Small, local businesses are more concerned than ever with getting more calls, more contact form submissions and more leads to generate a buzz and expand their customer base. Links from other sites to yours can and do send signals out to search engines so everyone knows what your website is about and what industries and markets you serve. This is where link building comes into play. But what exactly is link building? Let’s dig in shall we?!
Links between sites determine which web pages are the most relevant when people are doing their searches. A link is like a vote, and the more links you acquire, the more you attract people to your site. You do this by locating other people who care about the same things as you or in this case, connect in some way to your industry or, are in your target market. You contact them, ask them to link their site to yours and then, their website visitors are potential customers for you.
Let’s get started and see the Who, What, Where, Why and How of Local Link Building Outreach 101: What you need to know to get your business out there online in your area right now.
Buzzstream is a tool designed to help make your link building process easier and actually identifies the best sites when you are searching for your link building opportunities. It does this by giving you contact and website information automatically to save time; rather than you having to search for peoples’ contact email addresses or content categories individually. This gives you a better opportunity to sort this list by their Page Rank, the date found, the type of link (whether it is low-quality or higher-quality) and their status (whether they are active, inactive or pending) to keep you up-to-date on the number of contacts you actually have.
Majestic SEO is extremely easy to use, is quite intuitive and has one of the largest Link Intelligence databases on the planet today. This is because it gives you detailed information about how all the websites on the internet link to each other. It really helps you because it reports Referral Domain information so you can see what sites are actually sending traffic to your competitors. In this way, you can review the site and see what type of content they are providing and then, offer them content of similar value so they will link their site to yours.
Moz Open Site Explorer lets you do research by entering one of your competitor’s URLs and then hitting the search button. Once the tool has loaded the results, if you see any broken links, you can then search the competitor’s website for a replacement page. If you see one, you can email the webmaster and let them know that their link is going to a dead page and give them the right page. Then, you can ask them if they’ll add your webpage as another go to resource. If you can’t find a replacement page on their site, tell them the link is dead and that you have another resource, your web link, that they can use. Sometimes this is a very effective link building strategy.
Pitchbox helps you find targeted link building opportunities including contact information and social profiles, by identifying relevant keywords, industries and topics then, it searches the web to find the most influential people in those fields. In this way, you have important site stats, contact information, email addresses and social profile information right at your fingertips. This allows you to engage with influential bloggers on social media sites before you give them a “pitch” about how great an opportunity it is to connect their site with yours and the benefits you both will receive.
These are just some of the tools that are available to help you get started on designing an effective, sustainable link building campaign and get your business out there in your area today. Link building is both an art and a strategy that allows you to continue to develop long-lasting, more meaningful and profitable relationships. At Dialed In Web, we work constantly to give you relevant information to help you build a bigger customer base and provide you with the services you need. To learn more, please contact us today.
