But, like, it’s complicated.

Here’s why.

Backlinks? What are those?

Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page.

What’s a backlink? A backlink is a link that goes to your website from another point on the Internet, like forums, social media posts, and a competitor’s website.

Why are backlinks important? (Or, at least, why did conventional wisdom say that they were important before the Google leaks?) Having backlinks to your site is an important aspect of search engine optimization, or SEO, strategy. Specifically, backlinks act like a vote of confidence for your site, telling search engines that your site is trustworthy, relevant, and has good content worth reading. This vote of confidence affects search engine rankings, as the more high-quality backlinks your site has, the more likely search platforms are to reward your site with higher rankings in organic SERPs.

Types of Links

Now that we know what backlinks are, let’s talk more about other types of links (trust us; this knowledge will come in handy in a moment).

External Links vs Internal Links

External links are links that go from your website to another domain. These links are important for SEO because they signal to search engines that you are citing your sources and have done your research, making you appear more credible. Think of it this way: would you trust a student’s paper that cited everything properly, or a paper that ended with “Trust me, bro”?

Internal links are links that go from one page on your website to another page on your website. These links are important as they create a complex web of relevancy that tells search platforms in greater detail what pages on your site are about and how they relate to each other.

Dofollow Links vs Nofollow Links

“Dofollow” and “nofollow” are link attributes, meaning they are bits of code that tell search platforms how they should read the links they are attributed to.

Dofollow links are links that search engines know to crawl and index; these types of backlinks help boost page rankings for whatever page they direct to. By default, all links are dofollow unless specified otherwise.

Nofollow links, traditionally, were links that search engines did not crawl and index, meaning they did not affect page rankings. Google has revealed that in recent years, however, it does use nofollow link attributes as link signals, or signals to help search engines better understand links and their strength for ranking purposes.

Outbound Links vs Inbound Links

Outbound links, external links, or outgoing links, are links that go from your website to another website.

Inbound links, or incoming links, are links that come to your website from another website.

Good Backlinks vs Bad Backlinks

Not all backlinks are created equal. Google and other search engines will reward your site for having “good” backlinks… and punish your site for having too many “bad” backlinks.

A good backlink is a link to your website from a high-authority website. Having high-quality backlinks can signal to search engines that your site is worth reading and, therefore, worth rewarding with higher Google rankings.

A bad backlink is a low-quality link to your website from a low-domain authority site or site that otherwise appears spammy. Having a few bad backlinks won’t hurt your website, but if your website has tons of bad backlinks—and only bad backlinks—Google and other search platforms will penalize your site.

Importance of Backlinks

Now that you know what backlinks (and other types of links) are, it’s time to talk about why backlinks are important… just not in the same way as many digital marketers initially thought.

Many SEO strategists assumed that having lots and lots of backlinks was important for building site authority. While backlinks are important for determining domain authority in search engine algorithms, a recent Google leak revealed that a site doesn’t really need that many high-quality backlinks to rank well in organic search results. In other words, backlinks are still an important part of SEO strategy, but the quality of links should always come before quantity.

Having good quality backlinks can help:

• Build brand awareness
• Drive referral traffic, or organic traffic directed to your site from another
• Boost site authority
• Search engines understand the relevancy of web pages

7 Tips for a Robust Backlink Strategy

Building backlinks takes time and effort. Here are some of the best tried-and-true tactics to build backlinks to your website.

1. Avoid Black Hat Practices

Let’s start with what you shouldn’t do: black hat SEO practices. Black hat SEO means using techniques to boost your site’s rankings with SEO tactics that search engines do not like. When it comes to backlink building, the major black hat practice to avoid is buying links in bulk from low-domain sites.

2. Focus on Quality Over Quantity

As we mentioned before, search engines are more concerned with the quality of backlinks rather than the sheer number of backlinks. Ideally, you only want links from authoritative websites. If you’re running a healthcare-focused site, for example, you want links from the likes of WebMD and MayoClinic, not www.iMadeThisWebsiteInMyMomsBasement.net.

