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Link Building For Small Businesses In 2017

Link building is a very important thing to do if you want to achieve and maintain a strong online presence in 2017. This is the case for all businesses, both big and small. Unluckily, and not to much surprise, small businesses are going to have a much harder time carrying out link building than large companies that have huge visibility and specialised internal marketing teams.

Safe, successful link building can be very confusing for anyone who isn’t properly trained in SEO. And just to add to the confusion, it seems that Google can’t make up their mind on whether they want you to do it or not. In one place we’re told to ‘Make sure that other sites link to yours’ and then Google’s own John Mueller later makes out that link building can ‘do more harm than good.’

So what exactly should you be doing? Find out in this brief guide.

Why Your Business Needs Link Building

In early 2016, Google’s Andrey Lippatsev announced that the top two ranking factors are links and content – closely followed by Google’s machine learning algorithm RankBrain. With links being one of the top two ranking factors, the importance of building links is made clear.

Links build authority in search results. They make your site trusted and can help you to rank significantly higher. As well as this, they can bring through consumers from third-party websites like directories, forums and e-commerce sites – so they’re extremely beneficial for bringing traffic to your site.

So How Do You Go About Building Links?

As a small business there’s one way you can safely go about link building without the aid of a professional SEO agency, and that’s by creating and sharing a piece of valuable, quality content with a relevant audience. If you create content that is helpful to a target audience, they’ll share it throughout the industry, generating quality trusted links relative to your business.

As a small business you’ll most likely only need a small amount of quality links to your site to gain some authority. You need to be very careful with the way you go about generating your links though, as even just a few bad links can have a detrimental effect on your rankings.

The Process

  • First of all, create a piece of quality content that has value to your target audience. You should ensure it’s well optimised with a gripping title.
  • Share the link onto trusted third-party sites in the form of guest posts, forum submissions or social comments. (use descriptive, optimised anchor text)
  • See what results come back and continue this process with various content pieces to keep a constant flow of quality links. Don’t get carried away – focusing on link quantity can see you penalised by Google’s anti-spam Penguin algorithm, which will do much more harm than good.

Hassle-Free, Successful And Professional Link Building

As a small business link building can be very stressful – it’s time consuming, risky and confusing. If you don’t have the time or expertise to carry out link building, or you just don’t want to run the risk of causing negative effects to your rankings, consult an expert to carry it out for you.

UC4 is a Birmingham SEO agency that can complete fully compliant, quick and successful link building. We only generate links to highly trusted sites, so you’ll be sure to see positive results in no time.

Contact us today to discuss the set up of your professional back linking strategy.