Building a Backlink Profile for SEO Success

When it comes to building credibility and trust with search engines, one of the biggest challenges websites face is building up their backlink profile. By creating a strategic and healthy backlink profile, you can establish site authority, rank higher in the search engine results, and ultimately increase organic traffic. In this article we will look at what backlinks are, why building a backlink profile is important, and how a marketing specialist can help you undertake this vital SEO effort.

What Are Backlinks?

Backlinks are links from other websites that lead to a page on your website. If a user found helpful information on your site, a product they liked, or wanted to share content from your site, they can add a link to their own website or social channels for their visitors to find your content. If there is an abundance of high quality links to your web pages, it signals to the search engines that your site can be trusted and that it provides value to users, and therefore your site will rank higher in the SERPs.

A backlink profile is essentially a portfolio of all your links, but quality is more important than quantity. There are links that are good for your profile and help build credibility, and links that are considered to be “toxic” and can damage your profile. Once toxic links have been identified, they can be disavowed, which essentially means telling Google to ignore these when evaluating your website. The goal is to build up your backlink profile with plenty of high quality links that are relevant to your business.

There are many different tools and software that can evaluate your backlink profile and score it on a scale from 0-100. These tools use algorithms that incorporate a variety of factors to determine your site’s score. Some tools only focus on how many links you have, if they are high quality or spammy (for example links that were purchased through low quality sites or link exchanges, or where crawled and linked to by spambots), and how many sites they link to. Some tools take site traffic into account, or how authentic and humanized your site feels. The higher your score is, the higher your site is likely to rank in the search results. It’s important to set realistic goals and expectations for these scores—your site can still be successful and rank highly, even if your score is far from 100.

Completing an analysis of your competitor’s backlink profiles is also an important step in this process. By doing this, you’ll have a good idea of where your competitor’s gaps are, and what you need to do to get a leg up.

Why is Building a Backlink Profile Important?

Building a backlink profile is a key feature of a well-rounded SEO strategy. Having links to your website will help Google’s crawlers discover your content and find new pages more easily. It also helps Google build trust in your site and recommend it to others by ranking it high in the SERPs. Think of backlinks like reviews—the more positive reviews your business receives, the more customers will be attracted to your business. If you don’t have any reviews, or you have negative reviews, potential customers will look somewhere else rather than doing business with you. Backlinks work the same way. If you don’t have any backlinks, or the ones you do have come from places that are associated with spam, your website is far less likely to be recommended to searchers, because Google wants users to have the best experience possible.

How Can a Marketing Specialist Help?

Diving into your website’s backlink profile can seem intimidating, but there are experts who can help guide you through this process. A marketing specialist can do a few things to make this process simpler and less stressful for you as a business owner. Below are the steps a marketing professional will take to ensure your website has the strongest backlink profile possible:

• Backlink Audit: The first thing a marketing specialist will need to do is run an audit of your website’s current backlink profile. They have access to tools and software that allow you to see all the links that connect back to your site pages. Once the list of links has been generated, a specialist will determine which links are quality, and which links need to be disavowed. The disavow list will be sent to Google so that those links are no longer associated with your site, keeping your profile healthy and free of spam.
• Competitive Analysis: The marketing specialist will analyze your competitor’s backlink profiles, just like they did for your site. This provides you with a good understanding of how your competitors are getting backlinks, and will help determine where your opportunities are.
• Backlink Strategy Creation: This is where it’s important to work with a reputable expert who won’t engage in tactics that could result in your site being penalized by Google. It is best practice to avoid links that are irrelevant to your site, purchased, or part of link exchanges. Penalties can include losing rankings or having your site de-indexed (removed from search engine results) altogether, so you want to avoid these activities at all costs. A marketing specialist will help you acquire and manage links that will be beneficial to your site and help you build credibility with search engines. They can do this by helping you coordinate with third party or affiliated sites (like manufacturers of products you use in your business), guest posting on relevant industry blogs, or finding local business directories or expertise websites.

Note: It’s important to remember that while these strategies are good ways to build your backlink profile, it’s not enough on its own. Creating high quality content that is made for humans and relevant to your target audience is paramount. If your content resonates with your audience, they will be more likely to share it and link to your pages within their own content, creating backlinks that will help your reputation.

Key Takeaways

Building a strong backlink profile is a key component of any SEO strategy. Not only does it help build credibility and trust with search engines, it also helps drive organic traffic to your website, increases your site’s visibility, and contributes to the growth of your business. It may seem like a time consuming process, so enlisting the help of a marketing specialist will ensure that you acquire beneficial links and maintain your profile to keep it in top shape.

Each business is different, even within the same industry, so what may work for one won’t necessarily work for another. Thorough research into your business, your target audience, and competitors is vital before you begin crafting a link building strategy. By creating a strategic approach to link building, and continuing to produce valuable content, you position your website to have a credible, authoritative presence that will help you achieve your business goals.

If you’re curious about your website’s backlink profile and are ready to see how leveraging this technique can be beneficial to your business, we’re here to help. Contact us to find out how to get the process started.