In this post we discuss the common question of “is link building still relevant to SEO?”. We’ve rounded up a few resources that will expedite your learning process.
Is Link Building Still Relevant?
[Video Transcript]
Link building’s always been used
as a form of marketing since its conception,
it’s just that the actual nature of link builing,
how it’s done, and its effectiveness
on search visibility has changed over the years.
But in 2019, it’s even more obvious
that links are becoming increasingly more important,
and I just don’t see that changing for a long time.
(upbeat music)
So the main benefits are,
firstly, the direct referral traffic.
That’s an obvious one, but if you’re building
truly relevant and contextual links,
you’re gonna get the benefit
of having very relevant and targeted traffic
from those links, and the more of those
that you can build and convert,
through an effective user experience on your website,
the more revenue you’ll make.
And next up, you’ve got the organic search traffic.
You know, search engines have always placed importance
on links as a ranking factor,
and it’s especially important now, in 2019 onwards.
Simply put, the more quality, relevant links
search engines can see going to your site,
the more weighting that site will have
in terms of ranking for associated keywords.
Brand awareness, you know,
over and above just building hyperlinks.
Just getting the name of your brand,
whether it’s your name or your company,
is an very effective way of marketing anyway.
Just as it does in offline media, if you think about it,
people are only gonna get brand mentions
on offline media, as their way of linking.
Once you’ve done email outreach (mumbles)
you’ll start to build connections
with influencers and other companies,
and other associations,
and while it wouldn’t always turn into an immediate profit
or an income stream, there’s a possibility it could
turn into something in the future.
Is Link Building Bad For SEO?
[Video Transcript]
Hello, this is John Locke, and today we’re answering a viewer question about
building backlinks to your site. So a viewer question came in, and they asked
their name to be anonymous. The question said, “I had seen that somebody else was teaching
SEO, and they had said that building back links was bad, and you have to be
really careful when building back links, because it might hurt your SEO, and you
might get a Google penalty. What’s your opinion on this?” Signed, Anonymous. Okay so,
there are people on the periphery of SEO that are teaching people that you have
to use extreme caution in building back links, and as a result, a lot of
people are not building any sort of back links to their website. The truth of the
matter is, links, from the beginning of search engines up until now, have been a
major factor in ranking your site. In fact, Google said in March of 2016 that
the three biggest factors that they were using to rank your site were, the quality
and relevance of content on your site, the relevancy and quality of your
back link profile coming into your site, and the machine learning part of their
algorithm called RankBrain, which is basically artificial intelligence.
They’re trying to teach it how to select search results like a human. So those
three things. They [Google] basically said content, links, and machine learning. So, a lot of
people are being taught that building links is bad. Now, I get where a lot of
this fear comes from. It’s not that you should fear building links. It’s that you
should fear building links for the sake of trying to boost your Google score. Now,
to be truthful there are a lot of SEO companies out there, especially at the
lower end of the market, they use all sorts of shady tactics to build links,
including setting up fake blogs, which we call Private Blog Networks. These are basically
sites just set up to try and manipulate links. And people do sell links in a way
that’s not even really providing value to people reading the article. These are
definitely the types of links that you should avoid. Because from what I’ve seen
in competitor research, links that don’t drive traffic and are unlikely to be
clicked on, are undesirable links. So basically, if your SEO company is setting
up a bunch of fake articles that were basically designed just to
provide you a link, and nobody is likely to ever come and see that article, or
click on that link, then that’s a bad link to have. On the other hand, you
should be building relevant links that are going to build your brand and drive
traffic. Google’s algorithm is shifting — or they’re trying to shift — I
should say that they’re trying to shift it in this direction. I don’t think that
links will ever go away completely as something that they use to evaluate
where something should rank. Because links are a sign of how popular your
brand is. If you’re mentioned on industry blogs or industry sites, if you are
getting press coverage, if you are in the news for your industry, and if you’re
listed where Google expects to see brands in your industry — then those are
good links to have. And those are links that you should have, because they can
drive traffic, and they help build brand awareness. As we’ve discussed in other
videos a little bit, Google is moving to something called the Entity Graph. How is
your company connected to other things out in the world? Google is trying to
figure out how to connect people, organizations, companies, ideas, concepts —
entities. You’re basically trying to build a information grid of all these
things, to where they’re not so reliant on links [to evaluate rankings], but they can rely more on what
is known about an organization. That said, links are still important, and they are
one of the main factors, besides content of your site, that are going to move the
needle in a big way. Now other things that are going to go into that [ranking factors] as well:
product and service reviews of your company, the actual user experience of
your site, how user friendly, mobile-friendly, fast-loading is your
site — things of that nature. If all other things are considered,
content and links are going to be the two main drivers of your rankings. So
should you be building links? Yes, you absolutely should be. You’re going to find
it very difficult — you’re going to find it insanely difficult to rank without links.
So people who are teaching you to not build links because it’s dangerous,
they’re teaching you something that is false. Do build links that make sense.
You should build links that are going to drive traffic. Make sure that you’re on all the
sites that other companies in your industry are on. Do try and drum
up some publicity for your website, and do have content on your site which
people would want to link to. Most people are not going to link directly to
your service or product pages, because there’s just no reason for them to do
that. If you have content that answers the questions that your customers have
before making a purchase with you, and [that content] helps your customers make an educated
decision, those things are likely to be linked to by other web sites where
people are asking those questions — like forum sites or Quora. Those are the things
that are likely to be shared in Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else, so
that’s a hint. Build content, build your brand, build links. Those three things all
kind of go together. You need the content, you need to build
your brand. You can’t just be heads down in your work. You have to work on your
marketing, and part of that is building out content that establishes you as a
source of information. If somebody is telling you not to build links — and I am not
saying this to be mean at all — but if somebody is telling you not to
build links, and they act like they’re scared of building links, they’re either
not telling you something, or they’re not doing SEO at a very high level. So that’s
my take. If you have an SEO question that you’d like to see answered, go ahead and
leave it in the comments below. We will answer it out in a video. My name is John
Locke. My business is Lockedown Design and SEO. We provide SEO for manufacturing
and industrial companies, helping them get more organic traffic from Google and
Bing, and helping them get more Requests For Quotes. Peace.