If you want to stand out in today’s highly competitive market, you’re going to need high-quality SEO and link-building campaigns to improve your SERP rankings and drive traffic to your website.
However, link-building isn’t easy and involves many strategies that vary in terms of their expertise, required resources, and efficiency.
Before we get down to discussing how a link building agency can help you with this, you first need to understand what link building is and why it’s so important for your business.
What is Link Building and How Does It Affect Rankings?
Link building is the process of building hyperlinks from other sites back to your own. The search engines use them to discover new pages and determine how well a web page should rank in SERPs. The more high-quality sites link to your website, the higher your web pages will rank in the search results.
Here are some stats that can help you understand how impactful link building really is:
- More than 58% of SEO experts believe that backlinks have a big impact on SERP rankings
- Neary 60% of marketers indicated that backlinks would have a bigger impact in the next few years.
- Nearly 70% of them say that buying links positively impacts their search engine rankings for difficult keywords.
But then, there’s this:
- 65% of digital marketers state that link building is the hardest part of SEO.
This brings us to our point – link building is hard. In fact, more than 50% of marketers say that it takes 1-3 months to see the impact of link-building strategies. So, if you want to see results from your link-building efforts, your best bet is to invest in professional link-building services.
In this article, we’re going to explain what a link-building agency will do to skyrocket your rankings.
1. Acquire High-Quality Links
The quality of the links is one of the most important elements that Google and other search engines focus on when analyzing the sites that are linking back to your website. A higher number of quality links on your web pages will also determine how often you’ll be featured in the SERPs.
A good link-building agency will ensure that these links come from respected and authoritative websites. But what exactly is an authority website?
Simply put, an authority site is a website that is trusted by readers, search engines, and industry experts when it comes to a certain subject. The more authoritative the web page linking back to you is, the more authority they will pass on to your site.
When searching for authoritative websites, the website’s relevancy is another important aspect to take into consideration. If the links to your site are irrelevant, Google will discount them. For instance, if your site is about food and you get a link from a construction website, that link won’t count for much, regardless of the website’s authority.
Sounds like a lot of work, right? The best thing is that a professional agency will find a way to gain high-quality backlinks without spending too much time looking for them, allowing you to focus on running and growing your business.
2. Create Quality Content
Creating good-quality content that’s beneficial to your audience is crucial when it comes to natural link-building. According to Moz, 90% of marketers use content pieces as their primary tactic to generate more backlinks.
The goal is to create easily-digestible articles that people would want to share, such as numbered lists, diagrams, and infographics. Research has shown that listicle content generates the highest amount of unique backlinks compared to all other types of blog posts. In addition, long-form content is much more effective – blog posts containing 3,000+ words receive more backlinks on average than blog posts under 3,000 words.
So, again, it’s a lot of work.
An expert link building agency has a team of content specialists dedicated to creating original, engaging, and useful content. They will submit guest posts on websites where your target audience hangs out in order to deliver your brand message to a wider audience scope. In addition, they will promote your guest posts on your social media pages to drive more traffic to your content.
3. Build Links Through Outreach
Reaching out to other bloggers and websites in your industry is a great way to create natural, high-authority backlinks. Email outreach is an amazing white-hat approach that gets you quality links.
A link building agency will do all the work for you, including identifying bloggers and website owners to reach out to, finding their email addresses, getting in touch with them, in order to generate 33% higher response rates, and following up (which essentially increases email responses by 2x).
The best agencies also have a database of partner websites that meet certain quality standards (such as traffic, topical relevance, and domain relevancy).
4. Pay Attention to Anchor Texts
As Google becomes even smarter through algorithm updates like BERT (which increases the search engine’s understanding of human language), it pays close attention to anchor text, so link builders need to do the same. Link building is already complicated enough as it is, and the need to be strategic about anchor texts can make it even more difficult.
The search engine’s algorithms can recognize unnatural anchor text. If too many of your backlinks contain the exact same anchor, Google will consider that those links weren’t obtained naturally.
That’s why it is vital for your rankings to optimize your anchor texts. There are two things to take into account: the quality of the anchor text and the distribution of types of anchor text links.
A good link building agency will research anchor text distribution, optimize internal link anchor text, making sure your anchor text is natural and mixing in long-tail keywords with your exact match anchor texts.
5. Use Quick Strategies
Experienced specialists use a variety of different white-hat link-building tactics that go beyond content creation and guest posting to build links and raise your ranking in the SERPs.
One of the most popular strategies is the skyscraper technique. This is a complex strategy that requires detailed research on the niche you are creating content for, pinpointing all the weak spots and omissions of the current content that targets your audience, and creating content that’s better than your competitors. Once better content is created, the agency will reach out to the sites that have backlinks to the original content, and ask them to replace one with yours.
Other quick strategies that professional link building services use include replicating competitors’ backlinks, detecting and replacing broken links, using reciprocal links, etc.
Final Thoughts
There are many ways to improve your ranking and increase your traffic but link-building is the oldest and most commonly used means of achieving this goal.
Outsourcing your link-building efforts might turn out to be more beneficial and cost-effective than handling it on your own.
Using professional link building services is the best way to improve both your SEO and SERP rankings. Experienced specialists will do this by working with you to gain an understanding of your business, analyzing the reasons that your site might not be ranking well, and creating a personalized link-building strategy to start improving your Google rankings.
