Whether you are operating a blog or an E-commerce website, gaining traffic and online visibility is crucial if you wish to be successful. Unfortunately, since the internet is vast and filled with billions of websites, obtaining traffic can be challenging, especially when starting out.
Getting traffic to your website requires consistency and determination. It is a time-consuming process. However, using the right digital marketing strategies can ease the process and make it less complicated.
SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization and is a widely used term by digital marketers. SEO is essential if you want your website to gain more traffic. The first few websites to appear in search results don’t reach there by luck or chance. Instead, they implement the best SEO practices to get there.
If you are familiar with SEO, you must know that backlinks are an essential part of it. Digital marketers have different approaches to obtaining backlinks. Some prefer creating linkable content on their websites, while others like writing guest posts. You can even get backlinks by having your website feature in a business anniversary directory while celebrating an important milestone. The options are endless!
But before creating backlinks, consider learning more about them and how they can benefit your website’s traffic and SEO.
What Are Backlinks?
Creating backlinks is one of the most common activities SEO executives perform when trying to improve a website’s off-page SEO. They’re also called inbound or incoming links and are extremely important for a website to obtain a respectable ranking in SERPs. Websites or web pages with more backlinks are considered more relevant and authoritative.
Search engines like Google and Bing consider backlinks as votes or stamps of authority for a specific page. Pages with more votes from other websites show the search engine that the content is credible and valuable. An example will help illustrate this better.
Let’s assume you run a digital marketing agency. You decide to create a blog for your agency’s website to leverage the power of content marketing to boost its ranking in SERPs. As the year ends, you write an original, research-based write-up about the most popular digital marketing trends observed in 2023. Other digital marketers find your research valuable and start linking it in their blogs and articles. Thus, you gain backlinks from other trusted sources, helping your blog page rank higher in SERPs.
Why Are Backlinks Important and How to Create Them?
Since the internet consists of over 1.13 billion websites, human beings can’t go through all of them to determine if they’re providing useful and valuable information. Hence, search engines use crawlers to go through these web pages. Search engine giants have conditioned these crawlers to look for certain factors to determine a website’s authority, and backlinks are one of them.
However, while backlinks are important, not all backlinks are the same. Google values backlinks from high-ranking sources with considerable traffic and a respectable domain authority more than links from less trustworthy sources. Therefore, in addition to creating a considerable amount of backlinks, your focus should be on creating high-quality ones.
You can build backlinks in several ways. However, the best practice is to create linkable assets on your website. If you want people to link back to your website, you need to have something on your website worth linking back to in the first place. For instance, as mentioned in the earlier example, creating a list of statistics relevant to your industry is always an excellent way to get backlinks from other credible sources.
Another effective strategy for building backlinks is guest posting. But you must ensure you strategically guest post. Writing guest posts for websites that have little relevance to your website will detrimentally affect your site’s SERP rankings because search engines might consider it spamming.
How Do Backlinks Help Traffic and SEO?
If you’ve read this post so far, you already know why backlinks matter and how to create them. However, understanding their importance requires learning how they affect website traffic and SEO. Here’s how backlinks can boost your website’s traffic and SEO score:
1. Provide Referral Traffic
Research shows that approximately 53.3 percent of all website traffic comes from organic searches. While organic search is an excellent way to generate traffic, you also want to obtain as much traffic for your website as possible, meaning you’ll also want to leverage referral traffic. That’s where backlinks become crucial. While they can help you get more direct traffic through search engines, a backlink from a website with high domain authority and a large readership can also contribute to indirect referral traffic.
For instance, let’s assume your website gets a backlink from a Forbes article. Forbes gets over 150 million monthly visitors on its website. Some of these visitors might read the article containing your backlink and consider checking out your website. As a result, you may obtain referral traffic to your website that you wouldn’t otherwise get. Most people who would click on the link to your website will already be interested in learning more about your content. Thus, converting these people into loyal readers or customers becomes easier.
2. Ongoing Promotion
Another advantage of backlinks is that they provide ongoing promotion even after these links have been acquired. A high-quality backlink will continue contributing to your website’s SEO score and SERP rankings without additional effort.
3. Higher SERP Rankings and a Better SEO Score
It’s important to understand that SEO consists of three parts. These include on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Your website’s content, keyword usage, external linking, and meta descriptions affect on-page SEO. Meanwhile, technical SEO focuses on the backend web development aspect. Websites must have a mobile-friendly web design, excellent page speed, and avoid broken and duplicate pages to meet the technical SEO requirements set by search engines.
Backlinks are a crucial aspect of off-page SEO. If you’ve already managed to get your on-page and technical SEO factors right, developing high-quality backlinks will improve your website’s overall SEO score and help it rank higher in SERPs.
4. Increase in Revenue
Backlinks can also be particularly beneficial for websites that sell products or services. As more people visit your website and find your products and services, you have more opportunities to convert them into customers.
Conclusion
Backlinks can help websites get more referral traffic, boost their SEO ranking, and offer greater visibility in search engine ranking pages. Furthermore, such links are crucial for SEO efforts because they help search engine crawlers identify your website’s credibility, authority, and relevance. Ensure you focus on creating high-quality backlinks instead of targeting quantity.
Jeena Alfredo is a passionate digital marketer at The Business Goals. She is working with other companies to help them manage the relationship with The Business Goals for the publications.
