The Benefits of Link Building

Link building is a popular SEO practice for businesses in all industries with an online presence, so if you have a website, there is every chance that you have heard of this. Don’t worry if you haven’t; you can refer to this guide below for a quick summary of what the practice is and what it involves.

Once you have a good understanding of the art of link building, your next thought might be why. Why should you invest your time and money in building links? Why is it such a popular practice among businesses? These are questions almost every business looking into link building has, so to provide some clarity and get more companies up to speed, this guide looks at the 10 benefits you can gain when you conduct strategic link building campaigns.

Even if you know what link building is and are keen to learn more about its benefits, refreshing your mind about this SEO technique can be useful. Link building is all about getting other websites to link to your website. The links they provide you with are called backlinks, and they are votes of confidence to search engines like Google that they can trust your website. You can gain links naturally, but not all backlinks are equal – you only want high-quality links. Link building ensures that you only build these types of links and remove any spammy ones that could counteract the benefits. Link builders can create detailed campaigns with different strategies to guarantee these benefits, which you can explore more about here.

The benefits of link building are far-reaching and transformative for businesses of all sizes. So whether you are new to this SEO world, need to convince big bosses that link building is a worthy investment, or are deciding between different marketing strategies and need more information, these are the link building benefits that are worth knowing:

• Backlinks Increase Your Site Traffic

Search engines – Google is a prime example – have backlinks as a ranking signal to help them rank websites, so when you start to build high-quality links, you are improving your chances of ranking higher on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Google will assess the quality and quantity of backlinks you have, as these signal how credible and authoritative you are. Websites with fewer better-quality links will rank higher than those with lots of low-quality links. When you get these quality links from a range of websites, Google views you even more favorably and sees you as a better resource, resulting in you moving up the rankings even more. As you move up the rankings and become more visible, you will see an increase in organic traffic from the results pages. This is because fewer people venture beyond the first page of Google. If you rank higher up the page, users are more likely to click on your website over a competitor lower down, knowing that Google has provided the most relevant and highly useful websites further up.

• Links Give You Credibility

You need to be trusted by search engines and potential customers; backlinks can help improve this credibility. When other websites link to your website, they are effectively vouching for you, deeming your content and business reliable and trustworthy. This means regular readers or visitors of these websites are more likely to click on the link to your website because you have been given this vote of confidence from someone they already trust. Gaining links from reputable sources and big names like Forbes further increases your credibility. However, even just getting high DA-rated sites can be a huge boost for your backlink profile and credibility.

In the SERPs, if you have moved up the rankings to a higher spot, you become a credible source for users, too. Plus, the more links you build, the more your online visibility will increase, which means your name can become more familiar to relevant audiences. Being a more familiar name within your industry means when people come across you, they are more likely to recognize your branding or name and automatically know they can trust buying your products or services. Over time, as this credibility increases, you could earn the title of thought leader and an industry-leading source for others seeking information or research for their own content.

• Boosts Your Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) isn’t a ranking factor itself; instead, it is a website metric created by Moz that gives websites a better idea of how relevant, authoritative, and credible their website is – all of which are ranking factors that Google considers. Generally, the websites at the top end of the SERPs have a higher DA rating. Therefore, boosting this metric can be of great value to you, as it gives you a great benchmark and goals to work towards. Moz analyzes your backlinks to provide you with a DA score, which can range from 0-100. It is worth first finding out what your current DA is before you start link building, but as you work on your campaigns, you should see an improvement in this score. Seeing this score increase over time can keep you focused on the end goal and let you know that your efforts will pay off in the long run.

• A Continuous Source of Referral Traffic

By having lots of quality links, you can increase your rankings. The result of this? A boost to your organic traffic figures. However, this isn’t the only source of traffic you could see coming your way. If you include your links on posts on other websites, you could be coming into contact with relevant referral traffic. Referral traffic is traffic from other websites to yours and most often occurs when the website linking to you is highly relevant to your industry. Those visitors will more likely be interested in what you are offering, whether products, services, or content.

