Why Do You Need Link Building Services?

For Google’s bots, linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. are the pathways which lead them from site to site. By assessing relevance and quality of each link, the search engine’s algorithm can determine your authority and trustworthiness, effectively improving a website’s online visibility in the SERPs (or reducing a business’s online presence).

Having a 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. campaign is nothing new in the SEO world, but for the novice website owner, it can be a minefield to try and navigate successfully. If you’re wondering just how important link building is, and how it works to boost the traffic to your websites, our guide is here to show you exactly why you need link building services.

What is Link Building?

Link building is a method of internet marketing, which differs from brick marketing (the process of marketing for ‘bricks-and-mortar’ shops). Essentially, link building is the practice of acquiring links from other websites to your own. Internet users navigate from site to site using hyperlinks, and by featuring your links on relevant websites, you can attract and draw new consumers to your pages.

Link building is a creative practice, one which requires extremely high quality content, written with the audience in mind, along with communication skills needed to reach out to fellow bloggers and sites (otherwise known as blogger outreach). A talented link builder will be able to construct a relevant backlink profile, create winning copy, and send convincing proposition to the right websites. “Thin” content must be avoided at all costs, otherwise the search engines will mark you down in the search engine rankings.

What is a Backlink Profile?

This term refers to your link portfolio. Your profile is made up of how many sites are currently linking to yours, how relevant and trustworthy the link is, and how it is linking. The search engine algorithm also takes into account the quality of the link and performance of the landing page. Your profile affects your page ranking, so it is highly worthwhile to assess yours and take the necessary steps to improve it if need be.

No two link building campaigns will be the same. It will depend on your business, your niche, your product, your service, and your overall goal.

There are three primary ways to build high quality links, which are:

1. Natural links: Requiring no extra SEO techniques, these are links which feature on sites and pages who want to discuss your website, product, or service.
2. Outreach links: Requires you to approach bloggers, websites, sources, and directories to feature your inbound links.
3. Self-created: By commenting on blogs, user profiles, guest books and forums, you can add your link. However, use this technique with caution. Google’s algorithm now considers these spammy and could penalise your site.

Why is Link Building Important?

In the digital era, if your website is not seen and found online, you are missing out on a global audience. With an incredible 3.5 billion searches completed on Google every day, to ignore search engine optimisation is to ignore the possibility of reaching hundreds upon thousands of new consumers. You need to be visible online, but having an online presence is no longer enough. Now, you need to be visible on the top three pages of Google’s results to make any kind of mark in the industry, regardless of your clients, demographic, product, or service.

Google changed the face of search engine optimisation by introducing their PageRank algorithm. In bygone days, websites were ranked entirely on the content they featured. PageRank brought into effect the ranking of how many external websites linked to specific pages on one site.

Link building is a highly significant factor in any SEO campaign. It’s a part of Google’s algorithm, which you need to implement alongside on-page optimisation. Google has confirmed that backlinks (a crucial part of a link building strategy) is one of the top ranking factors, and this factor affects your overall ranking more than any other.

Before Google’s Penguin Update, a good link building strategy focused on the quantity of links, as opposed to the quality. Since this update, though, businesses need to roll out frequent and consistent links that are of high quality, so Google’s algorithm (and the algorithims of other search engines) do not consider your business spammy.

Once link builders would spam websites with a high volume of links, and Google would crawl the sites to discover the number of links and rank you accordingly. Now, it’s quality over quantity, and if Google does not value the authority and relevance of a link, your website’s standing in the SERPs is sure to remain stagnant or move lower down.

How Important is Link Building for Your Website’s Traffic?

The answer is extremely. Link building boosts your online presence and visibility. It allows you to move up the SERPs to hit the top spot. Additionally, it increases your site’s authority and trustworthiness. If a potential consumer finds your guest post on an extremely authoritative site such as Forbes, by association, you will be viewed as highly knowledgeable and reliable in your industry. Link building is a win-win situation, but to create a successful link building campaign, turning to link building services is highly recommended.

Link building is also essential for building an audience, which will, in turn, increase website traffic. When you secure a link on a relevant blog, you give an audience a direct pass to your site. This is referral traffic.

Remember: Google is continuously updating its algorithm, so link builders need to stay ahead of the shift to keep their SEO campaigns effective and ‘white hat.’

What is White Hat?

Also called ‘ethical SEO,’ white hat SEOWhite hat SEO is an ethical form of search engine optimization (SEO) which follows the guidelines and best practices for search engines to allow a website to rank higher in a search engine's results page. refers to techniques and tactics which focus on the audience, and not the search engine. It also refers to the SEO experts following the rules as stated by the search engine, and not trying to take any shortcuts or unethical practices to hit their target. A website must stay away from ‘black hat SEOBlack Hat SEO is a term used to describe practices by webmasters who try to manipulate search engine rankings in ways that are not in keeping with the intent of the search engines.,’ which will see your rankings drastically fall, and can even get your website de-listed completely.

The Specific Ranking Factors of Link Building

SEO campaigns need to taking the ranking factors into account when devising a strategy, but what are the specific elements of link building tactics?

