Benefits of SEO Link Building
The benefits of link building have been clear across the SEO community for a long time now – Having high quality links means better rankings and more traffic. Therefore, link building is an essential part of any search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
It is the process of proactively finding ways to increase the number of backlinks to your website from third parties.
Links help search engines discover new web pages and determine which ones should rank higher in SERPs. The more you have, the higher you rank.
But the benefits of building links don’t just end there. They also help improve your website and your broader business and brand.
Let us learn the benefits of building backlinks in more detail.
1. Better Rankings
Search engines consider the number of links your site has when ranking it on SERPs.
This is the main benefit most website owners have in mind when they start a link building campaign. Having more links can help you rank for more competitive terms.
Expert research backs this up:
- Backlinko found that the number one pages in Google’s results have nearly four times more backlinks than those in positions two to ten.
- Ahrefs says that backlinks are “arguably the most important ranking factor”. Its study of more than a billion web pages found a clear correlation between the number of backlinks a page has and the amount of organic traffic it receives.
- Authority Hacker says backlinks are “the most strongly correlated factor for SEO success”.
2. More Traffic
Appearing at the top of the SERPs will increase your website’s traffic.
According to research from FirstPage, the average number one spot on Google gets 39.6% of clicks. That’s more than double second place, which gets 18.4%. Position ten gets just 2.1%.
Research from Ahrefs shows a strong correlation between the number of links that a website has and its traffic. It also found that just over 90% of all web pages get zero traffic from Google. Most of these zero-traffic pages had fewer than four backlinks each.
The impact of backlinks on traffic can be seen in our work with SnackNation. We’ve built over 400 amazing links for them. Within two years, the company’s monthly traffic grew from over 700,00 visitors per month, with a whopping traffic value (monthly) of over $1,000,000.
3. Improve Domain Authority
Backlinks act as third-party indicators of your domain’s credibility. Domain authority is the term used to describe that credibility.
It considers the number of links your site gets and the level of domain authority those referring sites have.
Your domain authority score will usually be higher with just one backlink from a high authority site than it would be with lots of links from low authority sites.
The level of credibility a domain has is given different names by different SEO tools:
- Domain Rating (DR) on Ahrefs
- Authority Score on SEM Rush
- Domain Authority (DA) on Moz
These tools assess the quality of a domain’s backlinks and give it a score out of 100.
4. Build Relationships in your Niche
Good link building campaigns involve reaching out to experts or other creators of quality content in your niche. This is more of a by-product of link building than a benefit, but it’s still worth a mention.
This helps you grow your personal network of contacts. It also helps to raise the profile of your website amongst others in your niche and makes it more likely that they will reach out to you too.
Expert roundups and guest posts are a great way to increase your exposure and authority. Here’s one we recently created where we asked link building experts to share their best strategies.
5. Boosts Sales and Revenue
The more links you have, the more traffic your website gets. And the more traffic your website gets, the more people will see your products and services.
This means you will make more sales, and more sales mean greater revenue.
Links from publications and reviewers are especially useful here. That’s because they will:
- Be highly relevant to your niche
- Attract people looking to buy your products
Start Link Building to Rank Higher in Search Engines
Google’s primary purpose is to help searchers find the best information to answer their queries.
That’s why simply buying links or using black hat techniques won’t work well—they usually don’t have the user in mind.
Instead, you should focus on producing quality content and reaching out to other experts in your niche to ensure that you enjoy all the benefits we’ve covered.
How do Toxic Backlinks Hurt SEO
Backlinks are vital to SEO. At the point where another site links to your site, a backlink is created. For instance, if a brand discovers one of your blog entries that is useful for their clients, they may link to it. That backlink is a “level of trust” in your content. They’re saying that they think your post is acceptable and valuable and they need their site visitors to understand it.
A decent backlink implies more visitors get some answers concerning your website. What’s more, when they discover you, they’ll probably follow you via social media, making you more noticeable in their eyes. Backlinks are critical to SEO in light of the fact that search engines see those votes of trust as proof that your content is significant. If there are many websites linking back to your website, search engines are more likely to display your content in search results, thereby improving your website ranking.
