The landscape of SEO and link-building is always changing, and building high-quality links has taken a back seat in recent months to Helpful Content and generative AI in the SEO world.
That said, links are still important for establishing E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness), which is a philosophy whose framework influences how you rank organically.
Simply put, credible links back to your content – particularly rich, valuable content – will help your organic traffic. Digital PR, by which I mean targeted campaigns meant to gain more external links, is an important initiative for climbing the ranks and grabbing market share.
Link-building is the process of acquiring links from other websites to your own. A link is a way for users to navigate between sites and pages online. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between different websites.
In general, you want to get links that would drive high-quality traffic to your site and ultimately generate leads. These types of links match Google’s link criteria. It's for this reason that you'll want to employ quality link-building strategies, and not cheap or black hat strategies.
Internal links also provide an important ranking factor – but from within the authority Google has designated to the domain.
There are two fundamental ways in which search engines use links:
Once search engines have crawled pages on the web, they can extract the content of those pages and add it to their indexes. In this way, they can decide if they feel a page is of sufficient quality to be ranked well for relevant keywords.
When they are deciding this, the search engines do not just look at the content of the page; they also look at the number of links pointing to that page from external websites and the quality of those external websites.
💡 Takeaway: the more high-quality websites that link to you, the more likely you are to rank well in search results.
There are a few significant benefits of link-building. These include:
Google is looking for factual content, produced by experts, and updated with accurate information. The E-E-A-T guideline spans across industries and content types as Google wants to rank only the best content in search results. This shows what Google considers “great content.”
The other algorithmic aspect is authoritative mentions (links). In general, a good way to tackle E-E-A-T in content is by answering questions to previously unanswered questions, creating useful tools, and building a reputation for owning the space by publishing content across the site regularly.
You may have a PR department or PR agency working to put your content in front of bigger and/or more authoritative platforms, which is great. This can take two forms:
Even if you don’t have a PR resource, you can bootstrap outreach using sites like HARO, Terkel, Qwoted, etc. If links and awareness are your goal, you can use your owned media – including LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, Medium, and company/personal blogs – to publish POVs that may catch the eye of journalists and other experts in your field. And if you’d like to build your own outreach campaigns, you can follow experts like Gloria Chou to get insight on successful strategies.
All of the above assumes that you have – or are building – a content engine that provides your readers with authenticity and value. With that in place, use link-building as another fundamental lever for SEO that truly moves the needle for your business.
Want to connect with a team of SEO experts to supercharge your Digital PR? Contact Jordan Digital Marketing!