Here’s Why Service Businesses Should Invest in Link Building
- February 25, 2019
- By: Vonigo
This article about link building for service businesses is by Nicolas Straut, an SEO Associate at Fundera.
For service businesses hoping to tap into new markets and reach new clients, there are endless marketing strategies out there.
From paid social media advertising to referral marketing, the right marketing can allow businesses to speak to a local clientele eager for high-quality moving services, air duct cleaning, house washing, and other necessary services.
But one strategy not as often employed but particularly useful for service businesses: search engine optimization (SEO). This approach enables businesses to acquire higher rankings on search engines like Google for keywords that customers are searching for.
SEO consists of on-page, off-page, and technical optimization. On-page optimization includes improving your site’s content. Off-page involves improving your website’s visibility. T
Optimizing your website for SEO will give you a better of a chance of ranking in search results. Link building is a very valuable piece of the puzzle.
What is Link Building?
Link building involves increasing the number of backlinks to your website through outreach. Search engines use links as a signal of trust. By earning links to your website from reputable sites, search engines view your website as more reliable.
A link is more valuable if it’s placed on a page or website directly applicable to related keywords you’re targeting. A relevant link will be worth more to you than a non-relevant one. For example, if your cleaning business’ website is linked to a well-established home improvement website, that link will have a higher value than a random link from a different industry.
Service businesses can take on link building themselves in-house or employ an outside agency to build links for them. Regardless, it’s vital that the links built to your site are from reputable, relevant sites (quality over quantity). Don’t pay for links to be placed, which is a violation of search engine policies.
A Few Popular Link Building Examples
Before you start link building, it’s important to understand search engine rules and the biggest violations you should avoid. Once you understand what not to do, here are a few tactics to look into:
Unlinked Mentions
Unlinked mentions are one of the easiest ways to build links to your website. It involves simply reaching out to someone who has already mentioned you or your company online and requesting a link. To start, you can Google your business’s name and see whether anyone has written an article mentioning your business. If you find a mention without a link, track down a contact using a tool like Hunter.
Resource Outreach
Another great way to build links is to create a valuable resource on your company blog and doing outreach to other companies in your space. For example, if you own a housing painting business, you could write a blog post on how you got started in the industry. Describe how you trained and ultimately started a business, and how others could do the same.
You could then reach out to editors or managers who have covered a similar topic and see if they’ll place a link to your piece.
Why Service Businesses Should Invest in Link Building
Service businesses should invest in link building for many reasons:
1. Higher Rankings
As mentioned, links are signals to search engines of the trustworthiness of a website. By earning more links, in addition to optimizing your site in other ways, you’ll earn higher rankings in search results for related queries. For example, if you’re targeting the long-tail keyword ‘moving company in Princeton NJ’ and your page on the topic has double the number of links compared with a competitor’s page, it’s likely to rank higher in results, which increases the likelihood of a click.
2. More Organic Traffic
When you’re more likely to be the site that searchers choose, you earn higher traffic. If you’ve chosen to target the right local keywords, ignoring more competitive keywords like ‘moving company,’ for more specific, longer-tail keywords, you’ll yield qualified traffic to your site from searchers who are much more likely to become your customers.
3. More Leads
In addition to gaining higher rankings and generating more organic traffic to your business’s site, link building can help to generate more inbound leads for your business. A solid SEO strategy allows would-be customers to more easily find your site itself through search results and, hopefully, convert to leads and ultimately customers.
The Bottom Line
Link building is an excellent tactic for service businesses as a part of a larger SEO and inbound marketing strategy.
