025: Why Simple Link Building Is Important For More Website Traffic

In this episode, Jules breaks down why link building is important for websites and its critical role in SEO. She explains how both internal and external links contribute to your website’s domain authority, increasing its trustworthiness and ranking potential on search engines like Google.

Key Takeaways:

• Why Link Building Matters? Learn the importance of making the most of every opportunity for building website links, whether or not you create a whole strategy around link building.
  
  
• What is Domain Authority? Learn how your website’s domain authority is determined and why it's essential for ranking on the first page of Google.
  
  
• The Role of Internal and External Links: Discover how linking within your site and building external links can boost your SEO.
  
  
• Building High-Quality Links: Find out why relevance, quality, and quantity are the top three factors in successful link building.
  
  
• Practical Link-Building Tips: Learn how to naturally build links through guest posts, podcast appearances, and even your Google Business Profile.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Free Beginner's QuickStart Guide to SEO – Get started with optimising your website for search engines.
• Free Website SEO Report – Request a personalised report to assess your website’s current SEO status.
• Moz Domain Authority Checker – Check your website’s domain authority and see how you can improve.

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for more actionable SEO and website tips!

Related Content:

• Listen to Episode 9: Content Strategy - Your Roadmap to a Streamlined and Successful Online Presence

Get your free website SEO report here at The Website Success Hub and start making changes for a more sustainable marketing strategy!

Transcript

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT - MAY CONTAIN ERRORS
Introduction and Setting the Scene

Hi, happy Friday. I'm parked. I just had to move. It's raining. I was parked under a tree and it was really tinging on the roof. So  I moved but now I'm in  the main road. So I hope the traffic noise isn't too bad. Hopefully you won't hear it on on the recording or in the podcast. 

The Importance of Link Building

So today I want to talk about something that's really important for our website, something that is is critical really in terms of building up our authority and in terms of our websites actually doing what we want them to do.

And that's link building. So links are  a fundamental part of the internet. It's how the internet works really. It's the fact that sites link between sites and that's why it was called the World Wide Web. It's a web of links between good information on the internet and we want to try and build that on our own site.

Whether it's links between our own content. And itself, like internal links on our website, or whether it's links that are coming into our website or out from our website. This is really important.

Understanding Domain Authority

They're really powerful because they can help to increase what's called your domain authority. So as websites  are around for longer and they build more links, they have more content on them.

Google  and other search engines sees those sites as more. Trustworthy and as being a good source of information and there's something called your domain authority or DA score So that is where you're it's essentially a score that there's a there's a website called Moz That gives your website a score and it helps Google understand which websites  Have more authority and which ones have less authority.

So for a newer site, then you would you wouldn't have any authority when you first start, or if you've not really done anything in terms of having a strategy or a plan about how you increase the trust and increase the authority of your site, then you would have a domain of authority of, Very low zero, you know immediately sort of you could start start getting a few  a few points on that score But it takes time and it's something that doesn't happen automatically if you if you just build a site and leave it and don't do Anything with your seo Then your domain authority is unlikely to increase unless you happen to Be sending lots and lots of traffic to your website.

So your your website is is then seen as  as an authority because people are spending time there. A lot of people,  if maybe you're in a, uh, a niche that's very, that's very sought after. But even with that, actually, I'm saying that and thinking about it, I think still, you would still have to be getting those links coming into your site as well.

So anyway, I've digressed a little bit there, but essentially the reason that we want to get links to our website is to, to make our site more, have more authority and be shown as more trustworthy. And when we're trying to. Rank on the first page of Google, which is really critical because that's where you're going to get the lion's share of the clicks.

Most of the clicks go through to the top three positions. And certainly if you're on the first page, that makes a big difference because  Who clicks through to the second page, especially now Google has gone back to pages. We had quite a long time where Google had the infinite scroll, so you would just keep scrolling through the search results pages, but now they're back to having actual pages where people have to click on to page two.

, I find that I don't always get the results that I'm wanting on page one, so I sometimes do click through to page two as well, really. But anyway, most people don't.  When we're doing the SEO, when we're trying to get our sites to rank, we want to be in those top positions because those are the ones, really position one is the one that we've got, we're aiming for, but certainly one of those top three positions is where we want to be and the way that we can do that, the way that we can show up in those positions is that we  have a higher domain authority than the other pages on page one.

And that's not always the case. There are times where you can rank higher than sites that have a greater domain authority. If your content is better, and this is where Google is getting cleverer and cleverer, is if your content is better than those other sites, if you've got one really good article on your site about a particular topic, and there's other websites that are talking about it.

But they have more authority because they've got more links. They're talking about something else. And this is kind of a splinter article for them. And that's not to say that you wouldn't rank above those sites. Google really now with all the algorithm updates, just wants the best quality content for that particular search query.

