Good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy involves a lot of moving parts. One of the most important ones is off-page signals your website sends to Google, namely link building. Backlinks can boost your business’s online presence and help ensure your services and products get in front of a larger audience.
SEO agency Session Media has looked at some of the best strategies for building B2B backlinks. Below are the steps that work to drive more traffic to your website. Ultimately, they can help you increase your online presence and ultimately lead to more conversions.
What are backlinks?
You need to first understand what backlinks are. Many businesses turn to an SEO agency and get them to help you with your online presence without understanding what is going on. You want to know the basics of SEO and link building to know you can take an active role in your campaigns.
So what are backlinks? They are links from one website to a page on another. For example, your business might have a link from a news site directly to your website. This would be called a backlink. Sometimes it’s also referred to as an inbound link or just a link.
There are two types of backlinks classed as either DoFollow or NoFollow. To help build authority on the site and pass rage rank, backlinks with the DoFollow attribution are required.
Websites with a high number of backlinks tend to rank higher on search engines. Having a good amount of backlinks essentially tells the search engine that your website has valuable, credible and useful content, particularly if the referring domain is highly relevant and authoritative in the industry space where the link gets placed in correspondence with the subject matter.
While Google has changed its algorithm over the years, backlinks remain one of the most important ways it ranks websites and content.
How to build backlinks?
There are many ways your business could start building backlinks. Two of the main strategies to use include:
Guest blogging
Guest blogging is a great way to reach out and build your brand. First, you need to have something valuable to offer. These can be insightful articles that relate to your business or discuss a subject matter relevant to a business’ industry space. When deciding which websites to reach out to, it’s important to assess the quality and relevance of the domain that you will be outreaching and providing the content for to meet Google’s EAT guidelines.
Create linkable assets/Quality content
Start by creating content that makes for great reading in your specific subject. It’s a lot easier to get websites interested if you already have great content
This means that your website should have valuable content that sites can link to. You need informative articles, unique videos and great pictures, for example.
Quality content is the most important thing to focus on when it comes to backlinks. You can’t obtain backlinks to your content if you don’t point out the relevancy of this content. Your content needs to answer the user’s questions and have a meaningful connection to:
- The site where you are getting the backlink from. Your content should match what the site talks about or is about in general.
- The backlink you’re linking to. If you are linking to your website or a specific landing page, the keywords need to match that content. You can’t use a link talking about the importance of washing hands and a link to a television website.
For this reason, keyword research is important. It can even help you with things like content creation. You can find valuable information through Google Analytics to point you in the right direction in terms of backlink building and content creation.
Monitor your data
You also need to start measuring your inbound linking success, along with your keyword performance.
Data is so valuable because it tells you what works and what doesn’t. If you measure the success of your strategy, you can keep doing things that help boost your online presence. There is no point in backlinks if you don’t know which ones are helping you and which ones are a waste of time.
Finally, as well as monitoring your data, you should also look into competitor data. Competitor analysis research can help you identify great sources for backlinks. You don’t want to copy your competitors’ strategy. But you can understand what backlinks work and which don’t by knowing what your competition is doing.
What types of backlinks perform the best?
You need to make sure the strategy you go with helps you create powerful backlinks. At the end of the day, a single high-quality backlink can be more useful than several low-quality ones.
The most important features to keep in mind include:
Links from authoritative websites
Your business needs to target trusted and authoritative websites. Google won’t think of your website very highly if all of your backlinks are from random websites. Having links from authoritative websites is all about creating a good PR strategy.
You don’t want to approach these publications without anything to offer. Always look at their website to get an idea of the content they like.
Pitch an idea of content by showing the value to them. You want to let them in on any keyword research you’ve done and the benefits of having you feature on the site.
The best way as well to get links from authoritative websites is through reactive PR link-building. You need to check what topical news events are currently occurring as well as research what the current trends are in the relevant industry that you or your clients operate in.
Once you have established the concept that you want to pitch, the next step is to gather the appropriate journalist contacts and this can be done via using the many different PR software databases that are available as these will manage to show the relevant contact details of journalists across a variety of different industries, as well as disclose some details of the previous articles they’ve written.
Targeted keywords
You need to focus your SEO strategy around certain keywords. Your business has to have an idea of the kind of keywords you want to rank with.
When you start building backlinks, you want to use these keywords as the anchor text you use to link back to your site. The link has to be relevant to the landing page as well – again, focus on quality, not just quantity.
When it comes to anchor text portfolio strategy, using an exact match anchor text for the target keyword that is trying to be ranked will provide the best possible opportunity of helping improve the rankings for the target keyword.
However, it must be emphasised to not just always use exact anchor match keywords because that will be classed as keyword stuffing and will be detrimental to the ranking for that keyword.
Instead, it’s important to build a healthy and steady anchor text portfolio by using a variety of different anchor texts over time such as generic, branded, branded keywords, partial matches, naked URLs, random, and related matches.
Unique websites
You will also want to target different domains instead of building backlinks from a single site. Second, third or even fifth links from the same website aren’t as powerful as a single link from a unique domain. You don’t necessarily want to avoid receiving further backlinks from the same website but it’s also important to keep targeting unique domains.
Backlinks are a long-term strategy
Overall, it’s important to remember that high-quality backlinks for your B2B business are a long-term strategy. The above tactics and tips take time and effort to work. But if you approach backlinks with that mindset, you’re going to see positive results. Remember you’re not alone in creating a strong SEO strategy. If you need help, a good SEO agency can nudge you in the right direction.
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