Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is the core strategy that promotes your website on top of the search engine results page (SERP). With better understanding of search engines, digital marketers think of new ways to reach the top of SERP. Link building plays an important role in SEO, but it’s also a delicate component of an effective SEM strategy.
In this article, we’ll focus on how link building is used for search engine marketing. We’ll look into the role it plays in reaching the top of the search rankings. I will also provide some examples to show how high-quality backlinks affect rankings in real-time.
Read on further to know how it’s done!
How Link Building and SEM are Connected
Search engine marketing (SEM) is concerned about search engine rankings. It includes using Google Adwords, PPC marketing, and other sure ways to reach the top. Digital marketers exhaust a lot of resources to make sure that their respective websites are performing well on search results.
Link building is a part of an elaborate SEM strategy. It’s highly effective and won’t empty your pocket. That’s why SEO professionals prefer this method over other paid strategies.
On the flip side, link building takes a considerable amount of time to take effect. You have to wait for months to see the scale of your link building strategy.
What’s good about this strategy (aside from being free) is that it scales as you continue with your work. As you build links, your domain gets traction on SERP for the target keyword. Once you gain traction, the benefits will be like boulders rolling down the hill.
That is if you do link building the right way.
Search Engine Marketing Using Link Building Strategies
Search engine marketing and link building have the same goal – to achieve the top position in SERP rankings. But can we use link building strategies for search engine marketing? What’s the difference?
Here, we will discuss what link building strategies are also applicable for SEM. Just to be clear, link building can be considered as a subset of search engine marketing. But SEM favors paid advertisements and other strategies that involve money.
Meanwhile, link building is free-of-charge and produces high-quality backlinks over time. You can get quality backlinks sooner, depending on the link building strategy you employ. At the end of the day, both strategies – if done correctly – will get you on top of search rankings.
Here is a list of link building strategies you can use for search engine marketing:
- Outreach and link building
- HARO link building and marketing
- Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords
- Competitive market analysis
- Local SEO and social media exposure
We’ll go through these strategies and find out how these can help establish a good ranking to work with. Once you get traction on SERP, it becomes easier to market your website to your audience.
Outreach and Link Building
Outreach has been a core link building strategy to gather high-quality backlinks. It’s been the bread and butter of many SEO professionals in running their client’s websites. This strategy gains tons of SEO benefits in the long run.
One of these benefits is organic traffic. Organic traffic is earned from direct clicks from the Google search result. Having a good number of monthly organic traffic will signal Google that your website is a credible source of information.
Once this happens, your website’s reputation will become stronger and search engines will recognize it. Your website will move up the SERP if you have a lot of organic traffic.
In addition, organic traffic is easier to convert to sales than PPC traffic. Since organic traffic is driven by search intent, they clicked and landed on your site for a reason. They are there because they are interested in buying your product.
Here is a simplified way to do organic outreach to gain organic traffic:
- Find credible websites related to your niche. – niche-related websites are incredible sources of organic traffic. Since both of your websites belong to the same niche, you can easily convert their traffic to yours.
- Don’t just ask for a backlink. – first of all, it’s rude. Second, you don’t “earn” it if you just ask for it.
- Provide additional value to their website in exchange for a backlink. – additional value can be in the form of a guest post, and you can add your anchor text there.
HARO Link Building and Marketing
Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is a platform for information exchange between credible resources and reporters. It’s important to note that news websites and featured articles give a huge ranking boost to your website. Scoring a link on a news website will also improve your brand reputation.
In HARO link building, a high-quality and well-researched article is required. As for the backlink, it will only get clicks if the anchor text is not overly aggressive in promoting your website. Search engines will also recognize that the news website linked to your website out of trust and confidence.
It’s also helpful for marketing if you release exclusive industry news. For example, your website fetched an exclusive interview for the release of the new iPhone. Industry journalists would like to have a “sneak peek” of the release, so you make a feature article for the new phone.
If you can get industry journalists to feature your content in their publications, you can gain tons of organic traffic. You will also get more online presence and buyers will know more about your website. It’s a great way to convert the traffic you get to potential customers.
Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords
LSI keywords are closely related keywords that help make the main topic more understandable for both search engines and users. This link building technique can be used to increase your search ranking and reach more audiences.
Here’s an example of LSI keywords for the main keyword “link building”:
- benefits of link building
- link building services
- strategies for building links
- types of backlinks in SEO
These LSI keywords are generated by LSIGraph and you can use this tool for free. Using these keywords in your content will make your website appear more on search queries. LSI keywords increase the chances of your website appearing on related keyword searches.
LSI keywords also decrease the keyword density of your main keyword. This will prevent your website from being flagged as spam.
Competitive Market Analysis
In search engine marketing, analyzing your competitor’s performance is always crucial in making a competitive website. If you know how they reached the top position in SERP, you can modify it and apply it to your website.
Once you find out where your competitors get their most valuable links, you can replicate their technique or optimize it to make it better. Since it’s working for them, it must be effective when you improve it. You can read more on our article about website competitor analysis to analyze the strategies employed by your competitors.
Local SEO and Social Media Exposure
Local SEO is a very powerful method to capture local buyers. It’s an SEO strategy that focuses on making your local business grab the attention of your local community. By establishing your brand in your local community, it’s easier to get locals wandering in your brick-and-mortar store.
Along with local customers, you can also ask for a social media link from their website. This will be more effective if your businesses belong to the same niche.
However, this is easier said than done. There will be a natural competition between niche-related local stores since you’re both competing for local customers. But if you ask properly for healthy collaboration and show them the benefits, they might accept your offer.
Here’s What We Found
Success stories from our clients showed positive improvements in both organic traffic and SERP ranking. We’ve found out that these solutions helped achieve better SEM results:
- Making better content than competitors
- Re-optimizing on-page SEO factors
- Competitor backlink analysis
- Contextual link building from long-tail and LSI keywords
Adding all of these techniques up will improve your website’s performance on search engines. If you do all of these properly, you’ll see staggering results that will move visitors down the sales funnel.
We hope you’ve learned to use link building for search engine marketing. If you have questions regarding link building for search engine marketing, leave a comment below. We’ll answer them as soon as we can. Good luck with building links!
