a clear purpose, is well structured, and is written to a high-quality. Simple grammar mistakes will affect the quality of the link. If writing is not your strong suit, however, there are people out there that can help.  A content writing service will be able to produce engaging content, takes into consideration the publishing site and the keywords, and is 100% original.

A link building strategy can take time, but it can provide great results for those involved. If you have any more questions about how link building can help you, get in touch with us today.

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