We all know that backlinks are one of the top two ranking factors of Google.
But apart from this, what are the other things that make backlinks really important? What are the benefits that link building provides? After considering the amount of time and effort building a single link takes, is it really worth it to build links?
If you are here today with all these questions in your mind, you are on the right page.
Today, we are going to talk about something very obvious and yet interesting – the benefits of link building.
So why wait any further? Let’s dive right into this and get some solid answers to all your questions.
Quick link building statistics to understand its importance
- Backlinks are considered to be one of the top two criteria for Google’s page ranking algorithm. (Search Engine Land)
- There is a direct correlation between the number of backlinks a web page has with the amount of traffic that page receives. (Ahrefs)
- 79.7% of SEO experts say that link building is one of the most important parts of their SEO strategy. (Authority Hacker)
- The majority of online content, approximately 94%, fails to acquire any social shares or external links. (Backlinko)
- Only a small 2.2% of the content gets links from more than one website. (Backlinko)
- Only 1 in every 20 pages without any backlinks gets traffic. (Ahrefs)
- 52.3% of the digital marketing experts feel that link building is the most difficult part of their SEO (Authority Hacker)
What is link building
Let us explain this in a simple way.
First, let’s understand what backlinks are. So backlinks are links (considered as votes) that your website receives from an external website. For example, if website A adds a link to website B, website A sends a backlink to website B.
Now link building is the process of using various strategies and methods to earn these backlinks from such external websites to your website.
It’s all about using techniques to earn more and more backlinks. In other words, build links.
Benefits of link building
Now let us get straight to the point and discuss the benefits that link building provides.
1. It boosts your current search rankings
We all know that links are considered as a vote of confidence by Google. So the more links you have to your website, the higher the chances of Google trusting your website.
Each backlink that you get signals Google about the authority and trustworthiness of your website resulting in improvement of your rankings.
Each backlink that you earn from an external website will open a new path for Google crawler to crawl your website, update your new position, and promote your rankings.
Moreover, along with opening a link path from website A to website B, backlinks also pass some authority from the sender’s website to the receiver’s website resulting in an overall boost of rankings.
2. It gives you more traffic
What’s next? Well, link building also helps you gain higher referral traffic to your website. Let’s understand how.
So when an external website with high traffic adds a link to your website on their page, visitors of that website click on that link and land on your website. The traffic that you get from the link placed on an external website is called referral traffic.
Moreover, links from popular websites carry a lot of weight in terms of authority passing link juice to your website. This overall helps your website rank higher for more and more searches resulting in more clicks from search engines and a high traffic from your website.
The best thing about the traffic that you get from your links is that it can be sustained for a longer period. Unlike paid forms of advertisements which stop sending you traffic once your campaign ends, the traffic that you get from your link keeps on flowing to your website.
Moreover, instead of paying for ads, you can always purchase natural links to keep getting continuous traffic to your website.
3. It helps you increase your domain authority
You see, there are probably thousands of websites already competing for your target keywords. Then how can you beat all those websites and rank higher for your target keywords? By increasing your domain authority.
First of all, what is domain authority? Domain authority is a score that indicates a website’s strength, and trustworthiness, and ranks its overall authority.
Though it’s not stated by Google that they use the domain authority factor from third party tools to rank websites, it’s still extremely important to focus on domain authority as all the top ranking websites on a search result page usually have a higher domain authority than the ones ranking below.
And this explains the fact that websites with high domain authority are trusted and ranked higher by Google than websites with lower domain authority.
Now how can you increase your website’s domain authority? Well, the best way to increase it is by building as many quality links to your website as possible.
This is because each link that you get from an external website passes a part of its authority through the link coming to your website. Therefore, the more high-quality backlinks you get to your website, the higher your domain authority goes.
4. It helps you spread awareness
You might have a solid business with an amazing product that everyone would love. But that business will make no sales if you don’t spread brand awareness.
Spreading brand awareness is all about promoting your business among the audience so that everyone becomes aware of your business and its offerings. If you don’t know how to spread brand awareness, one good way to do it is by building links to your site. Let’s understand how link building helps spread brand awareness.
