One of the key components of a successful internet marketing strategy is having the right links to your business website. Link building, when done properly, can help improve your page ranking and increase your search engine visibility.
Through links, search engines are able to find all of the content on your website to index that content. Consequently, your target audience is driven to your website where you can convert your online leads into customers.
Here are some helpful tips on how small businesses can implement the right link building tactics as part of their internet marketing strategy:
Create a Weekly List
If you are depending on just one or two types of links, it is not impossible for you to see your page rankings drop. You need to create a wide variety of links that will help protect your rankings from major changes as the algorithms change. Plot a weekly list of different types of links, with a different focus every week.
This will help keep you organized and build up a broad range of links. For example, you can focus on niche directories for the first week, then the next could be about reaching out to customers.
Build Your Network through Public Relations Outreach
A small business that is striving to be known to its target market as a reputable source of quality products or impeccable services needs to allocate time doing public relations or PR outreach.
PR is vital in building a solid network that can help promote your business. If you want people to start linking to your website, they will need to know you first and public relations outreach is a good way to introduce your business.
Every PR event will open you up to so many new business partners that can help your business get known through their published works and social networks.
Ask Your Customers to Help Spread the Word
There is nothing wrong with being upfront and asking your customers for help. Let them know that you are currently implementing an online marketing strategy to help your business reach out to your target niche more effectively and that it would be very helpful if they could share their experiences online to enable their friends and family to get acquainted with your business as well.
Encourage them to subscribe to your monthly newsletter or like you on Facebook and other social media channels and share your links to their circle. You may chance upon a customer who happens to be a blogger or journalist and this bold move can lead to a major write up about how great your shop or café is.
A lot of Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter users have a large following, so you can imagine how many people just one post from each customer can reach. You can also empower your loyal customers, those who are very passionate about your products or services, to be brand advocates.
Get Help with Research and Guest Blogging
You don’t need to hire an expert to create an effective link building campaign. You can ask a relative or a friend for help with the research phase, and you will be helping them extra money.
It’s a win-win situation. Ask them to research and create a list of popular bloggers for your industry or potential websites where you can get your articles published.
It would also help if you get a basic online course about search engine optimization and get a ClickMinded SEO Certification so you gain more knowledge about online marketing and how to effectively improve your page ranking.
With these very simple tips about link building, you can grow your backlinks and customer base at the same time. Just remember to make time for these and stay focused.
License: Creative Commons image source
- Yes, You Can Still Build Links! - May 30, 2015
Guest blogging is a lot of work but definitely worth the effort. Really great post!