What is Link Building and Why is it Important?

Together, SEO and link building are constantly evolving and changing, and the importance of building quality links is growing more than ever before. It is essential to understand and implement high-quality campaigns in order to stay ahead of your online competitors; this has been the case for some time, and will continue into the future!

At Digital Next, we want to help you hit the ground running and make sure your online activity is moving in the right direction. Here we take a look at link building and the impact it can have on your business. So, if you’re new to this particular type of SEO strategy, we offer you a beginner’s guide to link building.

How can my business benefit from link building?

Links are a key indicator for search engine algorithms to rank listings. This means that the more links from high-quality sources there are pointing to your website, the more likely you are to improve your rankings. There are some other key benefits, however, that are worth keeping in mind.

Traffic from referrals

Rankings are often boosted through link building strategies, but you could also benefit from traffic coming from referrals. A well-placed link on a high-traffic website can result in an increase in your website traffic too. If the website is relevant to your industry, that traffic will probably be relevant too.

Michael Ellsberg, an American author, blogger and public speaker, wrote about an important distinction between putting yourself in front of a large audience, and a smaller one that is incredibly passionate about the topic in question. The point was that enthusiastic followers of a blog may be more willing to listen to a recommendation from an influencer, as opposed to an advertisement that admittedly has a bigger audience.

Nurturing relationships

Link building frequently means reaching out to blogs and websites that are relevant to your industry. Reaching out like this often involves promoting an item of content, like a blog or infographic. While the objective of outreach is to get that link, it can also enable you to build a relationship with prominent influencers in your niche. Relationships like this can boost regard and trust in your business, which can be as valuable as any backlink you get.

Building your brand

Building quality links can help grow your brand, whilst giving you an authoritative reputation for your niche. Certain link building strategies, like content creation, can demonstrate your company’s expertise. If you publish content based on industry data, you could increase your industry’s awareness of your brand as a valuable source of information. By doing outreach to acquire quality links to that content, you showcase your expertise by encouraging others in your sector to share your content and get the word out.

The importance of creating content worthy of a link

Before you attempt link building, you must ensure you have valuable content to link to. Often, this is simply your website’s homepage. It can also be specialised resources like blog posts, tools, infographics or research studies. Sometimes you will have had these assets for some time before beginning the work of link building. In other cases, you create material with the specific objective of acquiring links.

This is a good introduction to the concept of earning links and “ranking on merit”. The foundation of any good link building campaign is to have something of value that’s worthy of a link. It’s not easy to acquire links to content and pages of low value, but if you start with something that has genuine value, people will find it useful or worthy of a share. This makes link building a far simpler and more rewarding endeavour.