Link building means you campaign for serious third-party online sites to refer to your website via backlinks. This measure strengthens the relevance of your offer. When built and utilised strategically, they also enable you to profit from them in your B2B communication.
Link building: What are backlinks?
One click is all it takes – backlinks lead users of a domain to another domain. In other words, they “link back”. The target website linked ideally offers further information about the content which users are searching for on the website where they are coming from. Generally, the more backlinks, and thus recommendations, placed as references on a website, the higher the ranking of the website linked in the search results list of Google and others. This means backlinks encourage awareness and traffic.
For this reason, as a rule of thumb, the goal of a website operator in the B2B segment should be to practice active link building, with the aim of inspiring visits from other serious websites. There are various methods and strategies to achieving this.
5 link building strategies: generating backlinks in B2B
Offer relevant content
Ideally, the content of a website is so relevant that the operator of another domain links to its offers on his/her own, as they would like to share this added value with their users.
For example: the results of a study, which one has commissioned personally, can be so exclusive and interesting that many other websites quote from it and link it as a source. Informative graphics, white papers or opinion polls can also be suitable as high-quality content, which you should actively offer.
This strategy is also called link baiting – the attempt to lure in new, organic visitors from other websites, without spending money or giving away items. At the same time, backlinks from third-party sites whose high value is attested by search engines are more valuable for one’s own website as those from lower-ranking domains. Links from well-known and serious websites give your own image a boost and strengthen the so-called page authority. Which ranking your own website has currently achieved can be followed using SEO tools such as ahrefs.com.
„Links from well-known and serious websites give your own image a boost and strengthen the so-called page authority.“
Write blogs and guest articles
An own corporate blog, or one commissioned by external experts, offers a channel both for external corporate communication and for marketing. These articles, a kind of external source, let you include backlinks to your own pages. Guest articles from suitable third-party blogs can also achieve this goal, and thus strengthen one’s own page authority. The text of the guest articles, however, should differ from those on your own website. After all, search engines punish very similar content as duplicate content. The potential consequence: a scarred reputation and a lower position in the results lists.
Give interviews
If you have expert knowledge in your field of business, this can be communicated in an interview with the press or bloggers. In return, the text features a backlink to your own company domain.
Check for broken links
Many links on the Internet lead to nothing, because the respective pages or the linked content is no longer available. If you find such a broken link, you can offer the operator of the other domain to instead link to your own website. This should naturally match the topic of the original content. Otherwise the link would not make any sense. The SEO analysis tools mentioned above are also suitable for identifying broken links.
Keep away from buying and exchanging links
Links can also be purchased or exchanged with other website operators. But this is not recommended, as the algorithms used by search engines can today recognise these kinds of backlinks, which are considered not serious and also often of a lesser quality, and lower the ranking of the websites in question.
Conclusion
Good content marketing with interesting and, ideally, exclusive content is the basic pillar of effective link building in B2B communication. Remember: a good, content-matching backlink on a high-quality website is more valuable than lots of links on lower-quality sources.