Procuring backlinks is a fundamental piece of off-page SEO and acquiring more backlinks is called third-party referencing or link building. Yet, as countless parts of SEO improvement, and external link establishment isn’t simple. Most backlinks are acceptable, some are extraordinary, and others are harmful. An excessive number of toxic backlinks can hurt your ranking. Discovering them and disposing of them is fundamental, particularly in case you’re running an advertisement/marketing campaign.
Google is improving at recognizing and eliminating bad links, however, there are still some simple approaches to develop further your SEO that don’t include much link generation. In this blog, we take a glimpse at what harmful backlinks are, the means by which they hurt your SEO, and how you can dispose of them to secure your SERP rankings.
Are Toxic Backlinks Critical to SEO?
While each backlink might be a vote of trust in your site, links from dependable sites with significant or high ranking are prime. They tell search engines that a credible authority vouches for your content. Indeed, even a no-follow link from a high-ranking site can give your position a lift. On the opposite side, links from sites with low authority, or ‘malicious’ origin will not help your position. Toxic backlinks may hurt your website rank and prompt penalties from search engines.
What Makes a Backlink Toxic?
There are many factors that increase the toxicity of a backlink, from a search engines point of view including:
- Low Domain Authority Score: This depends on the number of backlinks from the trusted referring domains giving the backlink. A low position implies the site’s domain score might be falsely expanded or exploited.
- Reflected/Mirrored Pages: In the event that comparative pages on various sites are connecting to you from a similar anchor text, search engines might see this is an external link-building conspiracy.
- Page Design: On the off chance that the proportion of visible content to HTML is low, the connecting page might be viewed as low quality.
Effect of Bad Links
A toxic backlink hurts a website’s search engine ranking because it comes from an unreliable external source. The Google Penguin algorithm update in 2012 introduced the concept of an unfavourable backlink profile. Google has a strict procedure for evaluating a backlink profile imposing severe penalties on websites with a poor quality backlink profile. In addition to the Penguin algorithm, Google has added more Human Resources to their spam group which can manually punish locales that have toxic backlinks. As per a Search Engine Watch article, Google initiates more than 400,000 manual activities a month.
Final Thoughts
Ensuring backlinks to your webpage is excellent and following Google’s guidelines while creating such backlinks is essential for SEO. Have you inspected your backlinks as of now? If you haven’t yet, you must. Have you ever gotten a link-related notification of manual activity on your site in Google Search Console? Disposing of those toxic backlinks is especially significant to maintaining your website ranking. Web index penalties can cause your website’s position or rank to dip.
Why Small Business Should Focus on SEO
When it comes to website design, digital marketing, and SEO, smaller businesses with tighter budgets have a tough time deciding whether they should hire professionals for SEO. Many believe that the costs may be too heavy on their pocket and decide against it. But this decision often costs businesses more money than it saves them.
While it’s a fact that well-established, big businesses have far more capital to channel towards digital marketing and SEO outsourcing, smaller organizations can benefit from hiring professionals for these jobs as well.
Not only does the right kind of SEO give them the visibility they need in a busy marketplace, but it also saves them money and time and helps them stay profitable. Every business big and small can benefit from having a substantial online presence that helps to attract specific demographics. This is even more crucial for companies that have a modest marketing budget, yet want some way to attract a steady flow of website traffic.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a way of improving organic traffic to your website, which can also help you rank up on search engines when potential customers are searching for things related to your business. If you have high-quality SEO, your website will be accessed more often, and your page can show up right after the paid ads that show up on a Google search, for example.
With SEO, search engines, like Google and Bing, will recognize your business as a solution to a user’s problem. For that to happen, you need to always keep your SEO up-to-date and create new content with keywords and backlinks that aid the improvement of organic traffic.
Why Focus on SEO?
1. Helps Build Trust in Your Brand
High-quality, well-planned SEO helps to increase your brand presence. Whenever people search online for the services or products you offer, and your site shows up in the search results, it helps you build authority in the space. It helps in building trust among visitors to your website. This is particularly true if the content is engaging, answers their questions, and provides you value for money. If you satisfy these needs, they will be more apt to do business with you.
