With so much competition in the digital world, many websites don’t get the traction they deserve.
Perhaps that’s how you feel about your website, whether it’s an eCommerce site, business website, or blog.
You’ve devised a kick-butt name, designed an easy-to-navigate website, and even written a pretty good blog section.
You expect the amount of effort you put in to translate into people browsing your pages and following through with an action. Be that a purchase, video view, or signing up for a newsletter.
But it still feels like you’re not getting the attention and visitors you want.
How do you get more people to view your website pages?
A good place to start would be hiring an SEO or link-building consultant that can help you formulate the best strategy.
What the right Link-Building Consultant can mean for you and your business
Hiring the right consultant can mean the difference between make or break for your websites.
That’s right. A mediocre consultant could be a total waste of time and money – resources you might be running pretty low on.
Link-building services, when done right, can have a positive effect on your business and can lead to the following:
Build brand awareness
What exactly is brand awareness, and how important is it to your business?
Brand awareness is the number of people who know about an organization, person, product, or concept.
The more people who know about your brand, the more likely you will see actual turnover.
To illustrate this point, have a look at this logo.
Pexels
No doubt you’ve already connected the red cursive sign and the black fizzy drink many have come to know and love worldwide. In fact, Coca-cola is the most recognized brand on the planet.
“About 7.1 billion people would recognize the Coca-Cola logo if you showed it to them. That is 94% of the population of the Earth…” (1)
If you were to walk down the street on a hot summer’s day and saw that sign, you would immediately think of buying a coke, wouldn’t you?
A link-building consultant worth his salt will be able to expand your brand to the point where people interested in your product recognize something as simple as your logo and make the connection with what you’re selling.
Build partnerships
When building backlinks, you’re reaching out to many different web admins. Instead of seeing these as a once-off interaction, a consultant can help you build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.
As companies grow and become more relevant, their partnerships with other brands become more valuable.
It could be an article that adds value to your audience or an item for sale in their eCommerce store. Whatever it is, there will likely be an opportunity to grow your business through these contacts.
Build backlinks that give you a new audience or client base
Building backlinks to relevant sites within your own niche means that you have the opportunity to broaden your client base horizons.
How so?
Well, imagine throwing a party but not inviting anyone…
Pexels
Pretty sad, isn’t it? It gets worse.
Imagine the party has no music, games, snacks or treats. No passers-by would even dream of joining your party.
In a sense, that’s what a website is without good content or links pointing at them. But an excellent link-building consultant can target a broader audience with content marketing and link-building efforts to bring more people to the party.
Unsplash
Getting a link from a website with a serious amount of traffic will often pass on the link juice, showing the Google Search algorithm that your website (or party) deserves to be visited.
These backlinks then direct audiences to your pages that would never have heard of you before, and as word of mouth spreads, others will come to know about your pages and pass the information on.
This snowball effect is ultimately what you’re after, as you want people to speak about your product.
Achieve higher Search Rankings
Let’s face it; Google has a monopoly on search queries. In fact, according to one statistic –
“Google has dominated the search engine market, maintaining a 92.47 percent market share as of June 2021.” (2)
A link-building consultant that employs the correct content marketing and link-building campaign should be able to help your website rank higher in the result pages.
Why is this so important?
75% of internet users don’t scroll past the first page of Google results.
That’s right, with 34,000 searches conducted every second on a Google search engine, about 25,000 won’t care about anything on page two. (3)
You need to rank as high as possible to get more organic traffic to your website. And that’s ultimately what an SEO consultant will help you with – optimizing your site in order to rank higher.
What is a Link Building Consultant supposed to do?
Let’s compare link-building consulting to your standard GP, or doctor visit.
Can you imagine going to the doctor, and before you even say anything, they whip out their little hammer and start tapping on your kneecap?
Or even worse, they put on rubber gloves and reach for a syringe…
Pexels
Yikes… You won’t be returning to that doctor any time soon.
A good doctor will take the time to sit and listen to your concerns.
They’ll jot something down in handwriting that only they can possibly understand, ask a few questions, and only then will they start examining you.
The same thing applies to a link-building consultant.
Before making suggestions or drawing conclusions, they will sit down with you and listen to your needs. They’ll listen to your company’s challenges and take notes of what your expectations are.
Only then will a good link-building or SEO consultant start looking at the state of a website and how to best approach the link-building process.