• Quality: What makes a quality link may be subjective to an audience, but there’s no denying that a link from one of the big players in your industry is going to boost your links quality. It is this factor which is the most important to ensure you adhere to. With higher quality the link, search engines will reward your website with increased visibility.
• Trust & Authority: Much like quality, domain authority is determined by the audience and by Google. If the site is widely recognised and lauded as a force to be reckoned with, it has high authority. It makes the site much more trustworthy. How Google determines the authority, however, is a mystery to SEO experts, but it’s a factor you cannot ignore.
• Relevance: Google takes into account how relevant your specific link is on the site it appears. A link to a football kit on an interior design blog is not appropriate. However, a link to a football kit on a sports blog is. Relevant links are incredibly important, and show that you are not spamming.
• Number of Links: Don’t spam blogs with your links. Focus on a select number of high quality sites to build links.
• Engagement: How many visitors does the website have? How long do visitors stay on the desired page? Bounce rateBounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who visit only one page. A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not satisfied with your website. is a considerable factor for SEO in general, but also for link building as it can also refer to how relevant a page is to a specific term or visitor. For pages which see high engagement and visitors staying for a long time, it informs Google’s bots that this is something worth reading.
• Social Signals: An off-set of engagement. Is the content being shared on social sites? Is it gaining a high number of ‘likes’ and comments on social media? If so, Google will rank this content as highly relevant, high quality, and authoritative. Social signals also show the link popularityLink popularity is the number and quality of other websites that link to a particular website. to Google’s bots.
• Link Position: Where your link is positioned on a page is actually quite important! You want to place your link in the content directly, rather than the sidebar or footers, to get the best ranking.

What is Anchor TextAnchor text is the text highlighted by a hyperlink. The words highlighted are crucial for SEO, informing Google’s crawling bots about the content of the site linked to.?

Link building experts and novices alike will be familiar with this term. This term refers to the text selection of the link. It is a ranking factor, and it is crucial for copywriters when creating content. It is usually a keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business., or keywords, which the business wants to rank for, such as ‘football kit.’

If approaching the keywords as ‘Exact Match,’ it will appear within the content as such:

When starting to play football, you will need the correct football kit.

However, there are a number of anchor text types you can use, including ‘link including keyword,’ ‘branded,’ and ‘natural.’ It is highly recommended that you have a variety of anchor texts. What’s more, each will depend upon the overall goal and link placement.

Link including keyword would appear as such:

When starting to play football, you will need the correct football kit.

Branded would appear as such:

When starting to play football, you will need the correct football kit from Kit Suppliers.

Remember: You need to vary the anchor text type used. By using only exact match throughout, it is considered spam practice and could see the link penalised by Google.

How Long Does It Take to See Results from Link Building?

As with any SEO strategy, whether it’s on-page optimisation or off-page optimisation, there is no definite answer. A brand new link will not affect your rankings immediately. That’s the good and the bad news. If your new link hitsWeb page hits were all the rage in the early days of the internet, but have since been replaced by far more granular, valuable data. all the desired criteria, it can be frustrating to wait for it to boost your ranking. If your link is bad, spammy, or uses black hat techniques, you may be blissfully unaware for a number of weeks before you discover you have been penalised.

On average, it has been estimated to take between eight to nine weeks before you see any change in your site’s SERP ranking. Of course, this is not an answer clients want to hear, but it is something every good link building company will take into account when discussing link building tactics. Additionally, this change can be as simple as jumping one place up the rankings (hopefully!). While this is a positive change, it can be frustrating if you are hoping your link building campaign will move you quickly from page five to page one.

Remember: The number of weeks before seeing a difference in your website’s ranking quoted above are not an exact science. They are estimates.

It has been discovered, however, that the lower your rank currently is for a website, the bigger the effect the link building campaign will have. Pages which are now on page one, even if they are further down the page, the longer it will take for them to move up.

To see a change, your link building strategy needs to be consistent and accurate. Link building is not a practice which you can try out then put down to forget about for months. You need to be continuously monitoring progress to be able to react promptly should anything change, such as Google’s algorithm (which is reported to implement minor changes over 500 times a year), or changes to the authority or quality of a site.

What is definite, however, is that this is a branch of marketing which you cannot begin one week and ignore after that. Your backlink profile may be updating and changing without you realising, especially if your links are appearing on sites which are being penalised.

Are Link Building Services Worth the Investment?

Yes!

Without a link building expert by your side to guide you through the waters of strategy building, finding relevant links, creating winning content, and reaching out to niche bloggers and high quality, high authority websites, you risk damaging your site’s ranking.

Link building is a mixture of art and science; it’s not something just anyone can pick up and try. With so much depending on specific factors, and so much industry knowledge being needed, attempting to do all this yourself can have a detrimental effect. How will you discover the best keywords to use if you do not know how to find them, for example? Those well-versed in internet marketing know the places to look to ensure the right keywords are selected each time.

What’s more, by choosing link building packages, you can budget accordingly to ensure your site moves up the SERPs successfully.

Final Thoughts

Committing to a dedicated link building campaign may seem like an investment, but as discussed above, to be successful, it is a delicate balance of ensuring every ranking factor is achieved. Every ranking factor needs to be completed in the best possible way, however, which is where expert link builders come into play.

We at Click Intelligence pride ourselves on our expert link building services. We commit to creating only the highest quality, white hat links to boost your website traffic, your page relevance and authority, and ultimately, secure more sales and clients. We do not outsource your link building campaign; our in-house SEO team has the skills and talent needed to ensure every one of our clients increases their online presence and search engine rankings.