Link building, despite being a staple of all SEO campaigns, can be elusive to understand.
How do you build your link profile?
How do you do it properly?
What really is the point of spending time and effort to build links?
You’ll be told over and over again how important it is for you to build links, but for what purpose?
Here’s what you need to know about building your link profile and why you need to do it:
Why Build Links?
Links are one of the most important metrics for you to keep track of.
Without a healthy link profile, your campaign will fail.
But just getting links is not the real point of having a link building tactic.
If just accumulating some number of links was the entire point of this part of automotive SEO, no one would do it.
The real point of building a healthy link profile is to increase the reach, visibility, and network of your website.
The number of outside websites that link back to your own is an indicator of how valuable your website is.
The logic is that your website will only be linked to if someone else finds what you have written or posted there helpful and insightful.
The link is one of the most fundamental elements of the internet.
They are integral to navigating the internet and to being competitive in search engine rankings.
The goal of an individual link should ne to tap a new part of your audience and draw more people to your website.
How can you tell if your links are meeting these goals?
Customize What You Track
The most basic metric you should be tracking is how many websites link back to your website.
This will give you a general idea of how valuable your content is in the eyes of the readers.
Do they share they content?
Does someone in a relevant industry put a link on their blog or website back to your blog or website?
This is not, however, the only metric that you should be looking at if you want to be sure that your link campaign is actually working.
What you track should be based on your expectations—the goals of your link campaign: namely, to increase search engine ranking, draw more visitors, and connect to new audiences.
Of course, you’ll only be able to do this if you are actually tracking your automotive SEO campaign.
You need the hard data before you can start making inferences about what is and what is not working.
Looking at Your Metrics
Now, what you want to determine is how much work you have to put into building links, how many links you’ve built, and how your site’s performance responds to the building of those links.
Let’s take a closer look at each piece of the process.
1. The work involved – As you start to consider the work involved in building a link, you will want to consider the different steps that you have to use in order to build that link.
In general, you will need to find sites, pitch your link to those sites, and then create content to be posted along with your link.
Often, this third step is not actually necessary, depending on what type of website you are pitching to.
Occasionally, however, you might be required to create your own content.
When evaluating your process, determine whether or not the sites you are finding are actually of a high quality.
There are a number of different ways you can do this.
You can look at their traffic (and its sources).
You can look at its trust rating on any number of online evaluation tools.
You will definitely want to look at its relevance.
How much time does it take for you to determine whether or not a website is worth spending more time on?
2. How many links you build – This is actually a much easier metric to find, one that will likely be presented to you by any analytics tool that you are using.
Why bother looking at this number?
Because you need to determine if the time that you are spending is resulting in a high enough number of links for that effort to actually be worth your time.
If you are spending too much time building links and are only succeeding in getting one in everyone one hundred attempts, you need to look at your pitch, at the types of websites you are approaching, and whether or not the website or blog you are trying to get that website to link back to is actually valuable and insightful.
3. Performance after links are built – Of course, your performance in the search engines is reliant on a number of different facts, only one of which is your link profile.
That said, you should be able to look at the amount of traffic you are getting, its source, and the bump in organic traffic and tie that back to a certain event; in this case, the placement of a link on an outside website or blog.
Look at your metrics as they refer to both the specific page that is linked and to your entire site.
Look at these numbers both on a day to day basis and on a month to month, year to year basis.
Constantly looking at your website performance as you push through your link building campaign will tell you whether or not you are targeting the right types of websites in the right way.
