Anybody working for a half-decent B2B SEO agency will talk to you at length about why link building is important. They will talk about it at conferences, they will talk about it in meetings, they will talk about it at funerals (sometimes mid-eulogy).
Essentially, it’s a big thing for SEO people, and for very good reason. But before we talk about it is important, it’s a good idea to talk about what link building actually, you know, is.
The whole point of link building is to accumulate followed (this bit’s important) links to your website. There. Done.
We were hoping for more than that.
Fine.
Followed links – i.e., any link that doesn’t have a “nofollow” html tag – that point to your site are considered one of Google’s top ranking factors. They’re not everything, but they’re why link building is important.
While every link helps, some links are better than others. To gauge the value of a link, we use a metric called “Domain Authority” (DA) to measure the value of the site the link sits on. Developed by SEO software company Moz, it’s simply a number between 1 and 100: it’s meant to suggest how authoritative Google believes each domain to be. The BBC, for example, has a DA of 100, which makes it more or less the SEOly grail; the blog on cats you started this morning is likely to be rather less trusted.
Better still, the more followed links you accumulate, the more your own DA goes up. While any correlation between DA and search engine rank is unofficial – Google is very secret squirrel about how its algorithm actually works, probably because the second anyone notices that it can be exploited, they, well, exploit it – it’s generally accepted that the more trusted you are, the better.
PR and link building: kissing cousins
PR is an excellent way to build links, and we should know: we’re one of the UK’s fastest growing PR agencies.
The process of identifying target publications and agreeable journalists – and getting them interested in your company, its spokespeople, and what it has to say – is long and arduous, but it bears tasty, tasty fruit. Coverage and publicity is obviously a big part of that, but when you secure an article, blog, or comment piece with a media outlet, you’ll often be able to get a link in the author bio or somewhere in the text.
I’ve got some links so I’m good right?
If you want to know how many followed links currently point at your site, use Moz’s free (to a point) Link Explorer tool. Got some good links from sites with great DAs? Yes? Amazing! Now check a competitor’s site. Have they got more links than you from better domains? Yes? That’s why they rank higher than you in the search engine results pages. Everything else being equal (i.e. you’ve got all your onsite optimisation right and you’re regularly producing great content), your keyword rankings will pretty much be dependent on the quality and quantity of links you (or your great B2B PR agency – FYI that’s us!) build.
We know exactly why link building is important and are pretty good at it in all its forms, in using PR as part of a harmonious, coordinated SEO strategy. Want to discuss your link building strategy further? No problem, contact our SEO experts now.