It’s okay if you get links from some sites with middling domain authority, though. Heck, when you’ve reached a certain size, it can be impossible to avoid even a few links from low-authority sites! What search engines look at is the overall health of your backlink profile, or your site’s profile that search engines use to rate the overall quality and trustworthiness of your backlinks.

A healthy backlink profile will include links from mostly high-authority sites, some medium-authority sites, and little to no spammy sites.

TIP: If you’re getting lots of low-quality backlinks, you can disavow them to mitigate the negative impact they have on your site. Google Search Console’s Disavow tool can let you select which URLs and domains you want to disavow.

3. Outreach/Guest Blogging

One of the more direct link building strategies you can engage in is link building outreach. This strategy involves reaching out to other website owners to guest post on their websites; the guest posts will contain a link to your website.

Guest blogging is the most common form of white hat outreach strategies. Here are some best practices for aspiring outreach bloggers to keep in mind:

• Be respectful and exciting when reaching out to site owners
• Only reach out to site owners in a similar industry or vertical as your own
• Craft high-quality content that people want to read
• Return the favor and offer to host a guest post from the organization you reach out to

4. Broken Link Building

Maybe you’ve already garnered some backlinks to your site. Congrats! Don’t just leave it at that, though. Sometimes links break for any number of reasons. Whatever the reason, a broken link will not help your site.

If you notice that another website links to your site with a broken link, reach out to that website owner and ask if they can find the source of the problem and fix it.

5. Regular Backlink Analysis

You’ll find broken links and other potential issues with your backlink profile by running regular checks.

Some SEO tools you can use for backlink analysis include:

• Ahrefs
• SEMRush
• Google Search Console

6. Don’t Neglect Social Media

Backlinks can come from anywhere, including social media platforms. That means that regularly posting high-quality content on your social channels, building a robust social media presence, and engaging with social followers can increase the odds that people share your social posts and even directly post links to your website from their own social accounts.

7. Create a Kickass Website

Pardon our French.

The best backlinks are the ones you don’t have to work for. When your website is known for quality, people will link from their websites and socials directly to you. So make a quality website worth linking to. Populate your site with helpful, high-quality content like white papers, case studies, infographics, expert opinions, and more.

Craft a Winning Backlink Building Strategy

Are backlinks important? The answer is still, without a doubt, yes. These links may help others learn about your brand, drive some organic traffic to your site, indirectly boost site authority, and help search engines learn more about what your content is about (and how it relates to search queries). However, as Google has stated, link building is not the single-most important ranking factor for a website. There are plenty of other ranking signals that search platforms use to help rank pages, and all of them need to work in tandem to be effective.

Let the experts at Digital Strike – Targeted Marketing take some of that pressure off your plate. We have years of experience helping clients build healthy backlink profiles and execute winning SEO strategies… and we would love the opportunity to do the same for your organization.

Wait. No.

That’s not right.

The content or the links!

It’s a question we get asked a lot and one we wrestle with fairly often. The trouble is, both content and links are very important for any SEO strategy.

Links send readers to your site and a lot of good content will grow your audience and ultimately drive conversions. But which one do you choose to focus on first?

Ideally, you’d focus on both. But if you don’t have the time or the manpower, you have to choose one to start with first.

Content creation or link building?

It’s difficult to build a lot of links and create useful content at the same time, especially if you’re a small business or a one-person enterprise.

We’ll take a look at both strategies, the pros and cons of both, and maybe by the end of this post, we’ll have a concrete answer. (Spoiler alert: we will.)

Content vs. Links

Two strategies go head-to-head in a bloodthirsty battle. Which will the SEOs choose as their #1 strategy?

If you already have an opinion on content creation or link building, read with an open mind. Both have qualities that are worthy of your consideration.

Content First

Okay, content should come first because it’s naturally valuable. It is the foundation on which you build your long-term strategy. And if that content is good and evergreen, oh man, that’s good. Really good.

