Every business owner needs a link building strategy in place, but that’s not easy to do when you’re busy running your business.
It’s also not something you can learn through a weekend course.
Link building is a professional SEO strategy that requires expertise, experience, and connections to properly execute.
If you barely have time to run your business, you don’t have time to fully learn the art of link building. You need a professional link building service run by a reputable digital marketing agency.
You can find link building services all over the internet, but not all services are legitimate.
Link building isn’t just a task, it’s a strategy, and choosing the wrong service can actually harm your business.
In this article you’ll learn how to tell the difference between good and bad link building services and avoid the services that can be detrimental to your business.
Link building is a search engine optimization strategy that generates backlinks to your webpages in order to boost their ranking in the search engines and generate organic, targeted traffic.
In general, when your website has a strong backlink profile full of links hosted on reputable, high-ranking websites, your website will get a little more ranking power in the search engines. The more of these high-quality backlinks you collect, the higher your site will rank in the search engines.
Backlinks are generated through several methods, including:
Link building is an ongoing strategy that doesn’t have an end. Your competitors are continually generating backlinks, so to keep up, you’ll need to continue your efforts indefinitely.
Do you get traffic to your website that doesn’t convert? Do you struggle to get traffic at all? No matter what kind of traffic problem you’re experiencing, a professional link building campaign can help.
If you’re getting traffic, but few conversions, you don’t need more traffic – you need targeted traffic.
When you’re experiencing a low conversion rate (lots of traffic, few sales/leads), it’s a sign that your traffic is coming from sources that aren’t targeted to your market.
For example, say you paid $500 to get 1,000 backlinks. Those backlinks may have ended up on websites completely unrelated to your business. The anchor text might be misleading, causing visitors to click, but bounce the second they land on your site.
These types of link building strategies always backfire. They’re automated processes and are considered illegal link schemes by search engines.
Are you struggling to get visitors to your website? If so, you probably don’t have many backlinks, or if you do, they’re buried in the search engines.
A targeted link building campaign will drive targeted traffic to your website consisting of people in your target market. Targeted backlinks placed on relevant websites will also help you gain ranking in the search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Ultimately, link building will increase your revenue and build your brand image. The details of how link building achieves these goals is as follows:
With content marketing, you’ll have the opportunity to publish positive things about your brand on certain websites. With the right publisher, you might even be able to publish a PR piece to share your story with the world.
In a nutshell, targeted traffic equals a higher conversion rate, which means more business revenue. As you can see, it’s a complex strategy that requires expertise.
That’s where link building services come in. But with so many services out there, how do you find the right company?
How do you tell the difference between legitimate services and scams? First, you need to understand the bad side of link building and how it negatively impacts a website. Once you understand what to avoid, it’s easier to identify a good link building agency.
Generally speaking, a bad link building service generates spammy links that increase the quantity of backlinks pointing to your website, but don’t impact your traffic or ranking. The worst of the bad link building services can negatively impact your website to the point of getting your entire domain name blacklisted from the search engines.
There are high-quality and low-quality backlinks. Some of the worst links are considered spam even when the destination is a legitimate business website. That’s because it matters where your links are published. Publishing links to your website on spammy websites makes your website look like spam to the search engines.
While high-quality backlinks are generated with intention, spammy backlinks are not. For example, companies that sell packages of backlinks in large quantities are selling links that will be considered spam. There’s just no way to generate 1,000+ high-quality backlinks automatically. High-quality backlinks must be generated one at a time.
While mass quantities of links are considered annoying spam, many of them are downright harmful to your business. That’s because search engines like Google don’t hesitate to blacklist websites that are part of private blog networks (PBNs), and sometimes they blacklist associated websites, too.
That means if you have thousands of backlinks on known link farms and PBNs, when they get blacklisted, your site is also in jeopardy simply by association.
Another problem with buying bulk backlinks is being sold links on sites that have already been penalized in the search engines. These links won’t help you at all.
A legitimate link building service won’t get you thousands of useless backlinks overnight – you’ll get targeted traffic, more leads, more sales, and you’ll see genuine results in the search engines.
Here’s how to get those high-quality links you deserve.
Digital marketing services aren’t free. There’s no way to get around paying the cost of link building services. In this world, you really do get what you pay for, and if you try to get all of your SEO services at a discount, you’ll end up with poor-quality results.
Many factors go into a link building campaign and it involves a team of people, including writers, editors, outreach specialists, publishers, and management. This is where quality link building differs from scams – there is a high level of care put into the process.
With link building scams you pay a fee per link. With legitimate services, you’re not paying for links – you’re paying for high-quality articles to be written, edited, and published on relevant websites. These websites aren’t chosen at random; the website owners have an existing partnership with your marketing agency.
A genuine, high-quality link building campaign can be a short or long-term commitment, but you’ll get lasting results if you stick with it for the long-term.
If you decide to try creating your own backlinks, you’ll want to be selective with the publishers you choose. While the most obvious thing to consider is the topic of your chosen publishers, there’s something else to be aware of: open calls for submissions.
Websites that have open calls for submissions are often not what they seem. These sites can be an extremely risky place to generate backlinks. Many of these websites exist only to generate money for publishing articles submitted by marketing agencies. While some agencies produce top-quality content, many don’t.
These sites aren’t technically content farms since they’re individual sites, but they operate in the same manner. Once Google and other search engines get wind of them, they often get de-indexed, making all of your link building efforts disappear. If the sites don’t disappear, Google will devalue all backlinks on the site, which will leave you with worthless backlinks.
These sites also tend to publish questionable content, like articles with links to porn, gambling, and pharmaceutical websites.
Since the purpose of backlinks is to generate traffic and improve search ranking, it’s important to only get links from sites that are indexed in the search engines, specifically Google. Google has the largest market share for search, so if a site isn’t indexed in Google it won’t really help you.
Before submitting a post to a website for publication, do a quick site search for the domain to see if its webpages are indexed. To do this, open Google and type this into the search bar, replacing ‘domain.com’ with the website domain you’re considering:
site:domain.com
You can also search for the HTTP and HTTPS versions of the site like this:
site:http://domain.com
site:https://domain.com
If you get no results in Google, choose a different domain name to publish your content.
Even if you pay for professional link building services, it’s important to double check the publishing sites you’re being offered. Run a quick traffic search from Semrush and see how much organic traffic the site gets.
If the trend is upwards and there seems to be a good flow of traffic (at least 500 visitors per month), that’s usually a sign that it’s a trusted site. If you don’t see any organic traffic, or the trend is downward or sporadic, skip that site and choose another. Sites with an upwards trend tend to stick around longer, which means it’s a better long-term investment.
The best way to get high-quality backlinks is to hire a professional link building agency. At Dev.co , we can get the big results you can’t get on your own. We have existing relationships with top publishers so your links will get published on all the right websites.
When your ultimate goal is to increase your revenue, you need three things: high-quality content, high-quality backlinks, and targeted traffic. We can help you get all of these things and more. Contact us today for more information and you’ll be one step closer to getting a leg up on your competition.
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