Hello, Nick Ponte here. I love helping business owners like you with their SEO and business performance. Besides marketing campaigns, I do a lot of work with website optimizations so you get the highest quantity and best quality out of your web traffic.
What do I mean when I say quantity and quality? Quantity simply means more people visiting your website on their desktops or smartphones, which hopefully turn into visits to your physical store or e-commerce shop. Generally speaking, high quantities of traffic means a greater probability of building your customer base.
Quality is a bit more nuanced. Besides having a high number of people visit, you also want them to do something when they stop by. Ideally, they’ll find your homepage or blog content through a Google search, read a couple of articles and “about us” style pages, and be convinced to take a step toward greater engagement with your business. This could mean booking an appointment to see you, getting directions to you on their phone, buying something from your digital shop… or whatever you have set as your main “call-to-action” (CTA) on your site.
As you can see, highest quantity is desirable, but best quality is even better.
So, to boost the quality of your traffic further, I want to give three best practices for link building.
Also Read: Quality SEO Link Building Guide
What’s “Link Building” and Why Does It Matter?
Beyond a random assortment of webpages, your entire site ought to be a thriving ecosystem of closely-interrelated pages. The stronger the ecosystem, the more your customers will want to stay a while when they visit.
Link building refers to all the links you use on your website. Some links go back to old blog posts you’ve written, some go to your CTA (call-to-action), and a few go to other websites. Having the right links in the right places ensures that people stay longer on your website, visit more pages, and become more likely to use your CTA by the end of their visit.
It also has benefits for search engine optimization (SEO). Links improve the way search engines perceive your website. It works like this: To get a search result rank on a platform like Google, it has to find your website’s relevance to certain searches. Google learns (as best as it can) how well your site meets the needs of the searcher by crawling your website and checking out all the text, links, images, and video.
Imagine a robot sleuthing around with a little clipboard, making sure you check all the boxes to give searchers what they’re looking for.
Good internal linking makes the robot’s job easier, and shows them that you have a metric ton of content related to the searcher’s query. This makes them more likely to assign you a higher rank. Also, when you link to other high-quality content on the web, you get bonus points in the algorithm.
So to sum up, quality link building can boost traffic, engagement, and conversions, which are all key metrics you should use to measure your traffic quality.
Also Read: The Top 5 Misconceptions About SEO For Your Business
3 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Links
I’m sharing three best practices of how you can use links to improve your website traffic quality:
- Backlinks
Backlinks simply link to other pages on your website. The most common form of backlink involves linking to older blog content when publishing a new blog. You’ve already seen quite a few backlinks on this blog.
Good backlinks guide the user through your website and always lead to the same place: Your CTA. Make sure the customer has plenty of chances to take a step further with your business. To that end, I always try to link to my CTA (a free strategy call) on each page.
Go through your blogs and other webpages and add a few backlinks. Anywhere from 3-7 will do depending on the length of each page. For extra credit, go to your really old blog posts and link forward to newer posts.
- Check Up On All Your External Links
As mentioned before, you want to link to other highly ranked places to help your rankings. But you generally don’t want to link to your competition, so it requires some finesse. Still, it can’t hurt to share, say, a quote from a thought leader and then a link to their website to start a blog post.
When Google sees your site as part of the ecosystem of authoritative and helpful content on the web, it will begin associating you with them just a little bit more.
Make sure that all of the external links on your sites work and actually take the customer somewhere. Don’t add “dead links” because it will hurt you. Also, make sure the links don’t take people to shady places, scams, or low-quality content. A good rule of thumb: link to places that already rank well in Google, because then you know it passes the test.
- Create Link-Worthy Content
We’ve talked about the links you include to other sites, but that’s not the full story. Long term, it also helps when people link to you. Of course, you can’t always control what other people do with their websites, so getting this result is a bit more difficult to manage.
The best way to do this over time? Create quality, link-worthy content on your blog. Make it something that others actually want to show their own audiences. This means including helpful information and becoming an authority in your industry. And yes, it takes time.
For a quick boost, see if you can network with other business owners or bloggers in your sphere and establish a quid pro quo. They link to your blogs if you share their content, or offer joint promotions.
But over the long haul? Read about your industry every day and become an expert. Develop a blog that posts regularly and consistently, centered around the same 10-15 topics relevant to Google searches. Make them about 800-1200 words each, and include a few backlinks and maybe one external link in every post. Share it on all your social media channels.
If you remain consistent, people will eventually start quoting and linking to your content, giving you an extra boost for SEO—and ultimately conversions.
If you ever need help with your business website, we’ve got you covered. We offer a FREE audit of your digital marketing and tell you all of its strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. For more information on this, reach out to us today!
Further Reading: How to Improve SEO Stats with a Blog—And Watch Customers Flood In
Photos Courtesy of Agence Olloweb, Lars Kienle, and Alexander Schimmeck