2. Cost-Effective
Although hiring SEO professionals will cost you money, it’s a business essential and well worth the expense. High-quality SEO can help build good communication between the company and its customers. When your business can attract more customers because they can find you easily, it increases your sales and profitability. No matter which way you look at it, hiring a reputable and proven SEO company provides excellent ROI. However, you need to find the right people that would be able to customize solutions to meet your business needs.
3. Focused Approach
A company that offers professional SEO services will always work with you to get a good understanding of your goals. Since these needs can change at different times of the year, they will set up a strategy that works well for you. Also, they will review analytics and results to determine what’s working, what needs to be tweaked, and what needs added focus. These are some of the basic services a professional SEO company should be able to offer you.
4. Increase Organic Traffic
Regardless of where you are in your digital marketing efforts when you contact SEO professionals, they would be able to help you take it to the next level. When you see that your website is consistently ranking high on the SERPs for your chosen keywords, you will know it’s well worth the effort. You will also get a much better traffic flow. When SEO is handled correctly, it can give you an excellent ranking on search engines.
5. Effort and Skills Are Required for SEO Work
It takes a significant amount of effort and expertise to tackle any SEO campaign, and a professional SEO company can offer you these things. They have the know-how, skill, and experience, as well as the time to handle this job in a dedicated manner. They will manage this in a controlled way, so you get the best results. If you try to handle these aspects yourself, you will find many intricacies that involve too much work and can be challenging to manage. You may not have the skills to tackle every aspect of this job expertly. While you may get a certain amount of traffic, your website will not perform as well as it could if you have professionals for SEO.
6. Save Yourself Time
Time is money, and there is no refuting this fact. As a small business with an online presence, you need to invest time regularly to sell your products and services. So, hiring a team of SEO professionals will save you significant time that you can use for other crucial tasks.
7. Updated SEO Knowledge
Some small businesses indeed try to handle SEO themselves. But it can be a significant mistake. SEO isn’t a set-and-forget effort, and Google’s algorithms continually change. It also means you need to tweak your SEO campaign accordingly, too. That’s the only way you would be able to keep your website up-to-date.
While SEO strategies are never stagnant, certain basic aspects remain unchanged regardless of the type of website or business you have. These things can be extremely confusing to a layperson. The experimentation and trial and error that you go through when handling SEO yourself can be time-consuming and costly.
And when things don’t work the way you expect them to, it can be frustrating for you as well. But when you work with proven SEO professionals, they know the ins and outs of search engine optimization. They have complete knowledge about the intricacies involved and stay abreast of changes in this space. They would be able to make the necessary alterations to the strategy so that your company and website continue to stay in the limelight. Not only are they aware of the changes that take regularly, but they have some understanding of what to expect in the future as well.
Also, a credible SEO company will be focused in its approach and will grow its services to match your needs. This scalability and adaptability is crucial if you want to stay relevant and at the fore of your industry. For information on the SEO services that we at digiFOX Technologies provide, feel free to call us today.
How Long does it Take for SEO to Start Working
Some experts will say it takes somewhere between four and six months, while others say it may take up to a year. These are all ballpark figures, which means there’s no definitive answer to this question. Some companies will start seeing results in 3-4 months, while others may have to wait for more than a year.
That doesn’t mean one campaign is inferior to another; it just means the circumstances are different. You can make sure all pieces in the puzzle are right and wait for the algorithm to change the ranking accordingly. However, external factors, like competition will have an impact on the results. A successful SEO campaign requires consistent effort and regular optimization to keep up with the current trends.
Because of this constant optimization, SEO campaigns gain traction and evolve. It delivers better results with time, which means SEO will deliver excellent results by six months, but it will deliver better reports after a year or two of running constantly. A well-planned campaign continues to expand organically and get you good leads.
Think of SEO as an investment that builds up over time. If you’re patient and wait for the results, it will deliver eventually and take your brand to new heights.