You want to establish yourself as an authority and for people to keep coming back to your content. Reap the rewards!

It’s what people in The Biz call “cornerstone content.” That content acts as a representative of your site. It’s the content people will link to all the time because it’s always useful and relevant.

Starting with content provides instant value.

That’s a pretty obvious criticism of the link-first strategy. If you start by going hard on the link strategy without any real content, you don’t have a reason for anyone to link to your site.

But if you create amazing content that people want to read, you give people a good reason to care, to keep coming back, and to share your site with other people.

People love good content that provides value and goes in depth. Everyone says that no one reads on the internet anymore. They just skim.

But the people that do read? They want useful content they can share with other people.

If you create that kind of content, you’ll have a solid foundation for your site’s future.

Good content sets people a-sharing.

The power of social proof is strong, y’all.

Think about the last thing you bought online. Did you buy it without looking at the reviews? Or checking to see if a friend had bought it first and if they liked it?

Or maybe you were even tempted to look up the product because you’d seen a review of it.

It’s the same thing with websites. You’re going to trust a website that is linked to from another website or person you trust. 

If you can create content that makes people hyped to share it, then it’ll be easier for you to get links back to your site.

[dm101cta]

Links First

The other school of thought says that you should build your link strategy first because they give you an audience.

There are several pros to this approach:

Your content is useless without an audience.

I’m sorry, but it’s true! Even if you put hours and hours of work into creating wonderful content for your site, it’s no good unless someone is reading it.

If a tree posted a blog post in the forest and no one was there to read it, did it really happen?

An audience is what brings your content to life. The right backlinks network can expose your site to thousands of people you could never have reached on your own.

Just publishing the content won’t do that all by itself, unfortunately. In the case of content marketing, “build it and they will come” is a cliché that doesn’t apply.

Links also help with your SEO.

You can definitely focus on SEO while you’re creating content. Making sure your content is SEO-friendly and making it comprehensive are two ways you can do that.

But link building is a more scalable strategy. You can link to the same content all the time, but you can only publish the same post once. Instead of creating new content constantly without any links, you can update your old content. This will show Google fresh content without you having to make brand new posts all the time.

Link building can establish you as an authority by association.

Remember social proof? Say someone visits a site they like and sees it linking to your content. They’re going to think automatically that your site is an authority on that topic.

It’s like getting a shoutout from an important influencer in your niche. It’d be like if Neil Patel or Brian Dean linked to us. Or if Tony Hawk ran a website and linked to an up-and-coming skateboarder.

Or if a leader in the bad analogies and not relevant references worlds linked to this post. That’d be huge!

But what do the search engines say?

Because that’s what this is all about, right? What the search engines want and how you can “game the system” and get them to like you?

The real question we’ve been dancing around this entire post is “which do search engines care about more, content or links?” And we can even narrow that question further:

On-page SEO or off-page SEO?

Well, according to this extensive list of ranking factors from Backlinko, it would seem that Google cares most about factors other than content. And on this steps to a Google-friendly site page written by Google, they talk a lot about links too!

If you only look at that page, you’re probably convinced that links matter most.

But if you look a little closer at that Google-friendly site page, you’ll notice the very first thing they talked about is:

It seems like their #1 Google-Friendliness Factor is high-quality content that contains useful information.

That’s because Google’s primary mission is to help their users find the best content to answer their queries (and to drive SEOs insane). Links are great and very necessary, but ultimately, links lead to your content. 

If you don’t have content, those links are going to a site with little to no value.

Think about it like this:

Would you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to advertise an ice cream shop just to send people to an empty storefront?

You have to have the store first before you start running those ads.

The Takeaway

I think the decision is pretty clear at this point.

Ideally, you would work on both content and links.

But if you absolutely have to pick just one, start by building your content. It’s the backbone of every successful marketing campaign.

I know it can be intimidating or demoralizing to create a bunch of content without having a vast audience. But if you create content that shines, it’ll be easier to grow your website and audience with links later.

