When trying to improve your website’s traffic, there are many things you can do to move yourself up in rankings. But one important aspect of ranking that may not be entirely in your control is backlinking.

Backlinking can make a significant difference in your website’s performance, but you may not know what it is or why you want backlinks. At Performance Driven Marketing, we want you to understand what a backlink is and why it is so important for your business to successfully improve SEO and website traffic.

What Is Backlinking?

SEO backlinking is a link from one website that leads back to your website. Because this takes place off of your website, it is referred to as off-page SEO. Much like when writing a paper in college, backlinking acts as a citation from someone else’s website to your own, telling search engine’s that your content is reliable enough to use as a source. Backlinks are a great way for a website to gain authority. They tell search engines your brand is reputable and allows your page to show up closer to the top of search results. 

Why Is Backlinking Important? 

Backlinking from one website to yours acts as a vote of confidence and has a substantial impact on your SEO. It tells search engines and web users that your website is creating reliable, trustworthy content. As more brands link their content back to yours, search engines understand that this content is worth viewing and linking to. 

While the number of links to your page increases, your content may begin to appear closer to the top of search engine results pages (SERP). You should try to receive these backlinks to improve your site’s ranking and visibility. You may find that as the number of backlinks pointing to your website increases, the more traffic and business you will have. 

What Makes A Good Backlink?

While backlinking to your website is important, all backlinks are not created equal. There are several qualities that make a good backlink. The qualities of these high-quality backlinks include the following:

• It’s Relevant: The referring page is relevant to the link destination. If your links are coming from unrelated web pages, the users from that site may not find the information on your site relevant or helpful and will quickly click away. 
• Natural Linking: The anchor text is specific. If the anchor text says “click here,” the audience may not know what website they are heading to and find the link unappealing. By ingraining the anchor text naturally and using specific language, users understand the purpose and are more interested in clicking. 
• Reputable Source: The link should come from a reputable source. When reputable sources link back to you, it establishes your credibility as a reliable source and may encourage others to do the same. 

While some of these things are entirely out of your control, there is something you can do to improve the odds of receiving quality backlinks. You should ensure that every piece of content on your website is well-researched and factual. By providing quality content, you tell others that your website is a reliable source, making other reliable sources more likely to use your website as a reference. 

How Do I Backlink Properly? 

While it is important to create reliable content on your website to receive backlinks, it is also important that you are backlinking your content as well. If you are creating original content, you likely spent a great deal of time researching to ensure it was the highest quality possible. During the research process, you likely came across several reputable sources that helped you along. It is important to cite these sources throughout your text to establish credibility and ensure your work isn’t seen as a direct, uncredited rip-off. 

Many of the tips for backlinking properly are similar to the section above. You want to ensure that, when you add backlinks to your content, it is naturally engrained in the text and is relevant. These links are useless and overlooked by your website visitors otherwise. 

How Do I Get More Backlinks?

There are several different ways to increase the number of backlinks to your website, though it is important to understand that each of these is not created equal. The ways to increase backlinks to your website include the following:

• Pay for them: The easiest and fastest way for you to increase the number of backlinks to your website is by paying for them. However, we don’t recommend this method for one very important reason. Paying for backlinks without a “sponsored” tag goes against Google Search Essentials and can cause you to drop in rankings. We don’t believe this is a worthwhile investment, and it is best to try other methods. 
• Comment on relevant online content: While you certainly don’t want to comment on content created by your direct competitors, you can comment on relevant content online. When commenting, you should add a link to your website in the signature. While this isn’t a fast way to gain backlinks, it is certainly a way to get people in the same business sphere as you to see your content, and you may become a reliable source for their content as well. 
• Earn them: Earning backlinks certainly isn’t as easy as it sounds, but it is a great way to gain organic backlinks that will ultimately benefit your business. Whether you are writing blogs ranking the best products on the market and featuring other businesses or promoting your content on social media for others to see, creating reliable, well-researched content is the best way to gain more backlinks. 

Create SEO Web Content With Performance Driven Marketing

Creating SEO-rich web content is crucial for your website to show up to your desired target audience and ultimately increase the number of backlinks for your business. Without backlinking, search engines cannot recommend your brand to its users. Our team at Performance Driven Marketing is determined to create the highest quality content for your website to increase traffic and reputation.

In addition to our SEO services, we provide business owners across the United States with website development, graphic design, and marketing management. If you are ready to improve your website’s SEO performance, reach out today to request a free consultation.

If you are trying to advertise in an oversaturated market, it can be hard to come up with ideas for new content like blog posts. When there are lots of businesses out there similar to yours, you may feel like everything has already been done a thousand times over and there’s nothing that can set you apart from the competition in search engine rankings.

If you’re in this situation, you may want to consider tangential content to reach a broader consumer base and increase your brand’s visibility.

What is Tangential Content?

You probably create content that is directly related to your business. For example, if you own a residential real estate company, your content is most likely focused on all things related to buying and selling homes: tips for first-time home buyers, guides to local zoning laws, things like that. 

Although this content is helpful to your consumer base and provides valuable information, they can get that information from an infinite number of internet sources, and you’ll have a hard time finding SEO keywords that haven’t been used dozens of times before.

If you’ve exhausted every possible topic that is directly related to your business, it’s time to try tangential content, which focuses on SEO for tangentially-related topics that your consumer base will still find interesting or helpful.

For example, for the aforementioned hypothetical real estate business, you could try branching out into indirectly related topics like home decor, family living, or custom homes. You could create a video series giving interior design tips, make Pinterest boards with architectural inspiration, or post tips for parents of young children on social media.

Why Should I Create Tangential Content?

Tangential content helps you reach people who are not necessarily actively looking for your services or products, but will still find them relevant or useful. Who knows — your content might help them realize they do, in fact, have a need for your product or service.

Even if tangential content doesn’t immediately result in better conversion rates, it still increases brand awareness. If this content resonates with consumers, they will remember your brand or company later on when they’re actively searching for a specific product or service you provide. 

How Do I Come Up With Ideas?

There are many ways to come up with content ideas, but here are two methods to get you started.

Buyer Persona

The best way to come up with ideas for tangential content is to consider the type of people you serve. This can include demographic information, like gender, age, and location, or other considerations like behavior patterns, goals, values, and motivations. What are their likes and dislikes? What are they interested in? How do they spend their time?

Once you’ve considered all these things, you can create what’s called a buyer persona, which is a fictional characterization of an ideal customer. Cater your tangential content to this buyer persona.

Coming back to the real estate example, maybe your buyer persona is a couple in their early thirties with young children who are looking to buy a home in your area. They are moving from another state and value quality time with family, education, and outdoor recreation.

Based on this buyer persona, you can create tangential content you think people like this would be interested in. You can feature local schools on your social media, create a map of nearby family-friendly hiking trails, or write a blog providing helpful information about your area for people looking to relocate.

Mind Maps

Start with a central idea. For a real estate company, it could be something like “homeownership.” From there, you create branches for more specific related topics, like home maintenance. Take those subtopics and list even more specific aspects — lawn care, pressure washing, or appliance repair.

From there, you can keep branching out and getting more and more specific until you find a unique topic you want to create content based on. This is a great way to find unexplored SEO niches and elevate your content in search results.

Elevate Your Content With PDM

At Performance Driven Marketing, our professional team is committed to helping our clients develop their brand and reputation, improve their SEO results, and create high-quality content. We provide our clients with everything they need to increase their customer base, including web design, signage, promotional products, social media ads, and more. If you’re ready to amp up your marketing efforts, reach out and request a free consultation today!