Google asks to have backlinks in order to rank an online venture. In fact, 58.1% of the 800+ SEO experts believe that link building for small business has a big impact on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP).
Moreover, link building also benefits the search engines to discover more authentic websites and inform other users as well. This enhances the credibility of a website.
Whenever a relevant big name in the market endorses a small business, it gives a natural boost to its ranking. That’s how link building directly affects the authority of a website.
In this article
- Why is Link Building For Small Business Important?
- Not All Backlinks Are Equally Strong
- 3 Things to Consider While Link Building for Small Business
- Should You Pay for Backlinks?
- Where to Start Getting Backlinks?
- Final Thoughts
Why is Link Building For Small Business Important?
A small-scale business needs to grow online to capture its target market. However, it’s only possible when the business’s website has good quality content and strong backlinks.
Magnus Home Products, an E-commerce store, got a boost of 225% organic traffic and 113% organic keywords in just two months with the help of link-building experts. Magnus Home Products is right now in SERP position 1-3 for 973+ keywords.
In today’s competitive online market, users complain of not finding relevant content as per their requirements. This happens when a business has low-quality content and the website has a weak backlink profile.
Therefore, it’s also important to follow white hat link-building techniques while optimizing a website. By doing that, Google will never penalize your business.
Other than that, the backlinks that refer the users to a particular web page is another SERP ranking factor. Google analyzes the backlinks and the respective user’s responses to them. If those links have irrelevant content, that website will have negative SEO velocity.
That’s why Google has become so smart to identify what websites are using black hat SEO tactics to create the backlinks. And after identifying those sites, Google will penalize or might ban them.
So, it’s mandatory to follow the white hat back linking to avoid any kind of such consequences.
Not All Backlinks Are Equally Strong
That’s right. The backlinks vary in quality in the eyes of the Search Engines. For instance, Google uses the PageRank algorithm that determines how important a link is for the users.
If a small hardware business is getting links back from IBM, that will be of more value than an endorsement from an unknown low authority website.
Besides, search engines have learned over time how to do link analysis. Therefore, it’s important for small business owners to get good quality backlinks that will help them in long-term SEO campaigns.
3 Things to Consider While Link Building for Small Business
Getting white hat backlinks for a business is no doubt a challenging job. To make that easy, there are three basic things to consider while building backlinks.
Local SEO
Since a small online business needs time to reach its maturity, it’s better to start getting local backlinks in the beginning. But what’s a local backlink?
As its name suggests, it’s a backlink that the search engine considers to be originating from your locality. However, it’s important that the backlink must be of a relevant niche.
When a business gets local links back to its site, that ranks its authority on a local level. Moreover, it’s one of the best strategies to secure the top position on SERP locally in the beginning stage of a small business.
Take a look at the case study of Digital Ducats Inc., a Toronto-based SEO service provider, which got a 63.64% increase in traffic after getting local backlinks.
Relevant Niche
The relevancy of the backlinks plays a vital role in SERP ranking. A recent business study shows that it takes Google about 8-10 weeks to evaluate and index a backlink.
However, there are other factors like the link’s quality as well that affect the backlink indexing. And that quality depends on how relevant a link is to that small business.
In simple terms, a relevant backlink must have these characteristics in it:
- Topical Relevance
- Similar Product/Service
- Common Industrial Research
Additionally, if you own a clothing store and there’s a local footwear shop nearby, you can get a relevant backlink from that. It’s because both niches lie under the same category, i.e., fashion.
Valuable Links
Now, as a small business owner, getting valuable links is a big thing. In SEO, a valuable link is the one that has 30-50 Domain Rating (DR).
Therefore, a backlink must be valuable in order to boost the website’s SERP ranking. Moreover, links originating from the following platforms are considered valuable:
- Editorial Content
- Webinar Backlinks
- Business Profiles
Now, it’s not necessary to follow all the three things mentioned above. However, a small business needs to be recognized. Therefore, getting local backlinks in the growing phase should be the priority.
Should You Pay for Backlinks?
It’s obvious that no business can rank on SERP without a legitimate backlink. However, 55% of the web pages have zero backlinks, but they are still ranked. How?
This means that the businesses are going against Google’s SEO guidelines. Google doesn’t allow businesses to pay for backlinks because it deceives the user while browsing.
Moreover, the paid backlinks temporarily benefit an online business. But when the Google crawlers identify those links, Google instantly blocks them and penalizes the website endorsed by them.
Therefore, paying for a backlink is a black hat SEO practice. On top of that, it’s not a good option to go for paid links because it’s easier for Google to catch small businesses than the big ones.
Where to Start Getting Backlinks?
For small businesses, it’s better to begin by registering on public discussion forums. Most of these platforms are free or have an affordable subscription plan. But the high authority forum sites help the business grow exponentially.
While getting backlinks from those forums, people get introduced to the new business. Moreover, there’s a high chance of getting organic traffic on the website from such platforms.
Besides, Google instantly ranks websites that have organic traffic surging towards them. But again, Google’s algorithm also analyzes the link velocity, and according to that, the website either gets ranked or penalized.
Therefore, it’s a recommendation to always follow white hat SEO link-building strategies to mitigate the risk of failure in the beginning phase.
LinkDoctor is a site helping businesses by providing quality white-hat backlinks following ethical guidelines with fast results.
Final Thoughts
As link building for small business has become a necessity, it’s important to fulfill that need according to the Google SEO guidelines. Once the backlink profile starts to get authority, Google will automatically uplift that business.
Therefore, it’s important for small businesses to always look for long-term SEO benefits by getting quality backlinks with proven results.