Let’s say website A is a popular website in the food industry and website B is a new website that wants to spread brand awareness in the food industry. The best way to spread brand awareness for website B is by building build links from website A.
When website A adds a link to website B on its page, the link will act as a path for website A’s audience to click on it and land on website B, giving them an opportunity to explore B’s business and offerings.
5. It helps you beat competitors
The digital world has today made it easy for any business to reach and attract customers from any corner of the world. However, with all the good things that the digital world brings, it also brings a lot of competition to us.
But how can you beat your competitors online? Simple – by ranking higher. Now how can you rank higher? Well, by building links.
You see, one of the biggest factors that contribute to a website’s rankings on search engines is its backlinks profile. A backlinks profile contains a list of all the links coming to your site, the websites they are coming from, their quality, and so on.
So if you want to beat your competitors and gain a competitive advantage over them, you’ll need to build a solid backlinks profile that is stronger than theirs to help you rank higher on Google and attract more visitors to your website.
6. It helps you gain trust
When running a business online, it’s extremely important to gain the audience’s trust in order to run your business successfully.
So how can you gain your audience’s trust? Well, by getting links from other websites that your target audience already trusts. When a popular website that is trusted by your industry audience adds a link to your website, it helps you gain their trust. Let’s understand how.
Popular websites have so much impact on their audience that they trust almost everything that is shown on the website. So when such popular websites add a link to your website, it suddenly changes the audience’s perception of your brand.
“If website A is trusting that website and adding a link to it, I can also trust them”. That’s how they think with the backlinks that you get from popular websites.
7. It gives you long-term traffic
See, there are two types of traffic – one is the short-term traffic that comes to your website for a short period and then fades away and the other one is long-term traffic that keeps on coming to your website for a longer period of time.
Link building helps you gain long-term traffic to your website.
It is also confirmed that you can purchase backlinks from external websites to drive long-term traffic that is relevant to your niche.
But how can links bring traffic to your website? Let’s understand.
First, when popular websites add a link to your website, you get referral traffic from that website to yours. This traffic will continue coming to your website as long as the external website receives traffic. This way you will get long-term traffic from your backlink.
Next, the higher the number of quality backlinks you’ll have to your site, the higher your search rankings will be. So if your website takes the top spot for some search results on Google, it’ll continue getting traffic from those searches as long as it is holding that top position.
8. it helps with effective indexing
First of all, what is indexing? Search engines use crawlers and bots that discover and crawl every page on the web to add all the new ones to the database and update all the existing ones.
If you want your website to rank higher for Google search results, you’ll have to first make sure that search engine crawlers effectively discover and crawl your webpage to add it to their database.
So how can link building help with effective indexing? You see, search engine crawlers use links as a pathway to move from one webpage to another. That’s why when your website receives backlinks from many external sites, it’ll increase the chances of search engine crawlers discovering your page faster and indexing it effectively.
9. It helps you build new relationships
Running a business also requires you to build new connections and maintain relationships with other parties to get the best out of your available opportunities.
Outreach for building links requires you to contact many influencers, bloggers, and website owners, in order to get quality backlinks from their websites. This helps you create new connections with other influential people and businesses.
This opens your door to maintaining relationships with those parties and collaborating with them to target new audiences and influence the existing ones to perform a certain action. The connections you make with your outreach will also help you benefit from it in the future and make the best use of opportunities.
To improve your chances you can consider hiring blogger outreach agencies.
10. It gives you higher conversion rates
Next, link building also helps you attract a targeted audience and get higher conversion rates.
The best thing about quality backlinks is that they not only send you some general traffic but also bring visitors who are genuinely interested in your business and its offerings. When you get backlinks from popular websites, you get new visitors from them. Because these visitors come from a source that is related to your Industry or niche, they are more likely to be interested in your offerings.
This increases your conversion rates and makes it easier for you to convert those visitors into customers.
What’s more? These visitors are also more likely to trust your website due to the link placement on the referring site. This will encourage them to perform certain actions like signing up for a newsletter, filling out a form, and so on, leading them further into the sales funnel.
11. It helps you strengthen your internal pages
When it comes to SEO, only getting links from external websites is not enough. You’ll also have to maintain and strengthen your website internally.
