Your website is a crucial component of your business, showcasing the brand or, in the case of e-commerce sites, selling products and services directly. While having a well-designed, compelling, and user-friendly website is all well and good, what use is it if no-one finds it?
Sure, you can spend a large part of your marketing budget on advertising, driving traffic straight to your virtual door. But a critical element of your strategy should be via SEO, improving your online visibility in the search engines, raising your rankings so that you are more discoverable.
After all, if you appear higher in the search results than your competitor, more potential customers will click on your website than theirs.
One of the best ways to do this, alongside our other business growth advice, is by sourcing inbound links to your website from others. The benefit of doing this is two-fold:
- Google loves it when authoritative sites in your niche link to your own and will reward you with ranking improvements
- You might receive direct traffic from the link itself, building your audience
If you were in any doubt about the importance of link-building, look to one of the most competitive online sectors anywhere – iGaming. In a multi-billion-dollar marketplace, the battle for customers for sportsbooks, online casinos, and poker rooms is immense. It’s no surprise to find there are even SEO agencies focusing purely on iGaming.
How to Source Inbound Links
If you cannot afford to pay for a specialist agency to take on the hard work for you, you can seek to build incoming links yourself. There are several tried and tested ways that will reap the rewards.
Ask for links to your website from your suppliers – it’s not much trouble for them since they will be showcasing their customers. This technique also pretty much guarantees you will be getting a link from a source in your niche, which Google likes.
Seek to swap links with a complementary product or service. If, for example, you sell print-on-demand mugs, why not seek to exchange a link with a business selling print-on-demand tee-shirts? It’s easy to contact suitable places, and if they say ‘no’ or ignore you, what’s the harm.
Write a blog on your website, providing useful information to customers. Google will recognize good blog content since it will be keyword rich in your niche. If written correctly, good content marketing like this will attract current customers, as well as results from organic search. If your blog gains traction, it will start getting links naturally from third party sites. A win, win, and another win situation!
Create an infographic and share it online, with an embedded link back to your site. You must have the artistic and technical know-how to do this properly, using a creative tool like Canva. Also, make sure you have something genuinely useful to put in your infographic. Once complete, you can send it to various bloggers in your niche to see if they might share it.
Seek to write a guest post on other sites. If you enjoy writing, this is an ideal route. Contact niche blogs relevant to you and offer to write an article that will be informative and engaging for their readers. You will provide it free of charge to them, and the only thing you want in return is for the link to your website within the article to remain.
Influencer marketing is not suitable for all small businesses. But if you sell a cool product, it is worth finding some appropriate influencers who would appreciate receiving on of those products in return for reviewing it or referencing it on their website – with a link back to you, of course!
Other methods include sending press releases with your link in, subscribing to relevant directories, submitting guides and e-books to related sites, creating profiles with your web link on various niche forums and groups.
Work Out What Your Successful Competitors Do
If you can’t yet beat them, at least try to join them. Find out what efforts your competitors have made to build inbound links and try to replicate their success. Using online tools such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, you can target a competitor website and then get a report on all the sites that link into it.
Using this data, you can then approach the same sites and see if you can replicate what your competitors have done. At the very least, this exercise will help open your eyes and give you some fresh ideas.
It’s a Long Game
Once you begin trying to build inbound links, don’t be disheartened by slow results. It’s a long-term game, and results will come over time. But they will be worth it.