This will include the following:
Check the health of your website
Website analytic platforms like Google Analytics or SEO tools like Ahrefs help us determine the overall health of a website.
A link-building consultant will use these tools to their full potential to determine where your web traffic is coming from, which pages are visited the most, and how people are navigating through your website.
This will help you understand how well your website is doing pre-consulting and help you know what changes need to be implemented to be successful.
Give on-page SEO advice
On-page SEO or Technical SEO refers to the things we can control on a web page.
These include links between internal pages, website speed, and targeted keywords.
Technical SEO targets anything and everything that could have an impact on your search engine rankings within your own web URL.
Assess your current web articles
Some of your existing articles might be a good read but aren’t attracting organic traffic.
A Link building consultant should meticulously inspect the current website articles and provide suggestions on how to improve.
These improvements would include which keywords to optimize for, how to increase the content score, adding internal links and how many backlinks are needed for each page to rank.
Check which keywords you’re currently ranking for
Keywords are the words or phrases that people type into a Google Search.
Google uses these keywords to find the most accurate match on their search engine. Your pages will rank for specific keywords, albeit poorly.
A link-building consultant will find which keywords you need to improve and form a link-building strategy based on this information.
Establish what you want to achieve
During a link-building consulting meeting, a link builder must establish what you expect to achieve.
For example, you may be doing well with one aspect of your business and attracting relevant traffic to specific site pages.
But in the long run, you want to expand your services or product range.
- How will you achieve this?
- What can you realistically expect from a link-building campaign?
- How long will it take to rank for specific keywords?
A link-building consultant needs to have an honest discussion with a website owner on whether or not the money they’re about to put into a campaign will yield the expected returns.
What does on-page SEO have to do with link building?
It’s hard to separate link-building from other SEO services, like content creation.
That’s because high-quality links are dependent on high-quality content. The two simply work together; there’s no other way about it.
That said, here are a few avenues of content creation that link-building experts need to have knowledge on
Create link-worthy content
When speaking of link-worthy content, we speak of content that naturally draws links from other sites with the right exposure.
The days of 500-word blog posts are long gone. So are the days of bad-quality pictures and outdated statistics.
Link-worthy content is not only up to date on the latest credible information on the web but formatted in a way that is pleasing to read and informative to the target audience.
Google recently reaffirmed the importance of having content on your site that puts your audience first when it said:
“Google’s automated ranking systems are designed to present helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not to gain search engine rankings, in the top Search results” (4)
You might already have content published on your site or are in the early stages of setting up your blog section.
How can a link-building consultant help you with content?
Improve existing content
You can optimize existing content for search results using optimization tools like Surfer SEO or Clearscope. A link-building consultant will tell you what changes are needed so that it ranks higher on search engines.
These changes will include the following:
- Adding suggested keywords
- Lengthening the article, if necessary
- Internal linking opportunities
- Adding images
- Improving the article title and H1, H2 etc. headings
- Correct formatting using shorter, blog-friendly paragraphs
Creating new content
There might be an opportunity to rank for a keyword or phrase that doesn’t appear in your existing content.
This keyword research is an important step in the link building process and a point where link building consultancy touches on content marketing. The two disciplines go hand in hand and often overlap.
Link-building consultants will research keywords, find the terms your site can rank for, and then advise on what format would rank best in Google Search Engines.
Pexels
Determine which pages are worth building links to.
Some pages might only need a few links to see a massive increase in traffic, while others might need hundreds and thus aren’t worth going after.
This is also a critical step in link building consultancy as it helps the website owner visualize what a link building outreach campaign would try to achieve.
Come up with a link-building strategy
You could use several link-building strategies to build links to your existing website. But the trick lies in determining which method is right for your site.
Factors that need to be considered include your budget, the time you’re willing to invest in the project, your website’s current strength, and your expectations for the link-building campaign.
A link building consultant can help you determine which link building strategies to use to achieve the desired rankings in a budget-efficient manner.
Here’s a brief overview of some of the link-building services most commonly used to build links:
Broken link building
In a nutshell, Broken link building is the process of finding a broken link on another site that is relevant to your website. You will then create and publish a similar article on your own site. And lastly, reach out to webmasters and ask them to exchange the broken link with yours.
This process involves a lot of research and time as you need to create content from scratch and, at the same time, identify only the best quality sites to reach out to.
Guest posting services
Guest posting is the process of writing new content for another website. The article usually includes a backlink to one of your pages and thus directs traffic back to your site.
