Startup entrepreneurs are always looking for the marketing strategy that can put them on the map, yet still work effectively within the confines of their limited budgets (or niche needs). It’s undeniably hard to find this balance, especially with the diversity of online marketing strategies available today.
But one strategy stands out above the others, with a range of benefits both universal and unique to new businesses: SEO backlinks for startups. The basic idea is to publish offsite content on major publishers, with each article including a link back to the content on your site (usually in the form of well-written onsite blog posts). It’s a simple tactic, in theory, but has tremendous potential for any entrepreneur who wants more visibility for their emerging startup.
The Perks of Link Building
Let’s start by covering some of the basic benefits of the strategy:
- Referral traffic. The main purpose of a link is to introduce web users to a new page. Accordingly, one of the most immediate and obvious benefits of link building is an influx of referral traffic. Assuming you’ve built your link with captivating anchor text and in a context that matters to your target audience, you’ll likely earn direct referral traffic to whichever page you’re linking. Over time, as you work with bigger and more popular publishers, this stream of referral traffic can snowball out of control.
- Domain authority (and search rankings). Google’s search algorithm works by evaluating the relevance and trustworthiness of sites in its index. The more trustworthy your site is, the higher it’s going to rank; this is the basis for search engine optimization (SEO), the series of strategies designed to help businesses get more search engine visibility. Trustworthiness is measured in terms of authority, which is gained when you earn new links to your site. Link building, therefore, is valuable for boosting your authority and the rankings of your pages, earning you more organic traffic.
- Brand visibility. Simply mentioning your company by name can be valuable when building links on high-profile publishers. With enough exposure, you’ll introduce new people to the existence of your brand, and increase the likelihood of previous customers buying more of your products and services. This effect is increased if you have an author profile on a prominent publisher, where you can briefly talk about your company.
- Publisher relationships. Working with other publishers also increases your relationship with those publishers. If you make your editors happy, they’ll be more likely to feature your brand in new stories, or give you more opportunities to produce visible content for your shared audience. Writing good content will also increase your desirability for other, bigger publishers, allowing you to work your way up the ladder and unlock even more impressive opportunities.
The Advantages for New Startups
There are also some unique advantages that emerging startups can claim, due to the nature of their young business:
- Early momentum. Link building is a great way to help startups get early momentum for their brand visibility. Most businesses struggle in the early stages of brand development, since they don’t have much brand equity to work with or a foothold with their target demographics. Building a link on a major publisher is a kind of shortcut to visibility you otherwise wouldn’t be able to unlock until far later in your company’s growth.
- Low costs. Advertising can be inordinately expensive, so link building is cheap by comparison. You’ll have to invest lots of time (or some money) into writing good content and managing high-quality publisher relationships, but these costs are still relatively low, especially when considering the benefits. For startups working with a tight budget, it’s an ideal strategy to start with.
- You can use link building for a variety of different goals and intentions, making it easy to optimize for whatever your priorities are. For example, you could tweak a strategy to focus on developing your search engine rankings, or to favor referral traffic generation. Startups often need this flexibility to grow as efficiently as possible.
- Link building is also an impressively sustainable strategy, capable of yielding benefits to the new, small startup and the established, major corporation, as well as every step in between. This makes it an ideal long-term investment for any business prioritizing growth.
Link building isn’t the only strategy startups should be using—in fact, link building performs best when it functions as an element of a comprehensive SEO and content marketing strategy—but it is one of the best in terms of ROI and longevity. It’s hard to break into the field on your own if you don’t have access to skilled content writers or existing publisher relationships, but a link building agency can help any startup build the momentum they need to succeed.