Factors that Influence the Speed of SEO
Several factors influence SEO speed, but the five most important are competition, content, location, keywords, and links. All these factors dictate the pace of your results in different ways. Here’s a look at how these factors influence SEO:
1. Competition
SEO is a popular marketing strategy, and almost everyone is working on it. Your competitors are vying for the same rankings and leads that you are, which can hamper an SEO campaign’s success. They will target the same keywords as you and implement similar strategies. It can take more time for your campaign to gain traction when it is facing such a competition.
Smaller companies in less-competitive industries see results quickly. They can target popular keywords without facing much competition. Businesses in competitive industries need to work harder and dig deeper to get significant results. For example, a large-scale national clothing retailer will face more competition than a small town’s niche craft beer company.
2. Content
Content helps you maintain a dynamic presence online and remain at the forefront of the search engine results pages. The quality and frequency of your content publication will have a significant impact on SEO. For example, if you publish around 2,000 to 2,500 words every week on a consistent schedule, you will see an improvement in rankings quickly. Dynamic websites with a steady flow of traffic climb the rankings faster than other platforms with less activity.
The quality of your content also matters. If you publish several small 500-word articles every day on general topics, the campaign will take more time to gain speed. However, if you post a well-written, informative article of around 2,000 words with new research or current data every week, the strategy will be more successful. Consider the value of the content and how it can help your target audience. Valuable and informative articles will gain more traction quickly.
3. Location
The location of your business also influences the speed of an SEO campaign’s success. Local SEO can show results in around three months when implemented well. National SEO can take over a year to show good results. The location and scale of your campaign influence its speed. Small town businesses in suburbs or low-competition neighborhoods will get more traction.
For example, a digital marketer based in a big city like London or New York will have to work hard to promote their services and gain traction online. However, a small town’s candle-maker will gain attention quickly and see massive improvements in their organic traffic numbers after just a few SEO tweaks to their online presence.
4. Keywords
Keywords are the foundation of SEO campaigns. It is crucial to pick the right ones to target. Experts recommend a combination of popular and less popular keywords. Popular keywords have more competition, so it is more difficult to rank high on their SERPs. You will need to work hard and establish a robust online presence with these keywords. Ranking on popular phrases is still essential, but the campaign will take several months to show any positive results.
Less-popular keywords and long-tail phrases won’t bring as much traffic to your website as trending search terms, but they will initially provide good visibility. You will show up on the first page more often, which will help you establish a stronger brand presence.
5. Backlinks
Inbound links are the most critical ranking factors, but getting good quality ones is an exercise in patience. Marketers need to create worthy content, reach out to popular publications with page and domain authority, and then wait until these publications agree to add links to their content.
This takes a lot of time, and it will be months before your website has a decent link profile. You won’t see converting traffic on search engines unless you have a reasonably influential link profile.
SEO takes time, and the results can vary from one campaign to another. It is essential to keep working on it until you gain consistent results. If you need help from one of our SEO experts, please contact us today.
SEO for Business Growth: 8 Ways SEO Leads to Growth
You may have heard that you need search engine optimization (SEO) to market your business effectively in today’s day and age.
But understanding how exactly SEO contributes to business growth can be tricky. This guide will explain how SEO works for business and how you can use it to help your company grow.
By the end of this article, you’ll understand:
- What SEO is
- The importance of SEO in business
- How to get started with SEO for business growth
Want to speak with an SEO expert about how SEO can help you grow your business?
What is SEO?
SEO, which stands for program optimization, may be a digital marketing strategy that helps your site rank at the highest of organic search results for relevant keywords. A well-designed SEO strategy increases your online visibility and brings qualified results in your website.
SEO focuses only on organic search results — unpaid listings on program leads to pages (SERPs). It doesn’t affect ads that appear on SERPs.
There are several sorts of SEO. Every SEO strategy should include the following:
- On-page SEO: On-page SEO deals with factors on your pages that you can control, such as keywords, headings, SEO content, and page design.
- Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO relates to factors, not on your website itself that influence your rankings, such as links to your website from other sites. You can’t directly control, but can sometimes influence these factors.
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO focuses on backend website and server optimizations that help search engines and visitors understand and use your site. Technical SEO factors include sitemaps, page speed, and text files.
