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5 link building strategies for Small Business in 2017
28 Mar 2017 Dominic Comments Off on 5 link building strategies for Small Business in 2017
As a small business, you may very well find one of the biggest struggles being how to get quality traffic to your website – one of the most common issues for small businesses is link building and understanding what are the best ways to build your brand with SEO. Without knowing what the latest in SEO best practice is, many small businesses still go to agencies who promise lots of links to your site but in fact will be negatively affecting your rankings by employing what are referred to as “black hat” link building techniques.
These techniques are bad for your business as search engines continue to crack down on link exchanges, paid anchor placements and other shady approaches to building links. You need to avoid these “old school” methods and focus on relevant, authoritative links that drive real quality traffic to your website. These are 5 ways as a small business you could get quality links to your website.
1. Partner with niche-specific influencers
Try and identify the niche specific influencers in your industry. Don’t try and cover everyone – by focusing on the main influencers and developing a relationship with them, you can bypass the “noise” in your sector and can establish content partnerships with influencers who serve relevant content to your target audience.
For instance, you can be a regular contributor to their blogs and occasionally link out to your own landing pages. Developing a relationship will increase your chances of this – consumers are more likely to trust these links over one or two sponsored posts for a few reasons – they trust the influencer to only allow contributors who provide value and a regular contribution from a small business owner/employee is seen as an honest contribution. Link building using this technique will ensure you build a relevant backlink relationship with relevant traffic in your niche.
2. Leverage local partnerships for link building
Look at your local network – how can you maximize your locale and approach people in your area? Once approached you can then start forming partnerships with local organizations – which is an excellent opportunity to get backlinks from their websites. Or you may have existing partnerships in which case all you need to do is get in touch with current partner websites for link placement.
Try and avoid big corporations but draft a hit list of local smaller businesses you can target. You can also replicate the first link-building strategy by contributing to local blogs. And apart from local business blogs, you may come across official community blogs and local news blogs that welcome guest contributions.
Or how about local event sponsorship that caters to small businesses? This can get you links from the event’s sponsorship page. Apart from events, you can sponsor award ceremonies, conferences and charities. Any opportunity to get backlinks from these opportunities is worthwhile.
3. Use the skyscraper technique
This is a technique invented by Brian Dean of Backlinko, and is a technique which simplifies the link-building process by not requiring you to reinvent the wheel. Using this technique you can avoid having to come up with new content every week – you can simply take what’s working for others (including your competitors!) and improve upon it. All perfectly legitimate – if it is working for them then it should work for you! The 3 steps to this technique are:
Top performing content – what is the best performing content in your sector? Top-performing content can be determined based on the number of times it has been shared on social media or the quality of links pointing to it. You can use a tool like BuzzSumo to search the content that has performed well and a tool like Open Site Explorer to analyze the quality of its backlinks.
New content – Perhaps the top-performing content is low on practical examples or case studies. Or maybe it doesn’t go into as much detail as it could. You can deliver more value on the same theme by creating a more in-depth or comprehensive piece of content on the same topic.
Outreach – Reach out to relevant websites and influencers via email and social media. Look at websites and influencers that are already linking to the content you’re improving upon. Give them a heads-up about the new piece, and that includes the most recent information and examples.
The skyscraper technique is also known as “Content Marketing”. This has become an industry in itself over recent years and is a technique which has helped businesses build organic links and drive traffic to their websites. Content Marketing has become very popular in recent years and will continue to do so as search engines will rate high value content.
4. Search for business mentions
Finding business mentions that do not include links on community resource pages, forums and so on is a convenient and cost-effective way to build links. In addition to using the brand name when trying to uncover backlink opportunities, use other relevant keywords that would be listed on the page in addition to your business name to narrow down your search.
With BrandMentions you can discover mentions of your business and relevant keywords in the last 24 hours, last week and last month. Choosing “English” as the preferred language will further narrow down mentions. BrandMentions can be used with Google Alerts to research new mentions.
After you click on a particular URL, use CTRL+F (find function) to search for your brand on the page. You may find articles that are dedicated to your business or indirectly mention your business but don’t include a link to your website. Get in touch with the authors of these articles and ask for link insertion.
5. Link Building by creating a resource page
Depending on your locality, you can create a local resource page that includes useful information for small businesses in your area. For instance, if you’re an event company in Cheshire, you can create a list of the best wedding venues in the area.
When you provide useful information, other businesses (even competitors) will link to your resource page. You can partner with local subject matter experts to create information-rich resource pages; the efforts put into these pages will pay off once they capture the attention of businesses in the industry.
A resource page can then be cited when participating in Q&A websites and local business forums. It might even land you interviews and guest appearances (webinars, podcasts and so on), providing opportunities to build links from participated content.
These 5 suggestions are just some of the ways you could get relevant links to your website. SEO in 2017 is about generating good, original and useful content – there are many other ways to get that traffic but concentrating on building your brand using ways that search engines will like as opposed to the black hat techniques above will ensure you
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