There’s no better advocate than a happy, loyal customer—someone who can point to your brand and say: “I trust them to do good work.”
Backlinking for SEO works much the same way.
Just as you benefit from trusted members of your community touting your brand, you also benefit from trusted members of the online community linking to your brand. Their network becomes your network; their credibility becomes your credibility.
Despite being one of the primary deciding factors in determining a website’s keyword relevancy, backlinking is an often-neglected portion of SEO strategies. Develop trust among in-market web users and capture more leads through an effective backlinking strategy. Here’s how.
Create Thought Leadership Content
At the end of the day, every earned backlink to your website can be credited to high-quality content. Websites aren’t going to backlink to rehashed content that can be found just about anywhere. Web curators and in-market users are searching for new information—thought leadership.
Investing time into thought leadership content is the best way to earn unsolicited backlinks (i.e., backlinks that you did not seek out or pay for). Earned backlinks greatly improve your site’s keyword relevancy and organic search performance, which is why a strong thought leadership content strategy is so valuable. The more unique your insights into your industry, service, or product, the more likely it is you’ll attract derivative content and backlinks attributed to your domain.
As you begin your thought leadership content planning, consider putting time into developing a list of in-market bloggers who could be potential backlinking assets.
Need help compiling a list of in-market resources? Talk to us. We can help connect your brand to high-value content publishers through thought leadership content strategy.
Develop Thoughtful Paid Backlinking Strategies
While there are many ways to pay for backlinks, most of them are ineffective and sometimes even counterproductive. However, a paid content campaign that focuses on high-quality publishers can help associate your website with relevant keywords.
Advertorials in industry-specific digital publications are an example of a high-quality backlinking investment. By placing advertorials with backlinks to your website in a trusted trade publication, you have associated your website with a high-volume publisher of relevant keywords.
Recently, Google and other search engines have started to devalue paid content placements in favor of earned backlinks. However, advertorials are still worthwhile investments to reach in-market audiences while contributing to your overall SEO strategy.
You might be asking: “We post on LinkedIn all the time. Don’t those links count?” Unfortunately, in most cases, they don’t. Many social platforms that rely on user-generated content restrict search engines from carrying any value for that backlink, because the platform does not want to endorse potentially problematic content.
Strategic Content Is King
There is a long and short to backlinking. A litany of tools and resources are available to compile and assess backlinking assets. We use them every day, and they’re useful. But, in the end, it all starts with a well-planned content strategy. A steady stream of blog content stuffed with keywords isn’t enough. The content has to be unique and interesting to in-market influencers to garner earned backlinks.
Is your business ready to broaden its lead-generation network through thought leadership content strategy? Talk to us and ask about search-engine-optimized content.