Link building for small businesses is important if you are trying to improve your web visibility. If, however, you are only interested in promoting your products and services locally and you don’t even have a website, stop reading now because you won’t glean anything useful from this article. But if you want to expand your reach online, here are some useful link building strategies that are designed to help your small business‘s SEO campaign.
Start Blogging
Blogging is a really powerful link building tool. A well-written blog will help your target audience connect with you in a non-promotional way. It is a great way of drawing readers in by providing them with interesting and useful information, but if your content is of sufficiently high quality, there is also a good chance other people will link to it. And if you don’t have time to write blog posts, invite guest bloggers to contribute or use a creative content provider such as clickintelligence.co.uk.
Take Great Photos
Images are very important. A website without relevant images looks rather boring, but what you may not realise when you spend a lot of time creating cool images of your products is that other people might like them too. It’s not uncommon for webmasters to take images posted on other sites and use them in their content. You can utilise this to build links, but first you need to go looking for the images.
Use Google image search to see if other websites have ‘borrowed’ your images, be they product shots or branded logos. If you find any, contact the webmaster and ask them to add a citation link. As long as you are polite, you should find that most webmasters are happy to oblige.
Build Local Links
Local links are very useful and not too difficult to achieve, especially if you already have good relationships with local partners within the community. And if you do, ask these people to link back to your website. Another way to build local links is to write positive testimonials for other companies you do business with and include a link back.
Niche Directories
There was once a time when link building involved creating entries in generic business directories. For a while adding entries to dubious online directories worked very well, but various Google updates soon killed that one off and today, cultivating low quality links is a complete waste of time. However, good quality links from niche directories are worth having, so as long as you stick to local directories that contain information about other businesses related to yours, it is a good tactic to try. It is also a good way of driving targeted local traffic back to your website.
Host a Promotion of Giveaway
Everyone loves a freebie. Giving away a free product to the first fifty people who share your post on Facebook or Twitter is always going to be an incentive for people to share content. And the more ‘shares’ you get, the more links you gain.
Link building isn’t rocket science – anyone can do it. Even if you only spend an hour a week building links, consider it time well spent.
