If you’re just a few years into your venture or even if you’re a seasoned professional with an established business who’s been searching for ways to get more customers, it’s time that you start thinking about how much link building benefits your enterprise. After all, as they say, everything is a network.
In fact, it’s not new news that links are king. In fact, back in 2007 I wrote “How Does Google Measure Links?” as a quick read before my first year at TechCrunch. However, because we know that this isn’t only something Google can do. While Google may be able to tell us which pages have high authority, there’s no way for them to figure out how people find those top-quality sources. The same thing applies to any search engine – so don’t expect that you’ll rank #1 in terms of ranking power just by doing keyword research or generating great content. That’s why the best way for your enterprise to benefit from link building is through its web presence. And when done strategically, that often means using external links as well.
So…what exactly does link building mean? Let’s break it down first, then go over some of the most important reasons why that might actually be beneficial.
10 Key Benefits To A Strong Web Presence
Now that you know what link building is, let’s dig into some of the best ways it can benefit your site today. Before we dive into the specifics, though, we need to take a deep look at where our overall website performance ranks today. Are we still getting traffic on Google? What kinds of conversions do we see? Can we generate leads through paid ads? Is our product/service offering converting at rates consistently? If this sounds like something your organization should care about, it’s time that you start thinking about whether you want to invest in link building or link juice generation strategies. These two things are very different (in many ways). But in general speaking, link building can provide significant opportunities around several key areas. Here’s the breakdown:
1. Improves Website Performance By Maximizing Your Outbound Links
When you build a strong online presence, you’re essentially asking yourself the question: How can we improve how visitors discover our website? It’s easy to try simply adding a bunch of relevant hyperlinks to specific pages. Or perhaps you could hire someone to monitor every single one of your URLs for quality. Maybe you could also have link managers track the numbers manually but that’d make it incredibly difficult to find out in real time just how effective their efforts have been. Or maybe all of these changes would be too complex for small businesses to implement and for larger enterprises to maintain.
Regardless of whatever route you choose, however, there’s one thing clear: Linkbuilding will never work if your site’s performance suffers as a result, regardless of how simple or complex your plan is. For instance, imagine that you decide to target a particular demographic segment through your own blog. You decide to focus on topics relating to education and technology. Then, for example, you decide to incorporate a few posts around social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Now imagine that these posts rank really poorly across the board. When you add a couple of irrelevant low-quality links to other sites within your niche, you aren’t benefiting from linking authority at all. Instead, your entire effort is going to fall flat on its face because you failed to create authoritative, useful content that drives organic engagement. It’s pretty simple stuff like that. Just take note of the results you’re seeing on your site or blog. Because the biggest reason why links are going stale – and thus ineffective – is that your audience has lost interest in the topic matter.
Link building, therefore, works best when both your site’s user experience and user experience is optimized for discovery. Otherwise, you end up wasting resources trying to attract new subscribers that ultimately won’t convert into paying customers. So, instead of wasting valuable time tracking down every individual domain name in Google Analytics (which can be quite tedious), take the appropriate approach below. Start by looking for the highest-authority domain names in your industry, then use those domains to put together a list of related website pages that are likely to bring in organic visitors for your website. From there, use Google Search Console to perform a basic SERP analysis and find out how those websites fare against each other.
Again, it’s relatively straightforward; all you have to do is compare the performance between the sites using similar keyword structures and try to identify the best performing ones. Now that you’ve found a handful of high-authority domains, you should be able to move on to narrowing down the category further. Once you’ve narrowed it down to around 5-10 high-authority domains, you can pick one of the aforementioned categories, like software development, marketing, etc., and use tools like Semrush to look at competitor data to determine that kind of page structure. Finally, you can either include your existing pages on the list or you can create new ones in order to boost your outreach. Either option will help you improve your rankings and increase brand awareness.
2. Boost Rankings With External Links
Let’s now turn to the positive consequences of expanding your reach. One of the primary benefits of link building, especially among B2B websites, is that it increases your chances of making sales. Why? Well, one big advantage of working with an outside agency is that they’ll be able to better tailor their outreach strategy based on your needs and goals. They can easily pull in referrals and potential customers from anywhere – even after you’ve gone off the grid from public sight – which means that your prospects are already talking openly to you long before they ever visit your website. Remember, while affiliate programs used to be all about generating free traffic, link building allows you to effectively extend your outreach and earn commission for qualified traffic. As mentioned earlier, if you’re wondering how a given URL will impact your website’s visibility, remember that there are three main levels of authority: Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Anchor Text.
Page authority refers to the number of times URLs point directly to your homepage and anchor text represents links pointing to other parts of the website. All the higher levels of authority are worth considering since they refer to a direct relationship between a webpage and the information that it contains. Think of the above chart as a hierarchy of authority. At the bottom of the ladder are links pointing directly to a website’s original website, while anchor texts are those that are used to redirect users to another page.
Next up are those that lead straight to other parts of a webpage but do not contain embedded content. Those links are considered weak and will have little, if any, effect on your overall reputation. On the other hand, if links are taken to internal content, it will have more weight in the evaluation process. It’s important to recognize that your ability to drive clicks isn’t determined solely by a single link – think about it like having a car. Each individual part has a role to play and contributes a certain amount of value to the whole, but the sum of all the parts makes it up to the destination. Unfortunately, many link marketers forget this. They send emails featuring spammy landing pages to thousands of potential clients hoping to land them on clickbait, without giving consideration to all of the factors impacting their overall website performance. There are always two sides to a story, and oftentimes it’s best to ignore the noise and focus on the signals coming from your website’s actual source, the human element.
3. Build Trust Through Social Proof
A common misconception is that once you’re convinced that a client is interested in working with you, that person will be ready to pay for services with immediacy. Sure, everyone wants their money’s worth. But there is a problem in this scenario, the problem being buyer blindness. Buyers generally think of trust and how critical it is to them. So, when their partner offers a service for $100 and they are suspicious, they immediately look elsewhere because they don’t feel comfortable investing in a project at all. Not only does this hurt a potential partnership, it puts other potential buyers at risk, as well.
Therefore, to truly expand your appeal, avoid sending cold messages and aim toward promoting your expertise with social proof. Whether you do this by posting a testimonial piece about how well you did at explaining the solution itself or by sharing case studies that illustrate the outcomes of an implementation, the goal here is to demonstrate the effectiveness of your services and convince others of the efficacy of the methodologies you’ve implemented.
No matter what you do, though, make sure that you are demonstrating your successes as soon as possible after the initial call. If your prospect gets upset with you, they’ll probably walk away before you’ve even pitched a pitch. Having said that, there are certain steps you can take to make sure your message is received with ease and clarity. Ask questions during the phone conversation. Don’t assume that your prospects don’t speak English. Some don’t. Use translation tools to make sure that your calls get understood in the proper context and don’t sound like gibberish. Always be honest about how long the call will take. People are busy. Also, keep in mind that the time
