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One of the oldest and most effective methods of SEO is link building. It is something that the opinions of the SEO community are split in two about. Furthermore, businesses believe it is no longer worth the time and effort to build backlinks to their website.
In this article, we will look at what link building is and whether it is still relevant for your SEO marketing campaign.
What Is Link Building?
Link building is an SEO method to build authority for your website. The more backlinks you have built, the more authority you gain, and the more Google trusts your website and starts ranking you further up the SERPs (search engine results page).
Depending on the backlink you build, it can also increase the traffic to your website. This traffic can then lead to an enquiry or a product being purchased.
Is Link Building Still Relevant?
The reason for link-building is to build the authority of your website. Ideally, you want to increase the homepage authority throughout the year as this passes through to the other pages if they are internally linked. Additionally, you will want to increase the authority of other pages on your website. For example, if you are focusing on a specific category or page, focusing on link building to this page would be advised.
Sometimes, link building can lead more to just improving the authority. As mentioned earlier, if you build a link to a website with high authority that is relevant to your website, you will likely receive traffic from that website. If the traffic is relevant to your website, it can lead to conversions.
Difference Between Link Relevancy and Link Authority
How do you decide you have built a good link to your website? There are two things to confirm whether it is a good-quality link.
Domain Authority
Domain authority is one of the metrics to decide whether the link is relevant. If you’re unsure what the domain authority is, this is a score given by a third-party tool and is measured out of a hundred. The higher your score is the higher authority that website has. Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Pinterest, and Twitter are all examples of high-authority websites. Although it is good to build high-authority backlinks, you also want to create some links which are low authority as this is more natural to Google. However, don’t build too many low-quality backlinks as this can make it hard to increase over time.
Relevance Of The Backlinks
Although high domain authority for link building is a great way to increase the authority of your website, there are other things which make the difference. It includes the relevance of the backlink. Building backlinks to websites similar to yours is also essential for Google. For example, if you are a telehandler hire website, you will want to build backlinks to other construction plant-based websites.
Is Authority Or Relevance Better?
The question is, which is better between two? Is the relevance of the website more important or are the metrics of the website more important? For those experienced in SEO, they will say both matter and that is correct. Both of these matter for building a high-quality backlink as well.
Quality vs Quantity
The next question raised with backlinks is whether quality or quantity is better for backlinks. Some SEO experts believe quantity is better but it isn’t as simple as that. If you build a high number of backlinks which are not relevant, and have low authority, this could hurt your website. Nonetheless, building backlinks that have high authority isn’t an easy task and can involve payment. Furthermore, you can start your link-building campaign by building a few high-authority links to get your campaign going.
When you get near the first page of Google, you will notice that competitors also have high domain authority. Depending on your sector, the average domain authority of websites on the first page will be between 30-50. Nonetheless, you can still compete with them on the search engine results page if your domain authority is slightly lower than theirs. Just make sure you have other SEO practices covered to ensure you are ranking above them.
Final Thoughts: Will Link-Building Remain In SEO?
Link building is still essential for an SEO campaign and will continue to be relevant. Furthermore, Google still values link building massively as they constantly release algorithm updates throughout the year, with one of the most recent updates being in December 2022.
Link building is one of the best ways to increase the authority of your website as well as increase traffic. However, when building backlinks to increase traffic, you want to ensure you are reaching out to relevant users, also known as qualified traffic. That way, they are more likely to buy a product from you or enquire about the service you offer.
