3 MIN. READ
As part of a continuing series on industrial marketing in the age of COVID-19, this article will focus on the importance of high-quality backlinks to boost your website's SEO.
Industrial marketing is competitive because it is almost exclusively B2B in nature. Content is often geared towards companies rather than individuals. However, smart marketers know that every company is made up of individuals and will ensure that content is created with this fact in mind.
A unique voice and engaging content can help a company stand out in a crowded field of competitors. While this can help keep people consuming your content, it does not draw them to it in the first place.
That is where backlinks can help.
Digital Referrals
Have you ever told a friend about a restaurant that you enjoyed? Because they trusted your judgment, they followed your advice and went (enjoying it thoroughly by the way).
When the restaurant owner asked how they found out about the establishment, your name was mentioned as the method of referral. The same process happens all the time on the internet, and it is called a backlink.
Backlinks are essentially digital referrals. If your website has relevant content or something that is worthy of being shared, the author of another website may decide to include it as a reference in their own content.
The more authoritative a voice you are for a given topic, the more valuable your backlink will be.
How Backlinks Work
Backlinks are one of the most important components in visibility and SEO. They are seen as a sign of trust and a good reputation. If your content is accurate and relevant enough to be quoted by other websites, it bumps you up in the search rankings. The more backlinks your website has, the more this ranking will grow.
Take for instance a company that has a monthly blog about automation and robots in manufacturing. That content is seen by a technology writer who recognizes the relevance to an article they are writing about workplaces of the future.
They create a link in their article to your article, and just like that, a backlink is born. Now all of their readers are aware of your content, boosting your visibility.
Another one of the benefits of a backlink is that it makes your content available to an entirely new audience. The vast majority of them will have never heard of your company or website before the backlink drew their attention to it.
Higher visibility helps drive traffic to your site, resulting in growth, which thereby results in more business. This valuation on content provides a real-world example of why writing blogs, creating videos and recording podcasts are beneficial for your business.
Growing the Right Way
Growth should be organic rather than inorganic. Inorganic growth is when backlinks are bought from services or websites to artificially boost your search rankings. These are low-quality links to websites that are not even relevant to the content that you are offering.
For the most part, search engines are fairly good at identifying these types of backlinks and penalize websites that use them. Low-quality backlinks can also show up as spam, so you should check your website often to make sure that it is clean.
A great resource for organically growing your backlink standing is through IndustryNet. Industry leaders use IndustryNet to discover new suppliers and the latest information and data on companies.
With powerful ranking factors, IndustryNet appears as an organic search result for 278,800 keywords on over 1.8 million indexed pages.
Your content with a backlink from IndustryNet will instantly become visible to over 39,000 unique visitors every month. Right now, there are thousands of companies that are organically boosting their ranking by working with IndustryNet. Click here to learn more.
