The most effective content marketing strategy is building personal relationships in the digital environment. Although this can be somewhat challenging, one route that helps is link building.
Link building does much more than build relationships; it paves the way for improved website ranking and traffic generation when you collaborate with reputable websites.
To put things into perspective, 65% of surveyed SEO experts believe link building significantly impacts search engine ranking. So how can you include this process in your content marketing strategy?
Source: uSERP
What is link building?
The term “link building” refers to getting more links to a website and content. Link building is a marketing tactic used by businesses to attract more visitors, leads, and sales. Companies can build links by being an active member in relevant communities and forums.
Business-to-business (b2b) brands have more complex needs than consumer companies, making consumer communication more effective and different from how consumers are used to.
In consumer marketing, you work with websites with products or services relevant to your target audience. For example, if you want to reach out to doctors in the United States, you would work with sites that have information about medical doctors or hospitals in the US.
Most b2b content marketing strategies encourage you to look for sites that offer products or services related to your target audience’s industry. You don’t necessarily need a website but rather a blog post on the subject of your niche so that those who view the page will know what information they are looking at.
Photo: Plato Terentev
There are different types of link-building strategies that you can use to help increase traffic to your website. For example, for B2B companies to compete effectively on the web, they must create unique and helpful content for their target audience. This content can be found on your website or provided by you through other channels, such as email marketing campaigns or social media campaigns. The trick here is creating quality content that customers would see and need.
How does link-building work?
Link building is a search engine optimization (SEO) tactic that allows brands, in this case, b2b brands grow their search engine ranking. So how does it work? Simply put, link building uses hyperlinks collected from other websites to your own.
It is a great marketing technique to use, but it can be time-consuming. B2B brands will have to find sites, blogs, and social media pages that are related to their product or service. In addition, they must link each post on those websites to your business website.
There are many online tools that can simplify this process, most of which are free tools. Such examples are;
- Google Search Console allows you to see what pages rank on Google, how they rank, and whether they have any backlinks pointing at them. It also shows you which keywords they rank for and their domain authority. This keyword ranking system will help you decide which keywords to focus on when writing blog posts and articles for a high Google ranking.
- Ahrefs: This website allows you to see all the links pointing back to your website so that you know where you need more work done to bring traffic back onto your website. You can also see which keywords people are linking from their websites to target them for future or new links.
It is essential to understand that link building is more than just a one-size-fits-all process. Therefore, B2B brands can use different content marketing strategies depending on the brand goals and premier industry.
You have to perform due diligence in finding the right people to collaborate with. It ensures that you can build up a strong network of influencers in your niche that can provide guest posting opportunities for you.
Why is Link building crucial?
The content marketing strategy that is link building is crucial for brands for various reasons, going beyond better visibility on search engines. SEO link building is essential for B2B brands because it increases your chances of being found by potential customers, but while this content marketing strategy increases traffic, it also does more;
1. Brand development
An effectively applied link building strategy can help establish your b2b brand as an authority figure in your niche. For example, B2B businesses can utilize various techniques to show off their expertise in your niche, which often goes a long way in overall brand development.
For example, when you collaborate with other websites and create content relevant to your niche, you show how knowledgeable you are in the industry. Ultimately, consumers will know to visit your brand for accurate information and solutions to their situations.
2. Relationship building
Above, we mentioned the need for collaboration in effective link building. To properly utilize backlinks, your brand will have to collaborate with other websites in your industry so you can feature your links in their publications and vice versa. These sorts of collaborations can aid in building long-term business relationships that benefit all involved parties.
Also, these relationships, especially when done with trusted brands, further solidify your brand’s reliability. For example, if a well-known brand like Nike collaborates with a local county designer, that local designer’s reputation instantly increases.
3. Referral traffic
Referral traffic is one of the highlights content marketers look out for when it comes to link building, as it increases your website ranking on google and directs relevant traffic to your website. If you have links to blog posts from other websites in your niche point to your site, there is a high chance that viewers of that post will click the link and be directed to your page.
But the best part is that you can be sure that these viewers are people that have an interest in the products and services you offer, leading to a higher sales chance.
When many focus on link building solely as an SEO technique, they lose out on other crucial factors.
What are the types of link building?
There are various types of link building, such as editorial, inbound, user-generated, black hat, white hat link building, and resource links. But for the sake of b2b brands, we will focus on these basic guidelines.
Content–focused link building.
This is when you create content relevant to your site’s topic and then share it on other sites. For example, suppose you are an SEO company. In that case, your content marketing strategy that involves link building might involve writing an article about the best SEO tools for beginners and sharing it on popular content marketing agency websites like Hubspot.
Guest posting
This refers to published guest posts on other sites that are relevant to your industry or audience (or both). For example, as a content marketing agency, you can write a guest post about the benefits of content marketing and share the post on your website.
Social Media
Social media is an excellent tool for driving traffic back to your site. But brands can also utilize it to build links by sharing content others have written or shared on their social networks.
How can your b2b outfit get started with link building?
The first step is to determine an effective content marketing strategy and tactic that will build links in a short time for your website.
You also need to know what type of backlinks you are looking for. For example, if you’re looking for inbound links, your focus should be on high-quality websites with relevant content or products related to your industry.
When it comes to link building, you can use different strategies depending on the type of site or page you want to add as a link (internal or external). Adequate knowledge of these strategies makes it easier to employ your marketing strategies.
Examples of practicable link building strategies for b2b
You can employ any of these proven link building strategies to grow your website:
- Help a reporter out (HARO). By answering questions or providing your expertise to reporters about subjects in your niche, these reporters link your website to their publications.
- Building an article or blog post using an existing template.
- Creating guest posts on other sites
- Creating press releases or email campaigns and article marketing
- Sending out a newsletter campaign
- One strategy is promoting events through social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
- Linkable assets such as games or surveys that tools like Google forms can easily create
- You offer to replace broken links on the website of an industry partner with your website links that serve the same purpose.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this post, we mentioned how link building is not a one size fits all process. Brands may need to resort to trial and error when determining what strategy works for their business. Ultimately, a combination of link building strategies works, performing different functions at each phase of your business growth. Sometimes all it takes is tailoring the various techniques available to your business plan.
As with all roads newly ventured, link building for your business can be challenging, but it is not insurmountable.