Small businesses may not be able to compete with high-end brands in their million-dollar marketing, but they can increase their search engine rankings through organic SEO.
For search engines like Google, white-hat link building is one of the crucial factors in organic SEO. The number of high-quality backlinks increases the likelihood of your website showing up when someone searches relevant to your business.
This article discusses organic link-building and why it is necessary. Also, we have a list of tips and tricks that can help you with backlinks for your small business website.
An organic link is a natural backlink placed on a website by the owner because they assume it helps their audience and adds value to their website. It is like a vote of confidence from the publishers that they trust the given source, and the readers should check it.
Most online marketers you see on the top of Google are there because they have more organic backlinks than their competitors.
While building links, it is necessary to build them ethically. Google loves white-hat link building, but it is a time-consuming process and asks for dedication. That is why some people tend to use spam black-hat backlinks, which is basically cheating. Most websites that build backlinks for the sole purpose of manipulating the search results get penalized under Google Penguin.
Building backlinks can be difficult for a newly-developed website because no one knows you exist. Here is a list of tactics that small businesses can use to improve their search engine ranking:
There is no point in building backlinks if you do not have strong content to support them. High-quality and original content is the heart of the process, so our list opens with this.
You need to weigh your time and money into creating infographics, videos, eBooks, whitepapers, blog posts, etc. Before researching ideas for your content, address the following questions:
Moreover, ensure that your content uses several keywords and is SEO optimized.
Contributing to the content on someone else’s website is an effective strategy for organic link-building. Besides, it is mutually beneficial as the site you write for gets free content.
When guest blogging, always generate an original article sharing your insights and expertise on the topics in which you specialize. However, acquiring such opportunities might be hard in the beginning, so you will have to reach numerous websites.
Every website owner keeps shifting their web pages, thus editing, replacing, or deleting them. So, there are many ways a quality backlink can end up broken. But that does not imply you waste your previous efforts on organic SEO. You can use multiple tools to uncover such links and replace them.
Similarly, there can be other websites looking to repair their broken outbound links. You can reach out to them with a suggestion to replace those with a link to your page.
Once your brand starts getting recognition, online publications may mention your brand but not link back to your site. It can get annoying, as these links can be valuable.
Several tools can help you keep track of your brand or product mentions across the web. After identifying unlinked mentions, you can ask the website owners if they mind linking back to your site.
Communities are secret havens for link builders because the people within them share common interests. An increase in brand awareness often correlates with an uplift in backlinks because people start recognizing your content.
Just because your business is new does not mean that you cannot create digital PR campaigns to attract an audience and get backlinks. All you need to do is create linkable assets and promote these to relevant influencers.
By finding relevant content on other sites, linking to it, and then letting the publisher know, you can generate a lot of quality backlinks. Use this as a strategy to make them aware of your website.
Over time the publishers will begin knowing you and might start linking back to you.
Links from the sites related to your niche are most likely to influence your ranking positively.
When working on organic link building, it is wise to keep one eye on the competitor’s links. Creating something better than your competitors can influence the website owners to replace a competitor’s link with yours.
Regardless of what people tell you, directories are still alive. In fact, they are a great way to improve your local SEO and help potential customers find you. But you need to be on the directories that people actually use, for instance, Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.
Free tools, like calculators or template generators, are not effective for generating leads only but also for earning backlinks. Search a keyword in your industry and determine which one receives the most backlinks. Then, start creating something similar but way better.
From here, you should be clear on how to develop a strategy that grows your backlinks, rankings, traffic, and, of course, sales. For new business owners, accumulating good backlinks requires significant time and effort. But the payoff can be substantial and worth the hassle.
However, external backlinks are not the only links your website should build. Internal links that point from one page on your website to another are also essential components in the efficient operation of a site. Use these links to tell the search engines what the page is about and when to rank it.