Why You’re Not Earning Those All-Important SEO Backlinks
Backlinks.
They’ve become the holy grail of SEO. The more high-quality backlinks you earn, the more Google will trust your site. After a certain a point, Google’s trust will make your SEO efforts extremely easy and protect against certain black hat techniques your competitors may aim at your site.
Until then, though, it’s going to be a steep uphill climb that requires backlink generation.
4 Reasons No One Is Giving Your Site Backlinks
Are you one of the countless people who swear they’ve done everything right to acquire backlinks but have nothing to show for it? If that sounds like you, your poor results may be due to one of these four reasons:
1. You Need to Create Content for Influencers
The most common mistake people make when trying to earn backlinks is that they post content only for their target market – the people they hope to convert into customers. This can be unbelievably frustrating. You work day and night to give your audience engaging content, yet, you receive no backlinks in return.
This can happen even if the post received decent traffic and plenty of positive feedback in the comments section.
The problem is that most of your audience probably can’t give you backlinks. Social shares aren’t backlinks for one thing, so they don’t have a direct impact on your SEO.
You need your links to be shared on websites with traffic. This means you need to reach influencers, not just potential customers.
Let’s say you are a personal trainer and you just created a great post for getting six-pack abs. Who, among your readership, can give you a backlink for that? Unless your readers are also personal trainers or working in the health space and have a site and aren’t direct competition, it’s not going to happen.
It’s still fine to write for your audience, but consider what the influencers in your market would be interested in. A personal trainer could research studies on certain nutrients and write something that supplement companies may want to link to because it supports their business.
2. You’re Not Putting Your Content Right in Front of Influencers
Even if you craft content for your influencers, you may come up very short of your backlink goals. That’s because these authority sites aren’t going to see the tremendous content you’re putting together without some additional legwork.
Take the initiative to show it to them. Whenever you create a post for influencers, email a link to the people who run these sites. Introduce yourself and ask them if they have a second to look over your post. You can certainly mention why it would be relevant information for their audience, too.
Just make sure your content is relevant. If it’s clear you haven’t thought of the influencer’s audience in the least, you can forget about ever receiving a backlink from them – ever.
3. Your Company Doesn’t Have a Strong Social Media Presence
As we mentioned earlier, social media posts don’t directly improve SEO.
While that’s true, you should still improve your company’s social media presence. A strong following can help bypass a lot of the hurdles between your content and the influencers we were just talking about.
For example, say you’re not having any luck reaching your influencers. Depending on your market, they might receive hundreds of similar emails every day.
Later, when they’re on Twitter, though, they see your post because someone they follow retweeted it. They notice that it’s received decent social support, too, which means they’re more likely to read it over themselves. They also now have reason to believe your information is valuable to readers.
We’re not suggesting that this is exactly how it will play out for you. What we are saying is that social media can be a tremendous platform for building your brand outside of SEO, and this can help earn you backlinks.
4. You Don’t Collaborate on Any Content
Collaborating with other companies on content almost always leads to a backlink. At the very least, the company you worked with is going to share the content, right?
You may also earn exposure to a whole new network through collaborations. Again, this may simply happen through social media, but the results can be very promising.
Even a case study can count as a powerful collaboration tool. A company that’s the subject of one will often share it to show their audience how they’ve improved their operations. Depending on the nature of the case study, this kind of evidence-backed content can be very valuable to influencers, too.
Don’t Give Up on Backlinks
There’s no doubt that earning backlinks takes a good amount of work, but that’s all the more reason to do it. If you buckle down and create compelling content your influencers will want to share, you’ll eventually begin scoring high-quality backlinks that really improve your rankings.
Meanwhile, competitors who decided to give up will fall further and further behind.