Guest posts are a sure way to build backlinks that make a difference in Google Rankings.
This is because you’ll get a link from a topically relevant website that has relevant organic traffic to your site.
And because Google is already indexing the target site, it will boost your site authority.
Link-building consulting services are often part of the content creation process for these guest posting opportunities and help choose the correct anchor text that will benefit your site the most.
Link insertions
Also known as link placement, this is an easier way of building backlinks from pages that will make a difference to your Google Rankings in a relatively short amount of time.
This is because you’re building links from pages already indexed on Google and ranking for your targeted keywords or search phrases.
It also involves less effort, as there’s no need to create fresh content. The bulk of the work comes from identifying the right pages to target.
Here’s an in-depth explanation of the process of link inserts and the value they can add to your site.
Haro
Haro is short for Help-A-Reporter-Out.
This strategy is one of the hardest ways of landing a link nowadays. But the juice is often worth the squeeze.
Haro allows you to come into direct contact with reporters or web admins of some of the world’s best websites, like the Washington Post, the NY Times, and Forbes.
Although the success rate with Haro is relatively low, the payoffs can be huge, and landing a link on some of these websites can see your SERP rankings skyrocket.
How to spot a good link-building consultant
Are you overwhelmed by all the link-building companies promising you the world?
Pexels
A good link-building service will be identifiable by the following:
- Good communication
Link-building involves good communication with web admins. You need to have your finger on the pulse at all times.
But SEO agencies also need to communicate well with their clients, ready to answer questions at any stage of a campaign.
- Honest regarding expectations
This can be difficult as not all clients genuinely understand how difficult link building can be, but link builders with experience in this field will be honest with their clients from the beginning. Link-building takes time.
- Total transparency
Truly professional SEO services will always be transparent, not hiding any aspect of a campaign. They should be able to present a spreadsheet of the strategies they are using and their results.
- Delivers results within a reasonable amount of time
Return on investment is something that many SEO services promise but struggle to deliver.
Yes, link-building and SEO results take time, but there should be a pre-determined date for expected results from the link-building services.
Why is it important to use a link-building consultant?
Search Engines like Google have teams of engineers constantly updating their algorithms to rank the best content at the top.
If you choose to do your own SEO, you could unknowingly cause harm to your website and, ultimately, your business.
Pexels
How so?
Google looks at different aspects of websites and penalizes you for doing anything that would make it seem as though you’re trying to fool the algorithm.
Here are some of those no-nos:
- Keyword stuffing
Repetitively using specific keywords in an article or on a page to attract Google’s attention to your site is a sure way of getting penalized.
Here’s an example of Keyword stuffing from Google themselves:
“Unlimited app store credit. There are so many sites that claim to offer app store credit for $0 but they’re all fake and always mess up with users looking for unlimited app store credits. You can get limitless credits for app store right here on this website. Visit our unlimited app store credit page and get it today!” (5)
- Over-aggressive use of direct anchor texts in backlinks
Google often picks up the unnatural use of direct anchor texts and could incur a manual review or penalty for your site.
For example, there’s simply no way that 100 different websites can link to a set of clubs on a website in the Golfing niche at random and use the anchor text “best golf clubs.”
You’d expect to see alternative anchor texts like “a round of golf,” “good clubs,” “lightweight clubs,” “drivers,” “golf day,” “fathers day gifts,” and “putters.”
Link building consultants will lay out a plan regarding anchor text selection, which will help to reduce the number of links needed to rank while minimizing the risk of appearing unnatural.
- Using low-quality or spammy websites to gain links from
Time and again, we’ve seen that cheap links from spam websites have no lasting value.
Google will eventually pick up on the fact that the links originate from low-quality sites and associate your pages with them.
A Link building consultant will give advice on which sites to avoid when building links to not put your site at risk of receiving a penalty.
A real deal Link-Building Agency
Batlinks is primarily a backlink-building agency run out of Estonia.
We pride ourselves on building actual white hat links that have lasting value to our customers in various niches. We employ all the strategies mentioned in this article, from Haro and guest posting services to Broken link Building and link insertion services.
We also have a fantastic marketing team of researchers, writers, and editors who write high-quality content that reads and ranks well.
Get in touch with us today to speak to an SEO Expert that will help you unlock the potential of your website.
Article sources
2 – Statista on Google’s marketshare
3 – Hubspot