The first step in executing a successful online marketing strategy is to master your domain’s SEO. After that, however, things become somewhat more complicated.
You see, SEO merely relies upon your own knowledge and ability to implement a strategy; but link building, the other key element to a successful web presence, actually requires partnering and working with others to an extent.
If you’re still on the fence about why you need an effective link building strategy for your website, consider these five benefits it gives your online marketing effort:
Rocket Boost for Your SEO Strategy
If you think SEO is helping you bring thousands of views to your website, wait until you get a backlink or two from a high-traffic, high-search authority website. Not only is this free traffic that you don’t have to do anything for but also it will keep arriving as long as the link is maintained.
Establishes Authority
As we established above, authority in search is a very important if somewhat vague concept. In its most basic explanation, search authority works through a process of linking your website’s content to that of other websites with high volume traffic. This traffic, combined with the backlinks to an article, helps establish how many people think the linked article is important or relevant to a set of search phrases. While this is a consensus driven by numbers, it is also becoming increasingly powerful in being able to weed out spam and engineered posts from those with real substance and content to offer readers.
Pushes You Up in Search Results
The greater your authority or that attached to a single blog post, the higher up in search results it will appear for a given set of phrases. Again, all of this happens without any real effort on your part. Think of it as the dividends of a solid SEO effort but also use it for insights into how to tweak your content as well as partner with others in your niche.
Synergies with Other Businesses
Finding synergies with others online not only alleviates the burden of building out a huge web effort but also pays dividends over time in terms of new outreach and opportunities. Find who backlinks to your website and reach out to them to thank them – and perhaps even return the favor.
Outreach to New Markets and Audiences
One of the disadvantages of a very honed SEO strategy is that it can sometimes miss new opportunities or avenues for expansion. This is because focus is key when it comes to SEO, but the backlinks help give you insights into potential growth opportunities. Analyze who or what establishes backlinks to your content and evaluated that in light of what you think your effort is about – or perhaps what it should be about in the near future. This is a way of gauging immediate demand in a certain niche or in ancillary areas. A such, you can look at it as actionable reader feedback that can help you improve your efforts in real-time.