Link building not only helps you gain backlinks to the homepage of your website but also equally distributes your link juice to each page on your website.
Firstly, internal link building helps you link your page to one another making it easier for search engine crawlers to discover and crawl each page on your website. Next, it also helps you navigate your users from one page to another helping them explore relevant pages on your website.
Moreover, internal link building also helps you boost each page’s authority and turn it into a strong webpage. This will make it easier for those pages to rank higher for relevant searches on Google as search engines also consider the page authority of a page before ranking it higher.
12. It helps you increase page authority
Now, don’t get confused between domain authority and page authority. Domain authority is a website’s overall authority score while page authority is a website’s individual webpage’s authority score. Both are equally important for your SEO. Let’s understand how link building helps in increasing page authority.
So when you receive a quality backlink to your webpage, the link passes a portion of that website’s authority to your webpage, through that backlink. This increases your page’s authority.
Next, you can also make use of internal linking to equally distribute authority among all pages on your website. If page A on your website holds higher authority than page B, you can always add a link on page A to page B to pass link juice from page A to page B on your website.
13. It helps you increase sales and revenue
Next, link building can also help increase your business’s sales and revenue. Let’s understand how.
Firstly, when you receive high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites, the link passes some of that website’s authority to your website. This results in an increase in your website’s authority, which then gradually helps you improve your search rankings.
This way you can rank higher for transactional keyword searches related to your offerings and attract visitors who are actively looking for a similar product or service.
Next, along with the backlink that you get from an external website, you also get targeted referral traffic of visitors who might be interested in your offerings, increasing your chances of making more sales.
Lastly, the links that you get from popular websites help you gain the audience’s trust leading them further into your sales funnel.
14. It helps you reduce the bounce rate
What is bounce rate? So bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who visit a page on your website and then leave without viewing any other page or spending more time on your website.
While running a website, it’s extremely important for you to keep an eye on your visitors and ensure that the bounce rate is low. Let’s understand how link building can help you reduce your bounce rate.
When you add some relevant internal links on each webpage of your website, it will encourage the users to explore and spend some more time on your website. As visitors leave a page either because they got what they wanted or they didn’t find what they were looking for, adding some internal links to relevant pages will encourage them to check further and also find what they need.
15. It helps you reach international markets
Another great thing about link building is that it is not only limited to local or regional markets. The links that you get from international websites can help you reach and attract international markets as well.
First, when you get links from international websites, it drives international referral traffic to your website increasing the chances of converting them into your customers and grabbing a portion of the market. Next, the links on international websites also help you get your brand recognized globally. People from different countries would start recognizing your brand.
Next, when reaching out for link placement on international websites, you’ll also get an opportunity to build relationships with those international parties. This way you can collaborate with your target region’s influencers, bloggers, or website owners.
Lastly, having a backlinks profile with many links from international websites gives you a competitive advantage over other websites.
Conclusion
So here we are to the end of this post.
In this post, you learned about all the benefits of link building. Now that you know how link building can help you with your business and its website, it’s time to make use of it and get the best out of your backlinks.
Don’t know how to build links? Don’t worry, our team will do the work for you. SERP Forge is a link building agency with a team of experts who know the ins and outs of building links.
Once you join us we will take on the complete responsibility of building links to your website while being transparent throughout the link building process so that you can know what’s going on with your link building process.
FAQs
Is link building still important?
Yes if you want to rank higher on search engines. While search engines are constantly evolving and coming up with new algorithms and updates, backlinks are still one of their top ranking factors. This makes link building still extremely important if you want your website to rank higher on search engines.
Is link building a skill?
Yes. Link building is not something that can be done by anyone. Link building requires a lot of learning, training, and work for one to become good at it. Moreover, it also requires one to strategically plan the entire process, create content, build connections, and track results, making link building an extremely valuable skill.
What are link building mistakes?
1. Focusing only on the quantity of links and not on the quality of links
2. Not diversifying your anchor texts for backlinks
3. Purchasing links from low-quality and spammy websites
4. Not being consistent with your link building process
5. Focusing only on building external links and ignoring the importance of internal links.
