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Ever since the dawn of the internet, link building has been one of the most influential ways to increase your website traffic as it increases the amount of trust Google has for you website. However, it wasn’t long before websites began to take advantage of this fact, by building swathes of unnatural, spammy backlinks en mass.
To combat this, Google has become more and more strict over the years on the types of link building that it permits. In 2022 (and beyond), link building has become a lot more difficult to do right.
So, if it’s become so hard in recent years to build links then why should you still do it for your business? In this article we’re going to explore 5 benefits of link to illustrate why it should still be an integral part of your digital marketing strategy.
Any links that are built on other sites will often have the effect of driving clicks through to your website. This can be extremely effective if the link has a strong call to action with a reason to visit your page. Imagine what a link on a website like the BBC could do for your business… particularly if they encouraged their reader to check out your products or services through the link. With the amount of visitors that a site such as this has, the total referral traffic that they could drive through to your business is staggering.
Whilst the majority of businesses won’t be featured on the BBC website, you can still generate a reliable source of referral traffic on highly relevant websites, who share the same target audience as you.
For every new link that your website earns, Google sees this as an additional ‘vote’ of confidence in your business. This means that the more links you have pointing to your website, the more authoritative your domain becomes in the eyes of Google.
There are exceptions to this rule, as not all links are equal in terms of their relevance and trustworthiness. However, there is a very strong correlation between the amount of high quality links that a website has and the amount of monthly organic traffic it receives.
As your business is featured on niche-relevant websites in your industry, your brand recognition will improve, as people begin to see your brand consistently featured in these publications.
This increase in brand awareness and brand recognition will ultimately lead to an increase in branded search terms for your products and services. Whilst not a confirmed ranking factor, it’s pretty widely accepted in the SEO community that a website with strong brand recognition tends to rank better than a website with little-to-no branded search volume.
Link building is an incredibly powerful way to increase your rankings in the search engine results page. This is true not only for the individual pages that are linked to, but also the domain in its entirety.
Therefore, if an individual page on your site is almost ranking on page one, you can often build a few links to this page and it’ll jump up onto the first page within a few weeks/months. This isn’t always the case, as there are so many variables involved but it’s hard to ignore the compelling evidence that an increase in links leads to an increase in rankings and traffic.
Particularly for eCommerce websites, there is only so much on-page optimisation you can do for a product or category page before you invariably need to build some links before it can compete with the other pages in the SERP.
By building links to your product and category pages, you’re also adding additional context to your page, without actually needing to write more content on the actual page itself.
For example, if you have a category page selling ‘Blue hats’ and you receive a link from a page entitled ‘Where to buy the best cheap blue hats online’ then your category page is now more closely associated with long-tail keywords such as “cheap blue hats” , “best blue hats” and “buy blue hats online”.
Therefore, links aren’t just a way of increasing the authority of a page on your site, but they also provide additional keywords for Google to associate your page with. This helps your product and category pages to rank for more long-tail keywords, which ultimately leads to a boost in organic visibility and ultimately, organic sales.