There are also several types of SEO that only certain kinds of businesses use. Examples include:
- Local SEO: Local SEO focuses on reaching users within a particular geographical area , usual customers within an area business’s topographic point . this sort of SEO focuses on location-specific keywords, like those containing the phrase “near me” or the name of a city, state, or region.
- Enterprise SEO: Enterprise SEO is SEO for especially large businesses or websites. It focuses on ranking for broad, frequently searched, highly competitive keywords.
How can SEO grow your business?
So, how does all of that actually translate into business growth? Here are eight ways SEO can help you meet your goals. Going through the below points will help you understand the importance of SEO in business and how to use SEO for business growth.
1. SEO Increases your Online Visibility
SEO gets your website and business ahead of more people online. The potential for visibility with SEO is gigantic .
Google fields over 3.5 billion searches a day , which translates to quite 40,000 per second. Organic search drives over half all website traffic.
People address search engines for help answering all kinds of questions and solving all types of problems. When your company’s answer or solution shows up near the highest of search results, you gain tons of visibility.
2. SEO Helps you Reach the Right Audience
SEO doesn’t assist you to show up for just any search queries. With a well-designed SEO strategy, you’ll show up for the keywords your potential customers are searching for.
You accomplish this by conducting research to work out which searches people that could also be curious about your products or services are performing.
For example, if you sell paint for outdoor furniture, you’ll target keywords like “how to colour outdoor furniture” or “buy outdoor furniture paint.”
3. SEO Brings Qualified Leads to your Website
With SEO, you’re reaching people that have already expressed interest in something associated with your business, products, or services. people that click through to your website via organic search are likely to be well-qualified leads, meaning they’re likely to become customers.
Leads earned through SEO have an in-depth rate — the share of leads that become customers — of 14.6%, compared to only 1.7% for traditional marketing.
4. SEO can Help you Convert Leads
SEO’s main focus isn’t converting leads, but many of the items that are good for SEO also are good for increasing conversions.
Google wants to rank high-quality content that users like, so making changes that improve the user experience can boost your rankings. Many of those changes also can increase conversions.
For example, improving your website’s design and usefulness can improve your rankings and encourage visitors to remain on your site longer. These changes can also cause them to look at your website as more trustworthy, helping them feel comfortable enough to form a sale.
5. SEO Improves Brand Awareness
Because SEO puts your website and name ahead of more eyes online, it can increase brand awareness.
The more often people see your name in search results, the more familiar they’ll become with it. albeit they don’t click on your website the primary time they see it in search, after a short time, it’ll feel familiar to them, and that they may click through.
If potential customers see your website in search results, they’re going to also already be conversant with your business name if they see it on a billboard, social media post, or other marketing channels.
6. SEO Increases Trust and Credibility
Another one among the highest benefits of SEO for business is that ranking well can cause people to look at your brand as more credible and trustworthy.
Google wants to rank high-quality content from authoritative sources, and other people are wont to get high-quality leads to Google searches. So, when someone sees your site ranking well, they’re more likely to look at your site as authoritative, credible, and trustworthy.
As people see your ranking well for multiple search terms associated with your industry, they’ll start to ascertain you as an authority in your field.
7. SEO Helps you Beat the Competition
Even if you’re not investing in SEO, there’s an honest chance your competitors are. And if your competitors are ranking above you in search results, they’re likely winning customers that otherwise may have gone to you.
Improving your SEO is important to staying competitive during a world where search engines are such a prevalent way people find information, goods, and services.
Search results themselves also are highly competitive, so you would like to take a position during a smart SEO strategy to remain before your competition within the SERPs.
Having a technique that gets you top rankings is crucial since 95% of search traffic goes to listings on the primary page of results, and 68% of all clicks attend the primary five results.
8. SEO Provides Long-Term Value
SEO may be a long-term strategy that continues delivering returns long after your initial investment.
A page can continue ranking well in search results long after you initially create and optimize it, with just alittle amount of upkeep. This differs from other strategies, like paid advertising, during which your ads stop appearing when your campaign ends.