July 13 2021
Why Are Backlinks Important?
You see and use backlinks often when exploring the Internet. When another website links directly to your website or a piece of content on your website, that is called a backlink. Backlinks are seen as a signal to others that your content is important and relevant. Cultivating good backlinks should be a part of any solid SEO strategy.
Understanding Backlinks
Gaining a link from one website to yours is only half of the battle. The quality of the backlink is critical, in part because it can reflect the quality of your own website. Google uses backlink quality as a gauge for how relevant your website is to the search results it delivers. They have historically penalized sites that cultivated large amounts of low-quality backlinks through specific algorithm updates that targeted those out-of-date strategies.
Backlinks also get your brand out into the world wide web more and can bring in referral traffic. By having your website linked to a reputable source, your customers are inferring that reputation to you and are more likely to trust your brand.
SEO CASE EXAMPLE – Combined with the launch of a new site, the TopSpot Team focused their strategy on raising the backlink profile for a B2B client. These efforts began in September of 2020. By December, the work had paid off with a 40% year-over-year increase in organic traffic and their highest month of organic traffic for all of 2020.
Quality Content Leads to Quality Backlinks
The more quality backlinks you have, the more likely search engines will see your pages as relevant. The key here is to focus on quality backlinks, not quantity. Google uses backlinks as a signal that your site is providing good, relevant content and is a trustworthy source for users.
In order to acquire high-quality backlinks, you need to have content that appeals to your audience. For B2B companies, this can include many types of educational or technical content that is relevant to your industry. Content that explains what, how, or why are great references for other sites to link to. Examples include:
- Your Processes. Describe or show how your products are made and what makes you stand out from your competitors.
- Question & Answer. Find the questions your customers are asking and answer them in your content. You can find these in the search landscape, in your paid search queries, lead data, as well as your internal search queries.
- Photos, Videos & Infographics. In an increasingly visual world, having excellent photos and videos of your products being made or being used can be very helpful to your customers. How-to videos, for instance, are easily shareable are a great example of the kind of quality content other sites want.
For more suggestions on creating great content read our How to Create a Content Strategy blog.
Tools to Help Acquire Backlinks
Content doesn’t just automatically acquire backlinks. First, you need to identify the best content with which to seek out backlinks. You can identify these opportunities by seeing what content is receiving the most traffic in Google Analytics or Google Search Console.
At TopSpot, our Team has access to a suite of tools that can be very helpful for identifying new backlink opportunities, including BrightEdge and Moz. Additional tools can lead to more in-depth analysis and more backlink opportunities for our Clients.
BrightEdge. BrightEdge is an SEO and content performance marketing platform that TopSpot uses to help identify on and off-page SEO opportunities. This includes backlinks research for your site and your competition.
Moz. Moz is another helpful tool that our Team utilizes on a regular basis. While TopSpot utilizes MozPro, their Link Explorer Tool is one of their free tools that everyone can utilize.
Your Team. Over the years, the TopSpot SEO Team has cultivated a list of over 100 high-quality B2B-specific websites and directories for our Clients.
What This Means for You
Though often a slow process, it’s worth the time and effort to acquire quality backlinks to your site. The more your site is seen as a relevant source, the more it can help build credibility with the search engines, which can then improve rankings and increase traffic, which can ultimately lead to more leads for your business.