Most marketers and business owners know about the importance of link building, specifically for search engine optimization. However, there’s more to it than you may think initially. Link building can be quite useful for marketing. Hence, here are ten reasons to use link building as a part of your marketing strategy.

1. Generate More Organic and Referral Traffic

The first reason why you need to use link building for marketing is that it can help you generate more organic and referral traffic. Marketing is all about getting attention to your brand and selling your products, so if there are more people visiting your website, there are more chances that you will sell more products. Here’s how links building helps you get these two types of traffic:

  • Organic Traffic – Link building improves your website search rankings which means your website and different pages on it will appear higher in search results. In turn, this leads to more people clicking on the links and getting to your website.
  • Referral Traffic – Backlinks on different websites that point to your site and pages on it get you exposed to the audiences of those websites. Users who get to your website through those links will generate referral traffic for you.

2. Improve SEO Metrics and Search Rankings

In addition to generating more traffic on your website, link building can also help you improve your SEO metrics which influence the aforementioned search rankings of your site and pages on it. Your link profile is one of the most important SEO ranking factors that can affect metrics such as:

  • Domain Strength – The total value or authority of your website.
  • Page Strength – The value or authority of a specific page on your site.
  • Link Metrics – These are metrics specific to your links, including:
    • Number of links on your website
    • Linking root domains
    • Linking page relevance
    • Position of links on the page

By improving your SEO metrics and search rankings, you will already get more exposure which is essential for marketing. The more exposure you get, the more people you can reach and the more impactful your marketing campaigns will be. In other words, all of these things are interconnected even if they don’t seem to be at first.

3. Lengthen Average Session Time

The average session time is the average time users spend browsing your website. Some users will get on your website and leave almost immediately. Others will spend more time reading different pages. Your average session time is also an important metric that you should keep an eye on, so lengthening it will definitely have a good effect, especially on your SEO. Naturally, link building can be used to increase the average session time of your website.

Internal links play a key role in increasing your average session time. When you include links throughout your website to the different pages on your website, users are more likely to continue browsing instead of leaving quickly. Think about Wikipedia – it is the perfect example of internal linking success. When you start reading one page, you see many links to related pages that cover relevant topics. It’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole and keep reading for hours just because you got interested in one specific topic.

4. Build Your Credibility and Authority

When it comes to marketing, your brand image matters a lot. This is why the ability to build your credibility and authority is so critical – and link-building can help you with that too. Here’s how different types of links can help you with this:

  • Internal Links – Internal links are mostly useful to you for linking to relevant topics that you covered before and posted about on your website. It shows that you are truly an expert in a specific topic and can inform and educate your audience about the different aspects of the said topic.
  • External Links – External links are crucial for backing up the claims you make. For example, you can link to the sources you used (for statistics or findings), the experts you quoted, and so on. You can also link to external sources of valuable knowledge about the topic, but this could potentially guide users away from your website.
  • Backlinks – In a way, backlinks are a form of social proof because they mean other people (including industry experts, media outlets, and fans) trust your opinion. Even if you don’t have actual backlinks, you can start creating them yourself by guest blogging. You can hire a professional writer from the writing services reviews site Rated by Students who can write the guest posts for you while you focus on content for your own website.

5. Get More Loyal and Trusting Customers

As your credibility and authority improve and you gradually build your brand image, you will also start getting more loyal and trusting customers. In terms of branding, having returning customers and even advocates for your brand is essential for brand and business longevity. In other words, if you have many people who trust you and come back to you regularly, you are more likely to stay in business longer.

Obviously, there are many things that go into creating a good brand reputation. Credibility and authority are two of them, but you should also keep in mind customer service, product quality, and so on. This is why it is so important to consider all of these things together and understand how they collectively impact your marketing. It’s not just link building that’s essential, but also other things related to your business.

6. Benefit from Word-of-Mouth Marketing

By using link building consistently, you can eventually start benefiting from word-of-mouth marketing. When people talk about you, they give you more exposure and raise your brand awareness. Moreover, the loyal customers you have could be your brand advocates – these people actively recommend you to the people they know and even to strangers on the Internet. Thus, you can count on them to attract more customers.

Word-of-mouth marketing is not something you can do yourself because it comes from your audience. That being said, you can stimulate it through different tactics. Having a good brand image is one of the most essential things for encouraging word-of-mouth marketing, and because link building is so important for building your image, it indirectly stimulates word-of-mouth marketing.

7. Use More Marketing Channels

One of the benefits of link building is that it makes you come up with new ways to promote yourself through content and find channels and platforms you can use to place backlinks. As a result, you start using more marketing channels which diversifies your marketing strategy and positively affects it both in the short term and in the long run.

For instance, guest blogging is considered a popular way of getting backlinks. However, many marketers today have started looking for new ways to get backlinks. A service like Help A Reporter or HARO is a great example of this. Essentially, marketers could get backlinks by acting as experts in their respective niches.

8. Build Relationships and Network in Your Niche

It can be tempting to view your industry and your specific niche as a space where everyone is on their own. However, you can’t be a lone wolf all the time. It is much better to find partners and collaborate with different people in your field. This can help your marketing and your branding, but most importantly, you will be using link building throughout the process.

For example, you can hire an experienced writer from the custom writing reviews site Top Writing Reviews who will reach out to different online media outlets in your industry and write content on your behalf to get backlinks. This guest blogging will help you build relationships with different media outlets and network in your niche that way. The same can be said for collaborations you do with your competitors in exchange for backlinks.

9. Increase Brand Visibility and Exposure

As explained earlier, link building can help you with things such as credibility, authority, word-of-mouth marketing, and traffic generation. All of these together are useful to you because they can help you increase your brand visibility and exposure.

Remember that the more people you reach, the more chances you have of finding new customers. It is a fact that attracting new customers is more expensive than retaining current ones, so this benefit of link building is definitely one of the most important ones financially.

10. Offer More Content to Your Audience

Last but not least, working with link building means that you will be offering more content to your audience which will be another way for potential customers to discover your brand. Things like brand exposure and brand awareness are very closely connected, so getting more exposure will help you in the long run.

Just think about it. To get more links (internal, external, and backlinks), you need to have more content. Because you are creating more content, there are more chances for potential customers to discover you.

Final Thoughts

To summarize, link building is definitely very important for your search engine optimization, but it is also critical for marketing. Keep in mind the information in this article and plan your link building strategy in a way that will benefit your marketing strategy.