This week’s song choice is We Built This City by Starship.
The song inspired this week’s easy marketing tip, which is… link building.
When we hear about how Starship built their city on rock and roll, our marketing minds go straight to thinking about how we can build our business ‘cities’, or for the more ambitious among us, our business ‘empires’, using links.
And yes, building businesses on rock and roll would be much cooler, but link building can be pretty cool too… (if we do say so ourselves 😉).
So, what is link building, you ask?
It is the practice of encouraging other websites to hyperlink back to any one of your website pages, helping users reach your site by boosting your visibility in Google search results.
With millions turning to Google for answers, it’s great to be at the top of their search pages and get a larger chunk of the traffic… and customers.
A great website can get lost if it’s lower down in the search results, as most don’t tend to like scrolling (life’s too short, right?!) and are often drawn to the first thing they see.
So link building is all about keeping Google and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) happy, making your site stand out from the rest.
Think of every link to your website that exists elsewhere as a little vote and the world wide web as an ongoing election - the more links, or ‘votes’, you have, the more popular your website will be.
There are two ways that you can go about link building:
- Getting out great content (like blog posts!)
- Or… strategically build links
A killer website needs killer content, there are no two ways about it!
But having some great stuff to share doesn’t mean you’ll be automatically at the top of Google’s search rankings.
Those currently at the top are there for a reason, after all - they’ve got plenty of websites hyperlinking back to them.
There’s a number of things you can do strategically to get the links you need and climb up Google’s rankings:
- Add links to other websites, which may not be owned by you
- Forums
- The comments section of another blog
- Attach to your social media profiles (if you’ve already created them)
- Get your website on business directories
- Build relationships
- Ask other websites to link back to yours (known as a backlink)
- Contribute content to another website (e.g. through their blog)
- Offer a backlink in exchange for a backlink back to your website
- Directly mention another website within your own content to praise their work
- Back to basics with great content
- Provide varied content - white papers, a podcast, interviews, etc
- Reinforce content with valuable information and graphics, like studies and infographics
In the interest of reaching your customers, don’t be afraid to reach out yourselves!
If you can convince other businesses to link back to your website then, in time, your customers will be grateful that you chose to build your website on links rather than rock and roll.