Imagine the situation: there are two companies in the market, for example, of legal services. Both rely on content marketing and write quality materials. Articles of one of them are constantly in the TOP of search results, articles of the other – rarely get even to the first page. What could be the reason?
All other things being equal, the critical difference could be link building. The company with top-ranking articles likely has a strong link building strategy, resulting in a higher number of backlinks (links from other websites to their articles). These backlinks are crucial for SEO, as they signal to search engines that the content is valuable and trustworthy, thereby boosting its ranking. On the other hand, the company with lower-ranking articles may lack sufficient backlinks, causing their content to remain buried in search results.
Let’s explore the significance of backlinks for promoting goods and services. Without delving too deeply into theory, we’ll examine how Google determines search results and dispel common myths about SEO. This article will help you understand SEO better and avoid contractors who make unrealistic promises about quick backlink success.
How Google Search Results Work And What Are Backlinks to The Site
A backlink occurs when Site A links to Site B. For Site B, this link is called a reverse or incoming link.
Why are backlinks so important? Backlinks signal to search engines that other websites vouch for your content. When multiple sites link to the same webpage, Google’s algorithms view this content as high quality, boosting its ranking in search results.
Therefore, getting backlinks positively impacts your site’s position and visibility on Google. Some SEO specialists believe that 90% of backlinks can ensure a resource gets on the first page of Google search.
However, the quality of these incoming links is crucial. If your site is linked only by spam sites with low-quality content, search engines may also consider your site spammy, hurting its search ranking.
How to Check Backlinks to The Site: Your Own and Competitors
Ahrefs
The Ahrefs service will allow you to check not only your links, but also any site that interests you. It is enough to enter the URL on the backlink check page to get the results.
Please note: in addition to the number of backlinks and referring domains, the report page has a Domain Rating value, which is useful when analyzing competitors.
Domain Rating (DR) is a conditional assessment of the quality of site backlinks from 1 to 100. Let’s not go deep into the algorithm of its formation, but if for your site DR = 30, and your competitor has DR = 20, the quality of your link profile is higher than that of your competitor. This situation can occur even if you have fewer backlinks, because quality is more important than quantity.
Instead of Ahfrefs, you can use other tools, such as Ubersuggest or Semrush.
Quality of Backlinks in SEO
SEO specialists can reveal the topic of backlink quality for hours, talking about many factors. But still, 5 basic characteristics can be distinguished from this variety, which determine the quality of backlinks:
- Relevance of the anchor text. Ideally, this text should correspond to the subject of your site, and even better if it includes keywords on the topic of your business
- Relevance of content. The content of the donor site must be relevant to your niche.
- Uniqueness of the IP address and the referring domain. A situation where almost all backlinks for your site are received from one domain or one site will also be suspicious for search engines. It is necessary to avoid such situations and strive to diversify the resources that refer to you.
- Geography and language of the referring site. If the content of your site is in Russian or Ukrainian, and the main sources of backlinks are sites in Spanish and German, such a story will not inspire search engines to trust your resource either.
- Location of the link on the page. It is better if the backlinks are placed in the main text of the page. Links can be in the sidebars or footer, but then their value for search engines will be less.
At the same time, it is extremely important to comply with the main rule: backlinks in SEO should look natural. If you want to hire a professional link building service for this purpose, click here.
Where to Get Backlinks to The Site
So, it remains to be understood where to get quality backlinks.
Backlinks on your own
You can do most of the work of obtaining backlinks with your team, without involving third-party contractors. For example, you can place links to sections of your site, important articles or landing pages of your services on social networks. Yes, such links have less weight, but why not use this opportunity, because most likely you already have an account on Facebook (Meta), Instagram or LinkedIn.
Here are a few more ways that will help to increase high-quality and natural (for search engines) reference mass. The main secret of most of the proposed methods is the publication of high-quality content that people will want to share.
- Publish an expert guide on any topic relevant to your business on your website. People will definitely want to share it and Google will definitely notice such content.
- Publish an infographic. Choose a study and turn it into an infographic page – this is another good chance to get backlinks.
- Do you have partner companies or contractors? Ask them to post a review of successful cooperation with a link to your site on their pages or place your logo with a link in the “Partners” section.
- Does anyone in your niche have a successful blog? Contact him and offer to write a guest post on a specific topic with a link to your resource.
- Are there successful bloggers in your niche who review goods or services? Offer your product for review or conduct an interview on a popular topic for their YouTube channel by placing a link to your site in the description of the video.
As you can see, for most of the listed tasks you will not need SEO specialists. Your content specialists, PR department or even HR department can help in generating backlinks.
Purchasing backlinks
Hiring a professional in building a reference profile can be a good idea. Such specialists are called link builders, but SEO agencies can also take up this work. The pros are obvious:
- work on increasing the reference mass will be carried out systematically;
- backlinks will be handled by professionals;
- you will free up your team’s time and resources for other tasks, such as creating quality content.
Remember! Don’t go to extremes. Do not strive to get hundreds of links in the first month of working with the site. Otherwise you can get Google penalties.