Digital Strike can help you form a long-term SEO strategy made to fit your specific business challenges. Contact us for a free consultation.

You might be wondering:

“Why am I not ranking first in Google for [INSERT KEYWORD]?”

It’s not a bad question—it shows you value your business’ position in search engine results pages (SERPs) and understand that organic—or unpaid—search traffic can give you a continual stream of targeted traffic, qualified leads and, eventually, paying clients.

But if you, too, are asking this question, you’re focusing on the wrong measure of SEO success.

Don’t worry. I’m not avoiding your question—I’ll answer it in this post.

But before I do, allow me to reframe your problem with another question:

“What is the real goal of your SEO efforts: increasing your Google ranking, or creating a continual stream of qualified leads?”

Here’s the thing: your keyword rankings for a variety of terms should increase with any comprehensive SEO strategy.

But that’s not the goal. And it shouldn’t be your focus.

While we are monitoring how you are ranking across of hundreds—even thousands—of keywords, we don’t measure the success of your campaign by SERP rankings.

And why would we? You want to attract qualified leads, not win a blue ribbon for ranking first for a specific keyword. It’s the trend of rankings across industry-related keywords that will drive business, not ranking for any one keyword.

Here’s how we measure success:

• An increase in tracked engagements (calls and form submissions directed from your site)
• Number of qualified leads month by month (those who’re a good fit for your business, and interested in your product or service)
• The overall trend in rankings for various keyword themes—groups of keywords surrounding your business’ key service areas, products or markets

“But wait—I thought SEO was all about keyword rankings”

Okay sure, increased rankings in Google are correlated to an increase in targeted traffic and qualified leads—that’s the very idea that search engine optimization is built upon.

But SEO is not about winning a specific keyword. See, 3.5 billion Google searches are made. Every. Single Day.

And about 16 to 20 percent of those searches have never been made before. Especially as searchers become more comfortable asking Google complex questions, optimizing for specific keywords isn’t enough.

The best way to rank for these new, never-been-searched-before keywords is to have a strategy focused on building helpful content surrounding all facets of your business, and optimizing for every possible question a potential client might have from awareness to conversion.

By creating shareable content and increasing the number of sites linking to you, you will increase your Domain Authority and, eventually, increase your SERP rankings for industry-relevant searches—even searches that have never been asked before.

Yes, you still need to have a robust keyword-targeted SEO strategy. But now more than ever, you need to be more focused on addressing questions, improving user experience and creating a robust collection of web pages, blogs and backlinks in order to compete for the ongoing stream of new, long-tail search queries.

That’s why we—though we thoroughly monitor your SERP rankings over time for hundreds of keywords—focus most of our time on “keyword themes” rather than individual keywords.

Back to your question: “How do I rank first in Google for [INSERT KEYWORD]”?

I know what you’re thinking:

“This is great and all, but I still need to rank #1 for [INSERT KEYWORD]! How do I do that?!??”

Okay, let me actually answer your original question. One caveat before we begin: the answer is not simple.

Let’s say you desperately want to know how to rank #1 in Google for the keyword “locksmith STL.”

There are at least five other variations of that same keyword. Locksmith St. Louis. St. Louis locksmith. Locksmith in St. Louis. Even locksmiths STL.

Though these keywords all seem the same, you will get a slightly different SERP for each one. You might appear for “St. Louis locksmith” but not “Locksmith STL.”

To drive this point home, let’s compare the SERPs for two Google searches: “locksmith STL” and “locksmiths STL.”

The ads are different. The local pack is different. And the organic results are different. 

You might be ranking for every single variant of “St. Louis + Locksmith” except “locksmith STL.”

See, if you focus only on one keyword, you’re missing the big picture.

And this example only shows generic location-based searches.

What about when someone searches, “How to get broken key out of ignition”? Or when they search “How to fix a door lock that is jammed?” Or when they just want to know the “cost of rekeying a lock”?

