One of the most challenging aspects of SEO is link building. No matter what type of website you have or niche you’re in, you’ll need to build links at some point if you intend on ranking for relevant keywords.
There are many link building benefits, but I wanted to focus on what I believe are the eight most important ones. The correct link building strategies can make or break a website regardless of whether it’s a blog, ecommerce store, or affiliate website.
What is Link Building?
Link Building is the process of gaining links on other websites that link to your site. These are called backlinks, and the steps and efforts used to earn these links is called link building.
They’re called links because that’s basically what they do; they link two websites together to provide more information or enhance the value provided on the website.
The text used to provide the link back to your site is called “anchor text,” and it’s important as well.
You want your anchor text to be related to the information provided on your site, so the person clicking the link has an idea of what they’re about to learn when they click through. It’s also important for SEO purposes to tell Google what is on the other side of the link.
So, how do you acquire high-quality backlinks on websites that will actually help boost your site authority and increase your rankings?
You do this by building connections with other people. Link building requires you to step outside the webpage and reach out to real people who own or manage the websites you want a link on.
Acquiring links doesn’t have to be difficult, but it is considered one of the more challenging aspects of building a successful website.
Over the years, various changes to Google’s algorithm has made link building more critical, but it has exposed many opportunities for the people who choose to do it the right way.
Proper link building requires you to reach out to other websites and provide value to them in the form of great content, money, link exchanges, or a combination of all of these.
8 Benefits of Link Building
With all of this, link building is incredibly important, and the benefits are clear. If you want your website to rank and you want to increase your traffic, you need links.
I want the focus of this guide to be on link building benefits and some of the reasons why I think you should prioritize link building. This is especially true if you have an established website that has focused primarily on content for a period of time.
If you have a content marketing strategy and you’re regularly providing valuable content on your site, you need to build links to that content if you intend on getting it to rank.
1. Higher Rankings
Links are part of the Google Algorithm, so the more links you have, the higher chance you have to rank in the search engine results.
This is also why I mentioned the importance of having a content marketing strategy and pairing link building with it. One of the biggest benefits of link building is that you’ll rank higher, which will expose your content to more people.
When your content ranks higher on Google, it increases the chances of your earning links naturally. Someone might see your content ranked number one when they’re doing their own research and link to you because it was valuable or they quoted you somewhere.
It’s also very important to understand that the quality of the links you get matters as well.
The image above is from a website report in Ahrefs; you can use the URL rating distribution data to see the quality of the websites that link to you. You’ll find that most of the websites have a low domain rating, so don’t be surprised or concerned when you see that.
Your goal should be to earn as many links from websites with the highest DR possible and as much of their own traffic as you can.
2. More Organic Traffic
The image above is from Ahrefs research, and while it focuses on referring domains, this can tell us quite a bit about how backlinks impact rankings on Google.
Websites that have 0-5 referring domains average somewhere between 0-500 organic search visitors per month. As the number of referring domains increase, so does the search volume.
We can assume that if a website is getting links from a number of other websites that it is increasing its overall number of backlinks.
So, we know that backlinks increase our rankings, and we know that higher rankings increase our traffic. This truly helps us understand the importance of having an efficient link building strategy.
Organic traffic is a term used to describe traffic that comes to your website naturally. This means the person searching for something on Google found your page because it was relevant to their search, and now they’ll click through to read your article or look at your page because you ranked high enough on Google.
Backlinks help you compete with the other websites that are trying to rank for the same keywords in the search engine.
If you look in the boxes, you’ll see the total number of backlinks these pages have. They rank in the number one and two spots on Google for the keyword “how to build an affiliate website.”
This tells you that backlinks are important, but they’re not the “end all be all” by any means. You want to make sure you build backlinks, but as you can see, the number one ranking article has dramatically fewer backlinks, and yet it still outranks the number two article.
There are other factors that play into ranking, such as domain rating and quality content. Your focus should be on providing the best quality information to your readers, and everything else is secondary.
3. Increased Revenue
It’s all full circle in the world of SEO. When you do one thing, it benefits another that benefits another. That’s one of the greatest benefits of link building in general. Your link building strategy impacts everything.
If you increase the total number of quality backlinks on a page, it’ll increase your rankings in the search engines, which increases your traffic, which increases your revenue. IF you link to the right pages.
You want to make sure you’re building backlinks to the pages that make you money, or at least prioritize those pages and ensure they’re getting a fair share of the link juice.
For example, if you have an affiliate website, you might have some pages that look like the one above. They’re roundup reviews or large compilations of a lot of similar products reviewed on a single page.
This review of portable generators would be considered a “money page” because it makes the website money, and getting more traffic to it directly correlates to the amount of money the website makes.
In this article, it’s a similar topic, but this wouldn’t be considered a money page. This is an informational or Q&A article. Having these on your website is important because you can rank for many great keywords and drive more traffic to your website, but you don’t make money on these pages.
