How to Get More Backlinks for Your Website
When you want to know if a product or service is worth purchasing, you will often look for reviews and testimonials. This habit is normal human behavior that we all engage in.
In the online world, websites work on much the same principle. The more websites link back to your site, the better the rankings will be for your site.
Many companies want to grow their online presence through organic traffic, and backlinks to your site are an excellent way to do it.
The reality is that the quality and quantity of referring domains pointing to your site make a difference in your SEO results.
The first thing to understand is that backlinks are not measured with equal weight. One hundred backlinks from one website are not more valuable from one hundred backlinks from different referring domains.
To grow your SEO success, you need to acquire some referring domains (i.e., other websites) that link back to you. More backlinks will mean more traffic sources, and an increase in unique site visitors and page views.
So, the question is: how do you acquire high-quality referring domains? It’s not a simple answer, but it all starts with consistent content marketing and link-building strategies.
Read on to discover how to boost your search engine rankings and increase visibility with your target audience.
1) Find Your Top-Performing Pages
Identifying your top pages on your website is one of the best ways to figure out how to attract more backlinks. Rather than obsess about getting links to new pages, see which ones are already getting a lot of traffic, and which sources they are coming from.
Using a tool such as Ahrefs can quickly help you see how your site performs and how many other websites are linking back to you already.
One section to use is the Top Pages, where you can see which pages on your site have the most views and the volume of backlinks you have.
A high number of backlinks from referring domains means your content is trusted among other websites and online users. Therefore, it is wise to know what people are already valuing on your website to continue to provide more of the same content.
2) Identify Content Gaps
The more valuable content on your website, the more links you will get from top referring domains in your industry. Identifying gaps in your current content will broaden your potential target audience and referral links.
If people are already visiting specific pages on your site, the more you give people what they already value, the better your chances of gaining more backlinks.
If you look at the pages on your site that are already ranking, you can then consider how you can improve the pieces.
Take a look at the SERP results for other sites that rank for the same keywords as your pages. What information do they share that you do not? What are some areas of detail you can add to your content that they might be missing?
Try updating your most popular content pieces at least once or twice a year. Doing this will indicate to the search engines that your content is current and worth upgrading the rankings.
3) Use a Variety of Content Types
Variety is the spice of life, and that’s also true for your website content. If you can vary the types of content you share, you are more likely to attract more backlinks to it.
Here are some content types to try and help acquire more backlinks from unique referring domains:
- Create Case Studies — create unique, data-driven content that can help you earn links from industry publications. This content type can include trends and findings from surveys that you can produce yourself.
- Use Your Teams Expertise — tap into your team’s industry knowledge and include direct quotes to boost your content’s authority.
- Create Expert Roundups — these types of posts are common on sites like Forbes and Linkedin, where different experts in a field offer their views on a specific topic. They are relatively simple to create, and you can reach out to people for a quote that can then be used as part of the roundup. Many people featured in the roundup will also happily link back to the article from their website.
- Design Infographics — if you have an article with a lot of data or instructions, try creating an infographic that explains visually. Other websites will often share your infographics and link them back to your site at the same time.
4) Write for Other Sites
It might seem counterintuitive to share your ideas and expertise on other sites, but it has a significant benefit. Guest blogging offers multiple benefits for growing your online reputation, but it can also be a great way to get links back to your site.
Another method of sharing your ideas is through the site Help A Reporter Out (HARO). It’s a free service website that you can leverage to share ideas with journalists and writers who need information for articles. Very often, they will offer backlinks to your site, and that helps grow online traffic.
5) Keep It White Hat
A key to improving your online rankings is to ensure you follow search engine guidelines and best practices.
Remember that if you acquire several backlinks from the same domain, the value of those additional backlinks after the first placement decreases significantly. This ranking factor is in place so that sites don’t do link-for-link trading with each other.
It can be tempting to delve into black hat strategies that seem to work in the short term. However, over time the search engines will always snuff out any non-genuine sites trying to hack or cheat on getting backlinks.
More Value = More Backlinks
Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that gaining backlinks gets easier if you provide valuable information. Think of a site like Wikipedia – it naturally gains links because it gives an incredible amount of free information on almost every topic imaginable.
You can replicate this same result on your site if you focus on sharing knowledge and resources with your core audience. In return, you will gain more backlinks and visitors to your site and slowly grow the volume of conversions from organic traffic.
