How many times have you visited or found yourself browsing a specific website, then spotted a link to another website or another webpage, clicked, and continued your journey there? Sometimes this link will take you to a different page on the same website, sometimes it will provide extra value by taking you offsite to another source of information, and sometimes it will change the course of your journey completely.

This is an example of link building, and when done right can benefit your SEO hugely.

The Benefits of link building for SEO

Before we get into how to build links for SEO, it first pays to understand the benefits and why links are so important. Links are one of the main criteria used by Google in ascertaining the quality of a webpage and its information. As such, every link you use should direct the user towards a reputable and high quality source which is entirely relevant to your own website and industry.

Some of the best ways of doing this include linking guest blogs written by you for other sites, and blogs written by other sites and individuals for you, bolstering each other’s position and credibility in the eyes of Google; and finding sources that supplement the information provided on your website. Crucially, every link you include in your website must directly take the user to a source of great value, with no dead pages and no redirections. This is one of the main reasons why digital marketers always recommend regular assessments of your site SEO, as this is the best way to establish any broken links that you may otherwise have missed.

If this all sounds a bit daunting, don’t worry. It’s time to introduce some of the best ways of building links for SEO.

How to build links for SEO

The best way of building links is through professional relationships and partnerships. This could mean that you partner with other relevant sources and create editorial content for each other, or it could be more of a PR exercise where you create content which recommends and guides your users to check out their content or products too.

TOP TIP: If you decide to do this, always ensure that a link clicked on your website opens a new window or a new tab, rather than simply taking the user away from your website completely. The former aids their journey without ending their experience on your website, while the latter is a sure fire way of ending the transaction instantly.

Let’s look at an example of valuable link building in action.

Imagine that you are a beauty brand looking to launch and sell a new product. As well as creating your own content and sharing it on you platforms, a partnership with a renowned beauty blogger who then writes a blog for your website means that both your followers and their network will likely check out your blog – helping to establish your brand by linking it to someone who people trust.

This is the value of link building: it widens the reach of your website and your brand, and when done right can help to establish you as a credible go-to in the industry

 Our tips for building links for SEO

  1. Establish long term partnerships with people in your industry. This means competitors, authority figures, customer facing and back end professionals. You never know when or where you might get some valuable support from – and a variety of different industry touchpoints can help to build some fruitful and effective links on your website.
  2. Find out where your competitors are getting featured as guest bloggers and industry experts and get yourself on there too. There are tons of tools out there which can help you to discover where your competitors are getting their backlinks from, making it easy to follow their lead and bolster your own SEO.
  3. Testimonials! These are so important, because if you review a big brand or a supplier you use and they decide to mention or share your review, you are getting free marketing and backlinks to your online presence without even trying.
  4. If it fits with your brand, build a resources page and add all your favourite external sites and brands to it. This is a great way of implementing external links to your site without even really having to try and will likely lead to positive exchanges with other professionals who want to be featured on your page too. This also bolsters the user experience on your site as you make the customer journey super easy for them and provide even more value.
  5. Build links into your content. This may seem like a simple one, but not every link has to have a dedicated CTA and bright coloured button. Some of the best links are those you embed into a piece of content, telling the user exactly which piece of information or statement the link is going to support.

The Takeaway

Link building is a way of showing your website to be full of value, authority, and credibility – and it all starts with the importance of working partnerships and industry relationships. By building external links into your own site, and getting your site mentioned and integrated into other reputable external sources, you continue to show Google that what you are sharing, selling, and/or offering is high in value and relevant to the target audience.

As part of an SEO strategy, link building is up there as one of the most important areas of focus.

SEO, known in the industry as Search Engine Optimisation, is one of those buzzwords thrown around by digital marketing experts as a service that they offer and can use to help your business drive more customers and make more money.

But what does it actually mean, and does SEO really work?

What is SEO?

SEO refers to the use of organic search results to drive a high number of the right customers through to your website. In short, it relies on the use of different content streams and sources to show Google and other search engines what you do and how you can help the end customer – so that they can, in turn, highlight your website on the results page of a relevant customer search.

Much of what we do for SEO is built around keywords and search terms, and this stems from research into the industry you operate in, and the kind of words being used by your competitors to drive traffic.

An effective SEO strategy looks at two different types of keyword for effectiveness:

How does SEO drive customers and sales?

The biggest focus of an SEO strategy is on driving high quality customers to your website, who are actually interested in your brand and your products, without you having to pay a penny to attract them. Paid ads are a whole other ballgame in the digital marketing sphere and have nothing to do with your SEO plans – so park those where they are and let’s talk more about keywords and optimising your search terms.

Search engines send crawlers out into the big wide world of the internet, every time a user makes a search. The results that they feed back to the user are based on the match those crawlers find between the search terms and high quality websites available – matching those crucial keywords, and any other credibility factors it can find quickly and easily.

It’s not all keywords when it comes to these search engines, with crawlers also looking at high quality links (both internal and external on your website), the quality of the user experience on your site, the content and context of the copy on your site, and even the positioning and formatting on the images and videos you include. But SEO is the main driving force in framing the way that Google sees your site, and the way that users find and interact with it – by optimising and fine tuning every element of the site from load times to content and the customer journey as a whole.