You could lose your mind trying to optimize for every single variant of every single keyword. Even for the best SEO companies, optimizing for every possible search query is impossible.

Remember: Nearly 630 million Google searches are made every single day that have never been searched before.

Shift your focus from specific keywords to “keyword themes”

At Digital Strike, we do tons of keyword research for each of our clients.

We’ll create a detailed spreadsheet of every possible keyword phrase someone might use when talking about your products or services, from the awareness phase (when someone is looking for a solution to a problem), all the way to down to the purchasing decision or conversion.

In any given SEO campaign, we are optimizing for hundreds of keywords for every market you serve, service you provide or product you sell.

Usually, each of these keywords can be distilled down to several “themes,” or broad areas of focus that we’re optimizing for.

Let’s tie the locksmith example back in:

You provide both residential and commercial locksmith services. The end goal of your SEO campaign is to leverage targeted search traffic, turning searchers into paying customers.

Once we understand your business and know your goals, we’ll do some keyword research.

We might find there are three main “keyword themes” surrounding the keywords in your business: residential, commercial and emergency services.

There are a variety of keywords that fall under these keyword themes:

1. RESIDENTIAL
   Example keywords: residential locksmith, front door lock replacement, how to rekey a deadbolt, door lock repair service
2. COMMERCIAL
   Example keywords: commercial locksmith, electric strike installation, filing cabinet key replacement, digital safe lock change out
3. EMERGENCY
   Example keywords: emergency locksmith, how to get a broken key out of ignition, locked out of house, commercial lockout

Of course, there are dozens of other keywords we could list under each theme. But essentially, these themes describe facets—service areas, products, or markets—of your business you’d like to grow.

We’ll develop a long-term content and link building strategy that encompasses many different ways to search about each theme. In the end, this will help increase your SERP rankings and, in the end, drive business for each of your service areas.

Bottom line is this:

Ranking for one keyword won’t drive results. Building a robust collection of web pages, blogs and backlinks surrounding the various services you provide and markets you serve will.

The success of your SEO campaign is measured by bottom line results, not keyword-by-keyword rankings.

It’s the same with local SEO.

Sure, at one time clean citations and proper Google My Business (GMB) categorizations were enough to rank in the local pack and local organic.

No longer.

Citations and GMB listings are now considered foundational, similar to paying the entrance fee to get into a race.

Without them, there’s no way to rank in the local pack at all, and it’ll be harder to rank in local organic. But clean citations alone will not make you competitive in local SEO.

The things that will make you competitive and drive business are factors like the quantity and quality of sites that link to you, and the presence of robust, keyword-optimized content.

Competitive ranking factors harder to implement than foundational ones, but you can’t win without them.
To rank in local pack/local organic search results and, more to the point, generate leads for your business, you need to first build a strong foundation and then move onto what will make your website stand out from your competitors: the competitive local SEO ranking factors.

Moz, a key voice in digital marketing, recently released their annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey for 2018, detailing the top foundational and competitive ranking factors for local SEO.

We took a look at this survey and distilled it down to its core: the top foundational factors and the top competitive factors.

Basically, we’ll tell you what you need to enter the race—and what you need to do to win.

