We’ll start with the basics…

Link building is the process by which you establish a network of hyperlinks (we’ll just call these “links”) that direct traffic from external websites to your website. Each of these links are connections that help to better tie you to the community that you are a part of. The more links you have out there directing traffic to your site, the better. However, link building is very difficult, and it doesn’t happen overnight. In order to do this correctly, it takes a lot of hard, consistent work.

Why Is Link Building Good For Business?

Link building is an excellent practice for any business to pursue for three main reasons. These reasons are as follows:

Build & Solidify Real-World Relationships

Often there is a perceived disconnect about what happens online vs. what happens in “the real world.” Make no mistake: link building requires you to be very intentional about forming real relationships in the community around you. It might happen online, but it is a reflection something that is very meaningful.

How do you pursue link building? You do it by reaching out to and interacting with relevant influencers and companies! If you’ve just published an article that you think your audience might be interested in, send it their way! If your content is high-quality, this won’t just help you build links, it will also help you create valuable relationships with real people and real companies that can last forever.

Build & Develop Your Brand

If you are trying to build a brand, one of the biggest things you can do is start to establish your authority and expertise in your field or industry. Good link building will do more to broadcast your authority to the world than you could ever have done alone.

Having well reputed sources link to your content will build your brand a good reputation purely out of association. Of course, your content will need to be good enough that all those well-reputed sources will find it to be link-worthy. When these sources link to you, they are going out on a limb and vouching for your quality and trustworthiness. In doing so, they are taking some of the credibility that they have undoubtedly worked very hard to earn, and sharing it with you. So the people that make up the referral traffic to your site are predisposed to like you as compared to those that came to your site through a simple Google search.

Now that you have those additional people viewing your site via external links, it’s time for you to work your magic with useful content and compelling calls-to-action. Are you ready?

Bolster Your Web Traffic & Overall SEO

Of course, we can’t forget the most immediate, most quantifiable result of link building: web traffic.

In the short term, link building will earn you a large bump in views via referral traffic. This happens whenever people click on the links to your site. As time goes on, and the world keeps spinning, this traffic will begin to diminish as your referrers publish more content, until the links that you have built begin to get buried. But links are the gifts that keep on giving, because even after your initial surge in traffic has subsided, something will remain.

In the long term, link building will drive big improvements in your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Better SEO means more traffic, which means more conversions, which means more revenue, forever. We’ll talk more about this in our next article.

Link Building In Action

If you’re still fuzzy on what exactly link building is, we recommend this article from HubSpot for further reading.

See what we did there? That’s a link! HubSpot is a company that we at Horton Group feel sets the bar in the categories of “trustworthiness,” and “usefulness.” We also think that they produce a lot of excellent content, so we feel good about referring you to their site with a link.

HubSpot will, in turn, receive extra traffic from us, and when Google crawls this page that you are reading right now, it will see that link and make incremental improvements to HubSpot’s search rankings because of it. That’s how Google works!

For the next article in this series, click here!