search engine optimization
Link Building Be The Authority
When other websites, especially other websites in your industry, start citing your content with links to your web pages (backlinks), that’s when you become an authority in the eyes of search engines.
Authoritativeness is 1 of the 3 primary determiners of where your site gets ranked when a user enters a search phrase that applies to what you do. If you’re the authority, you get the top slot.
The number and quality of backlinks to your site, therefore, directly influences how many people see your website on search, which directly corresponds to how many customers walk through the door. Backlinks = customers.
So how do we get all those juicy backlinks?
Building great content is still the best way to generate backlinks. It’s the right way.
That said, it still takes time to naturally build up all those links—and all the while you’re still competing with other companies that may be using expedited methods for acquiring backlinks. These methods offer backlinks as a paid service for either short or long-term gains and can be effective. Be careful, however, as this usually violates search engine terms of service and could have the opposite effect if detected.
Later on, once you have a solid library of content on the site and have built up some domain authority, it might be time to start looking into a reciprocal link exchange program. This is where you proposition other webmasters to link to your site in exchange for linking to theirs.
quality content is the currency of the internet
Link building strategies will not work if you don’t have information of value.
Over time, value trumps everything. There’s literally no price tag you can assign to quality information which, by definition, makes it invaluable. So, our preliminary advice to clients is to spend some upfront time on your content so you never fall into the trap of trying to build up traffic to subpar information.
Don’t build the proverbial road to nowhere.
Does my topic have Low Competition and High Search Volume?
Once you think you’ve got your valuable information in hand, these are the two things you should consider.
First, is the topic low competition? Another way of looking at competition is to recategorize your information as either general or specific. The more widespread the information is, the more competition you’re likely to run into by adding equally general information into the mix.
If you run a plumbing company, don’t expect to compete for “extremely fast service”. Not only is it a general statement, it’s a claim that doesn’t solely belong to the plumbing industry.
It’s not reasonable to expect to rank for such a broad statement. Adding the qualifier “plumbing” to the claim helps but you’re only going to get so much mileage out of it because just about every plumbing company under the sun has a similar claim on their website.
We need to get more specific. What about “How to replace a sink trap”? That is specific to plumbing but not so broad that every plumbing company will have it on their website. That’s a pretty good indication that it’s low competition relative to the more broad categories you’d expect to see.
The second thing you have to ask yourself is do people want to know more about this topic? In the case of a sink trap, everyone has one and everyone’s gets clogged from time to time. So the odds are pretty good that this is both low competition and has a high search volume.
Keep in mind, this is a delicate dance.
The higher the search volume for something, the more likely there’s going to be competition. If you’re competing for something incredibly common, like “Financial Planning”, you’re going to be outcompeted by the giants in your industry nine times out of ten. The more niche a topic, however, the less likely you’ll have as high a search volume.
The trick is to find that sweet spot where you’re specific enough you don’t compete with everyone and their uncle but have information pertaining to something that people genuinely want to know more about.
SEO Long Game
If your content isn’t solid, backlinks won’t matter in the long run. To recap, everything you do concerning link building should center on content that is both:
(a) Low Competition and (b) High Search Volume. Sound familiar?
The best way of accomplishing this is to simply produce valuable information about a specific subject. It should not read like every other website on the subject either. This is your chance to write in your own voice.
If you feel like you’ve accomplished all of the above and are ready for high quality backlink building, please proceed.
We can help you find those niche topics that people are interested in and your competitors are missing. With that information, we’ll create valuable content for your website and get that content onto the front pages of high domain authority media outlets.
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