Foundational local SEO ranking factors: Your ante into the game

• Your business’ proximity to searcher
  You have little control over this, but proximity is by and large the greatest factor for the getting into the local pack. Lately, proximity has outweighed every other factor, at least when it comes to the local 3-pack.Let’s say you own a pizza shop. If someone looks up ”pizza near me” on their phone, but your shop is located all the way across town from the searcher, you are unlikely to show up in the local pack (the 3-listing box atop search results).It’s important to note that local organic results—the results that lie below the local pack—are significantly less affected by proximity.Still, for both organic and local pack results, you need to have a physical location in the city of search, especially where there’s a geo-modifier—a city or location attached to a keyword phrase—in the search.Essentially, you won’t show up for local intent searches if you aren’t close to the searcher.But proximity hardly guarantees ranking, and only gets you into the running.
• Google My Business Category Associations
  Your Google My Business category associations help Google determine what kind of business you are.If you are a plumber, but your GMB category is ’electrician,’ then you are less likely rank for your business—plumbing. Now, that isn’t a likely scenario, but it drives the point home.You won’t rank for your business in the local pack if your GMB listing doesn’t accurately portray what you do.Make sure your GMB listing aligns with your business. But your GMB listing will not help you compete with other businesses in your vertical—it simply gets you in the game.
• Citation consistency
  Google wants to display accurate results to its searchers, especially in local where there is a high likelihood the searcher is looking to call or go to a business.Because Google doesn’t want to frustrate its users with incorrect addresses or phone numbers, it has a ”trust but verify” policy when it comes to the business name, address and phone number (NAP) in your GMB listing.That’s why Google cross-verifies your NAP across hundreds of other directories across the internet. Still, don’t worry too much about hunting down every single listing. NAP listings from primary data sources are given more weight. Start with cleaning up your listings in prominent directories, and then work down from there.After all, citations are important, but will not set you apart from the crowd.

Competitive local SEO ranking factors: The key to winning business

• Inbound links to your site
  Your site’s link profile—the collection of sites that link to your pages—is one of the most important ranking factors.In fact, it’s the most important competitive ranking factor for local, according to Moz’s 2017 Local Rankings survey.Google takes inbound links as votes of confidence in your site’s authority and relevancy. The more inbound links you have, the better your chances of ranking in the local pack and local organic.Back to the pizza shop example: if sites all around town are linking to you menu with the anchor text, best pizza in town, Google will begin to believe that your pizza shop does, in fact, have the best pizza in town, and be more likely to feature your business when someone’s looking for pizza.The key here is that you need quality, relevant links, and you need a lot of them. And, especially when it comes to ranking locally, having local magazines and resources link to your site is an extra bonus. For ranking in the local pack, you’ll also need to earn inbound links to your GMB landing page—the page you link to within your GMB listing.
• Your site’s domain authority
  Developed by Moz, your domain authority is a score assigned to your site out of 100 that gives you an indication of the strength of your domain.The number of unique domains linking to you, as well as your total amount of links are taken into account when calculating your domain authority. As implied, good domain authority numbers point to high authority in your vertical because many other sites are talking about you.Generally speaking, the higher your domain authority, the more likely you are to rank locally.
• Inbound link diversity
  You link profile cannot all be comprised of all the same link.The pizza example again: If all your inbound links are from your city’s food magazine, point to your menu and use the anchor text ”best pizza in town,” Google might think something is up.You need diversity in referring domains (the sites linking to you), anchor text (the text in the hyperlink), and pages they link to (i.e., menu, homepage, blog).Google wants you to build natural authority—not just trade or buy them.And it knows your link profile is natural if a variety of sites are linking to you within relevant articles with varying anchor texts.If your link profile is diverse, you stand a greater chance of ranking over your competitors.
• Keyword-optimized site content
  And the last competitive local SEO ranking factor we’ll talk about is keyword-optimized content.Basically, to rank for a keyword phrase, you need to talk about that keyword somewhere on your site.Seems pretty straightforward, right?It is. For Google to think you might answer a searcher’s question or satisfy their need, they need to know that you provide the answer or solve the problem within your site content.Without a keyword-optimized content marketing plan, it will be much less likely you will appear in local search results.

Local SEO is a hard race to win. What’s true today won’t necessarily be true tomrorow—the only constant in local SEO is change.

You need a dedicated team of local SEO experts who will stay up on changes—and implement them—for your business.

And you need your local SEO team to know what tactics are simply the foundation, and which ones will push the needle. You need them to get the foundation right, and move quickly to working on the competitive local SEO ranking factors that will improve your rankings and drive business.

Digital Strike is that team. We will tailor a local SEO solution that takes into account what you already have, and helps grow your business.

If you’re ready to get start growing your business, then let’s talk. Schedule a cost- and obligation-free consultation today!