Keep in mind that this depends on your monetization strategy. If you have ads on your site then you’ll still be able to make money on informational pages.
If you focus entirely on affiliate marketing or ecommerce, you’ll want to get as many links as possible on those pages to increase their rankings in the SERPs.
4. More Backlinks
One of the biggest benefits of link building is that building backlinks helps you build more links.
As you increase your rankings, you’ll find that you are scoring more backlinks out of nowhere. It does not require manual outreach, link exchanges, or anything like that.
This is happening because you’re ranking on the first page of Google, and people are linking to you because they’re using your information in their research and referring back to you to help their readers get more information about a topic.
Certain types of content get more quality backlinks than others.
How-To – How-to articles provide step-by-step instruction on how to do something. These articles get a lot of links because they’re used as a resource for writers that may not be able to provide the full breakdown in their article.
Authority Content – Authority sites like Backlinko and NeilPatel.com do this well in the SEO industry. They’re known as authority sites, and people respect their opinions; thus, link building becomes easy because people always link to them.
Original Research – If you do some original research, provide examples, and include incredible data in your article, you’re sure to score links if you can rank the content. This includes case studies, white papers, and interviews.
Media-Rich Content – Adding a lot of videos, images, and graphics to your content can increase the chances of you getting more links. Create shareable infographics with an embed built into it, so you automatically get a backlink each time it’s put on someone else’s website.
The key is understanding that quality content gets quality links. If you’re focusing on sites with high domain authority to get your quality links, they’ll expect you to have something of value for them. All effective link building starts with good content.
5. Increased Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is when people come to your website from the linking website. Remember that tip about building links on sites that have their own traffic? This is where this becomes a major factor.
Building links on successful websites helps you get referral traffic, especially if that website promotes the article with the link in it.
One of the best benefits of building backlinks is that it opens up the door for you to try and rank articles on other peoples websites.
If you’re writing guest posts, you can do your own keyword research and try to get that guest post to rank so you can capitalize on the referral traffic clicking through from their website.
This is something that doesn’t go away either. If the article ranks, you’ll reap the rewards of that referral traffic for as long as the link remains active. The benefits of link building strategies you implement now will continue to pay you for a while.
As you continue building backlinks and increasing links to your website, you’ll accumulate more and more referral traffic. Pair that with your own rankings, and you have a great recipe for success.
6. Higher Domain Authority
Domain Authority is a metric used by Moz to determine the authority of a website.
The tool builds a massive database of pages and looks at how many links they have to help determine the score. The more links, the higher the domain authority or DA.
So, if you’re increasing the number of backlinks to your website, you’re ultimately increasing your domain authority as well.
It’s important to take this data with a grain of salt because this is not Google’s data. Google uses a much more complicated algorithm to determine the PageRank of your domain, but it provides us with a benchmark.
It’s simple. More links equal higher ranking. Do your best to score backlinks from other sites with a high domain authority, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.
7. Build Relationships in Your Industry
The one thing that really separates link building from other forms of SEO is that it almost always requires you to actually talk to someone.
This doesn’t mean you have to pick up the phone and start cold-calling businesses asking for links, but you’ll likely reach out via email, LinkedIn, Facebook, or their social media.
At first, it might be intimidating but rest assured, you’re not the only one reaching out to these people asking for links.
When done correctly and respectfully, link building is a great way to build a name for yourself and establish yourself as an industry expert in your niche.
You should also realize that many people won’t answer your emails or messages but will still check out your website and whatever content you’ve shared. This is spreading awareness and familiarizing more people with you.
Even if someone isn’t necessarily interested in collaborating with you at that exact moment, you could be opening the door to future opportunities down the road.
Sometimes the biggest benefits of link building don’t immediately result in more traffic to your website or increase in search engine results.
The benefits of building are sometimes about building relationships and increasing brand awareness for your target audience.
8. Brand Awareness and Credibility
Have you ever seen a banner like this on a website? Why do websites do this?
They do it to build credibility. When you land on a site you’re unfamiliar with, the first thing you do is look around to see if you can trust these people.
One of the best ways to earn credibility, especially as a new website, is by getting a link on a big site that people are familiar with.
In the example above, this website in the fishing niche used manual outreach for guest posting to score links on all of the sites above. These are sites that people who fish are familiar with, so it shows that this website is also an authority in the niche.
When you reach out for guest posting opportunities, you’ll also spread your name around, whether you’re writing under your own name or your website.
If you’re focusing on link building in a specific niche, people in that niche are going to get used to seeing you in a number of places because you’re on all the websites they like to go to.
The more familiar they become with you, the more benefits in terms of trust and credibility you’ll experience.
Final Thoughts
These eight link building benefits will help you grow and scale your website regardless of your niche or monetization strategy.
At We Outreach, we understand the importance of an effective link building strategy and that’s the reason why we’ve made it our primary focus to help business owners score more high quality links.
If you’re struggling to build links or develop a link building strategy, contact us today!