Does SEO really work?

This is the big question, and for the most part the answer is yes – provided you have a strategy in place and don’t just throw keywords around for fun. The first thing to realise is that Google algorithms change regularly and so your approach to SEO needs to be fluid, flexible, and adaptable at a moments notice. Having said that, having a high quality user experience which delivers on what you promise and is designed to provide solutions to users never goes out of style, and so provided that your website is authentic and safe to use, SEO is simply there to help you guide the right audience towards it.

One of the major misconceptions we see is the idea that SEO is a quick fix that you can implement overnight and instantly see results. This is not true. SEO is a long game solution to ensuring that your organic traffic is higher in both quantity and quality – which in turn leads to more website visitors, more customers, more sales, and more profit. And that’s just the top level wins. Some of the other benefits that businesses will recognise as they implement an effective SEO strategy include:

What do all these benefits prove? That once you start to build an SEO strategy in your digital marketing, your SEO possibilities and options will only serve to grow and develop even further. What better proof could you ask for to show that SEO really does work?!

The Takeaway

Provided you spend the time researching your place in the market and finding the right keywords for your SEO strategy, the question of whether SEO really works is all down to implementation and getting the buy in of your entire digital team. One of the easiest ways of ascertaining the best keywords is to use analytics and immerse yourself in research around your main competitors – what words are they bidding on, and how do they implement keywords across their website. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel – just finetune your own plan based on examples that are already working.

As time goes on, you will find that more doors are opened to your business and search engines becoming increasingly friendly towards you – all because of a little SEO focus that you can start right now.  

If you hear the term SEO being banded around but don’t understand what it means in practice, this article is for you. From exploring the value of SEO through to identifying 8 ways of improving your own website to help it achieve that page one search ranking, following the steps laid out in this article will help to improve your website’s visibility and give it the best possible chance of being found by the right, active audience.

What is Google SEO and why is it important?

Google is always adding and changing its algorithm for being well ranked, but SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is always up there as one of the most important things to focus on. What SEO does is help ensure that your entire website is as well written and laid out as possible for Google to assess it and rank it as high in value and strong in user experience. This in turn means that when users search for the keywords your website is built around, your site will be ranked highly by Google and will show up early in the search results – ideally on page one.

This is when organic traffic is at its highest and click through rates are at their most competitive – after all, does anyone really search for a website beyond the first page of search results? We all know that page one is where the real value and quality lies.

Let’s take a closer look at how to get there.

The 8 steps to Page One

The following steps are all things you can do to give your website the credibility and assurance of quality that Google looks for in ranking different sites. Remember that Google has always been invested in the user experience, and with the release of the new Core Web Vitals algorithm has become even more focussed on how a website creates a seamless and productive experience. As such, you will find that some steps are content based while others are all about the customer journey.

  1. Identify your top ranking pages

We call these your ‘threshold pages’ – pages that are on the cusp of ranking at Page One status for certain search results but haven’t quite made it. These are the pages to focus on first, because they are already proven to be delivering high quality, credible content… we just need to give them that extra push to Page One.

This isn’t about just knowing which brands and businesses are your competitors – this means identifying your threshold pages and then identifying those same pages on other sites and assessing why there are ranking more highly than yours.

We often hear business coaches saying that you don’t need to build a new strategy or work frame from scratch – you can simply take the structure of what someone has already built and adjust it for your own business. And that’s exactly what you need to do here.

In a breakdown of things to do to improve your website, this is one of the easiest to implement and can lead to a significant improvement in the way your site is viewed and assessed by Google. Internal linking refers to the way that different webpages on your own site allude to other pages and posts on your site – creating a chain or network of different experiences that customers can follow to enhance their understanding of certain topics.

A great way of improving this includes linking within blogs and guiding the reader towards certain products, services, or even other blogs that you mention within the content.

This one needs no explanation. Mobile optimisation is one of the most important things you can do for the modern user – and is a huge factor in Google’s ranking algorithm.

This is another point which takes us back to that “don’t reinvent the wheel” mindset. If you have pages that have performed highly in the past, take a look at how and why, and see what you can do to build them back up again into a high performing position.

Some things you can do include building new internal links into content, updating the copy and imagery, and adding new features or keywords. 

One of the best ways of becoming a reputable source in your industry is building a network of external links between your site and other well regarded sites in the same industry. Once one or two other sites link and mention your website within their own blogs, you will find your SEO ranking jumps right up – as Google will see that other reputable sources trust you and see you as a valuable resource.

This is something you will have to actively pursue for optimum results, but it’s worth it!

Reassess your customer journey and look at how far away the quality content is from the homepage. Remember that the longer the journey, the more customers you will lose along the way – and it’s important to keep people engaged as they go. Identify your most valuable and popular pages and turn them into the main pages on your website – rather than second or third tier pages that have to be searched for and found.

Make the process as easy as possible and watch as the reader rates stack up.

This is a feature of Google Search which pops one of the top search results into a featured box – a bit like being given a gold star for content and jumping straight to the top of the class. There is no defined way of getting there and there are no guarantees you will make it, but we recommend analysing the structure of past snippets and replicating their format and the way they use keywords as a good starting point.

For more tips on giving your website the boost it deserves to reach Page One, get in touch!

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