When talking about marketing, link building is what that takes most of the time. And that's why the majority of small businesses struggle with building quality links.
Link building isn't a new term in the industry but an old one that has been there for years. However, it has changed significantly over the past few years. Previously it was just about getting backlinks from a ton websites but now it’s about getting quality backlinks from such websites.
In order to build quality backlinks for a new business, blogging is a must. According to stats, when you start to blog consistently, you get 434% more indexed pages and boost your inbound links by a whopping 97%.
But that’s not all about link building. In this article, I will be sharing top 5 link building strategies for small businesses.
Guest Blogging
A few years back, Matt Cutts claimed that guest blogging is dead for link building. Don’t remember? Here’s what he exactly said,
Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.
But was that true?
No. Thousand of businesses are still using guest posting as a way of building backlinks. The only thing which is dead is the influence of low quality guest posting websites.
However, if you’re posting on high ranking quality websites, guest blogging can be your biggest source of link building as well as lead generation.
One of the best examples to prove the benefits of guest blogging is Buffer. Buffer wrote 150+ guest posts and grew from 0 to 100,000 users within 9 months.
The reason behind this success is that Buffer focussed on creating valuable content for the target audience and then sharing it on platforms that already constitute their target audience.
“But how does it help local businesses?”
Here’s what Isaac Hammelburger from SearchPros says regarding link building for local businesses,
“Business owners spend a lot of time networking with other local businesses, sharing leads and advice, why not also share websites? Ask other businesses if you could offer a guest post on their site, it will not only get you a local and relevant link, it can also help you build a stronger network.”
Leverage You ‘Linkable’ Assets
Linkable assets are those pieces of content that are specifically created to build quality backlinks. These assets can be anything like infographics, pdf, tutorials, ebooks, etc.
KISSmetrics, co-founded by Neil Patel, created 47 infographics that helped it to generate 2,512,596 visitors, 41,412 backlinks and 3,741 unique referring domains. The company says that infographic creation is one of the main reasons it grew from 0 to 350K readers within a span of 24 months.
Here, it’s just infographics that you can leverage as a linkable asset but also an in-depth guide or eBook can be used to generate quality backlinks. However, this method won’t work unless you have a proper outreach strategy ready to help you reach out to bloggers working in the same niche.
Here’s what Sahil, Founder GetSchoolSuppliesList says,
“Linkable assets aren’t simple content, these pieces of content that are unique and resonate with the interest of your target audience. For example, my business comes under the education domain and if I want to generate backlinks for my website, my strategy should be developing and sharing education related content.”
Work on Your Personal Brand
One of the best link building methods is to grow your personal brand. When you start to work on your personal brand and establish yourself as an authority in your niche, you allow people to come to you and share your content on their website. Be it your quote or your blog post, after allowing them to share, you can easily ask them to provide a backlink to your website.
Also, this isn’t the only benefit of growing your personal brand, there are many more but since this post isn’t about that, let’s end it here.
To Conclude
So these were the top 3 strategies that you can use to build quality backlinks for your website regardless of what kind of business you own. Though there are many more strategies that you can find on the internet but these were the ones that are going to continue in the upcoming years as well.