To see just how it would impact you, take this example:

If you had 100 high-quality, relevant websites linking back to your site and between 10 and 15 people clicked on it every month, you could see yourself getting anywhere between 1000 and 1500 visitors. The more websites linking to you, the more traffic you could be earning.

• Lowers Bounce Rate

As link building aims to help you create high-quality links on relevant websites, any traffic you get is likely more interested in your offering and engaging with what you have. This means that you are less likely to experience high bounce rates – of people coming to your website and clicking back off without taking any action. If you have a high bounce rate, it could indicate that your content isn’t relevant enough or that users can’t find what they need. Although it won’t directly impact your rankings, according to Google, you should always be on the lookout for ways to improve your bounce rate. When you achieve a low bounce rate, this is because your content is useful and engaging to users. These are two factors that Google will be accessing and rewarding. Link building helps lower the bounce rate as long as you use strategies that focus on getting backlinks from the most relevant websites.

• Increased Visibility and Exposure

You may have the best content and products or services, but if no one can see it, it won’t bring you any benefits. Fortunately, link building can change this for you. The more links you get, the more credible Google and other search engines will view you, and as a result, they will push you up the rankings and the more visible your website becomes online. This makes you even more credible, further boosting your visibility, so you can see how rewarding link building could be for you over a long time.

If you have been seeking solutions to outperform your competitors, link building is the way forward because, with bespoke campaigns, you could gain better visibility and exposure than them, particularly if they haven’t set up their own. Even if they have great quality content, if they aren’t but you are using various backlink strategies, from broken links to guest blogging and reclaiming unlinked mentions, you are giving yourself the best opportunity to become the best in the industry and earn the title of most credible source, ultimately enjoying more exposure online as a result.

• Improves your Trust Score

Trust score is another metric that will give you an idea of how trustworthy and authoritative your website is. Rather than looking at how many backlinks you have from other trusted websites, this metric assesses the content and the link quality compared to others online to determine how trustworthy your site is. Although it isn’t a ranking factor, like DA, it can give you a good indication of how well your website is performing in terms of trust. It is always handy to know what this score is and how much it has improved from using link building strategies. Scores are between 0 and 100, and the closer to 100 you can get, the better. It’s not just building links that can help you improve your trust score. If you go to an expert for link building services, they will analyze how many low-quality links your backlink profile has. By removing these, they are improving your trust score.

• Greater Revenue Opportunities and More Sales

As backlinks can improve your visibility, you can get a boost in organic traffic. They also provide relevant referral traffic. With all this additional traffic coming your way and viewing your content, products or services, you have a fantastic opportunity to sell to more customers. When you get traffic from other websites, they are telling their visitors that you are a reputable and credible company that can provide the products or services they need. So long as you are ready to embrace this opportunity by having a website that can handle large volumes of visitors, is speedy, offers easy navigation and internal links, and plenty of calls to action (CTAs), you could increase your sales massively thanks to this boost in highly targeted traffic. As link building is a fairly cost-effective technique, the revenue increase can make a massive difference to businesses.

• Builds Brand Authority

The online world is competitive, and the battle is even tougher in certain industries to improve visibility and increase sales. However, link building can solve this issue for many. This technique will help your brand stand out and be viewed as a source of authority. Once you gain the image of being a trustworthy business, more people are likely to spend money, which only further helps your revenue and sales figures but also means more word of mouth for your business as people spread the good word about your products or services and leave reviews. Plus, once you start to get lots of quality backlinks and gain a higher ranking and DA, more people are going to know that you are a credible source and are likely to link to you the next time they have something of relevance.

• More Valuable Content For Your Users

Google, for one, loves valuable content. Any visitors you get are also going to be interested in the best quality content that provides them with the answers or solutions they are seeking. The great news is that once you start link building campaigns, your content will also see an upgrade. Mostly, this is because you have motivation and encouragement to do better in order to gain those better-quality links. When creating guest posts for your backlinks, the highest quality content is most likely to secure you a link, too. As you build up your links and traffic, you will also find you are striving to improve your website’s content to ensure that you provide enough value to your visitors. As you produce more valuable content over a consistent period of time, you could become a thought leader within your industry, which only serves to benefit you further.