What Are Backlinks and How Do They Influence Your Rankings?
If you’re considering SEO, you may have already learned the importance of backlinks. This guide covers exactly what backlinks are and how they influence your rankings. With a better understanding of backlinks, you can better identify the placements that best align with your business goals.
What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are links placed on other businesses’ websites that direct traffic to your website. While these links can increase the traffic to your website, they also encourage Google bots to travel and browse our website. Google also notes that other websites are willing to link to you for reference, often leading to the conclusion that you’re a trustworthy website.
You may have even interacted with backlinks before. Perhaps you were reading an article on how to paint your living room. Within the article, there may have been a tip on choosing only high-quality paint to protect your walls and the paint job. It’s only natural to go from reading tips on painting to selecting the best paint. You may have even clicked the link to learn what paint type you should buy. Maybe you even purchased after clicking through the website. This is what backlinks are and how they work.
Who Needs Backlinks?
Any business that wants to rank higher needs backlinks. Businesses of any size, niche, industry, service, or product type can benefit from link building.
The problem with backlinks, though, is that generating them can be one of the most difficult parts of an SEO strategy. Generating backlinks requires continuous outreach, content creation, and follow-up.
Many agencies and businesses simply don’t have the necessary resources to give backlinks the attention and time they deserve. This is why many businesses outsource their link building efforts to professional backlink builders.
Backlinks can benefit any business in any industry with a website. Local service-based businesses can achieve higher local search rankings using backlinks. Larger e-commerce businesses with many competitors can even find value in an effective link-building strategy that sets their website apart from the other retailers.
How Do Backlinks Affect Your Rankings?
Backlinks tell your users and search engines that your website is trusted. Since trust is an important ranking component, it can lead to higher rankings. Backlinks also help you stand out from your competitors. Search engines will compare your website against your competitors when deciding which to list first in the search results. If more websites with higher quality links back to you, it can give you an edge against them. Higher-quality backlinks are typically measured by domain authority (DA.) DA is a search engine ranking score that predicts the overall trustworthiness of a website and how likely it is to rank. Earning fewer high DA backlinks is typically better than many low DA links.
Additionally, many businesses include some SEO tasks in their marketing campaigns, including keyword optimization and social media marketing, but few put in the effort to build links. This means adding link building to your optimization strategy could be the one technique that sets you apart from your online competitors.
What Is the Best Way to Get Backlinks?
The best way to get backlinks is to create a strategic campaign. Not all backlink opportunities are created the same, so choosing placements that align with your business and its goals is important. Spend some time before reaching out to potential placements to create a list of the best placement types.
It’s also important to remember that generating a large quantity of backlinks isn’t necessarily as beneficial as getting a few high-quality ones. Generally speaking, securing backlinks from high-authority websites will do much more for your SEO efforts than low-quality, low-domain websites. You also don’t want your backlinks to appear spammy to your readers or the search engine bots. Otherwise, they’ll recognize that the link placement was only for the purpose of boosting SEO, and this strategy doesn’t typically work.
The best link placements align well with your industry and are of high quality. Once you secure the placement, you’ll likely need to provide the website host with a high-quality blog. Because building links can be so involved, many companies decide to outsource it to a professional agency.
Backlinks are a necessary and extremely important part of an SEO campaign. Proper placement, good content, and natural linking are all also important components of an effective link building campaign. Most businesses will find value in integrating link building into their SEO efforts as long as they’re done strategically.