So  that being said,  it's good to look at what else is on page one. So if you're thinking about  Your domain authority and increasing it and thinking about a term that you want to rank for, then you can look at, there are tools that you can use. There's a little chrome extension called the Moz bar, and I find that really helpful when I'm looking at whether it's possible that you could rank for a term.

If I'm working with my clients and we're looking at a search term and thinking whether that's a good keyword to optimize for, then We look at those pages and see what else is showing up on that page. And what that does is it shows us  the search intent of that query. So it shows whether people are looking for more information or they're looking to make a purchase or do a little bit more research before making a purchase or looking for a, to navigate to a particular either site or to a local business, then it tells us that, but it will also show me that the domain authority of the other sites that are on page one.

And if they're all a domain authority of like 50 plus and my website is a domain authority of two. It isn't, mine's more than that. But if it was, then there's very little chance that Google is going to trust me more than all of those other sites. ,  if you look at, a page  and you see Very mixed domain authorities on that page.

So you see small sites you see big like the big players Then there's more chance that you you have a chance of ranking But anyway, that's sort of going off on a bit of a tangent because i'm talking about links this morning And actually i've just gone down the domain authority Rabbit hole there a little bit but it is important because that's why we're building links I mean, the links themselves bring traffic into our website, but the goal is that this will all help to make our website a more trustworthy source of information..

Strategies for Effective Link Building

So, the reason that it's also helpful is because those links  Let me first of all talk about  what kind of links we want. So there's three things when we're considering links for websites. First and foremost, we want to build links that have a good relevance. So the links that are coming into your site and the same for going out from your site as well.

Going out from your site is a bit different, but when you're first starting out, actually linking to content, even linking to bigger competitors, is a bit of a controversial. Strategy,  but it can be really helpful if nobody's finding your site. anyway, then placing yourself and linking out to alternative content that relates to what you're talking about can kind of bring you into that, into that ballpark with those people.

So it kind of makes you part of that circle. It's not necessarily gonna  directly affect  your SEO, getting people coming into your site, but it just helps to increase that authority in terms of you knowing what you're talking about. You can. link to the other places who also know what they're talking about as well.

It's  something that you can do,  which can sometimes be helpful. It's, it's certainly something you wouldn't want to be, if you were a shop, you wouldn't want to be linking to your competitor next door if they sell the exact same thing as you.

But  say, like, if I was writing an article about SEO.  I could then link to some of the big sites like,  like Moz, and that would be helpful for me showing that I understand that industry and I understand,   what else people need to know about that topic and that can be helpful.

 So relevance, making sure that the links that are coming in and out of your site, you can't always control the links coming into your site, but if you're trying to build links, so you're trying to go after and get links, make sure that they are relevant to what you do.

Make sure that they are,  from places where people are actually interested in what you're talking about and it relates to it.  There's no good getting loads and loads of links and this was something that was  An old Black Hat SEO tactic of just building loads and loads of links and people buy links and there's so much stuff that now that Google is so much smarter that actually just going and buying 10, 000 links from random websites that are really spammy.

And have no relevance to what you do  is not going to help your SEO and it's probably going to harm it realistically. So relevance is first, making sure that those links that you're trying to build are actually relevant to your content.

Quality of the domain that's sending those links as well. So trying to get links if you can from higher authority sites.

So  that can be,  I mean, in terms of what you can actually,  Get links from I'm going to come on to that in a minute But actually just making sure that when you're thinking about how can I build links? I would say if it's relevant then don't worry as much about the domain authority So first and foremost worry about the relevance then thinking about the domain authority  and what you want is a mixture?

So you want to have some smaller sites linking to yours, ideally some big sites. That's the goal, if  you can get some links coming in from really high domain authority sites. Then that's great. And the reason that we want to do that is because  essentially what it does is it tells Google.  Yes, this is a trusted source that I'm linking out to you can pass a little bit of my little SEO juice over to that, that site and  . It doesn't take anything away from that original site, but it just helps to pass a little bit of SEO authority and a little bit of SEO juice over to your website.

And that's why it's so important because as you do that, then it. As I say, Google understands more that you are trustworthy and that you you then get that little bit of SEO juice And that's that's the goal That's the key is we want to try and get those links that  come from a site That's that has authority  And also that those links are the we're talking about sort of the quality of the links So the quality of the site that they're coming in from but also the quality of the links themselves  So if you're if you are doing some link building  Or if you're doing some guesting and you're giving somebody a link to your site, if you give them a little sentence that maybe describes what you do or so, I quite often, if I'm doing any sort of guest expert slots or guest blogging or anything like that,  I'll link to one of my freebies and that my, my two most popular freebies are my free quick start guide to get to SEO, which you can get from my website if you need it.

And also my free SEO report, which again, that's there on my website. If you need it, I'll link to those. And.  If I'm linking to those, rather than having the word where the link is, as here. So you can get an SEO report here. What ideally I want is something that says you can get a free website SEO report here.

So, and you link, you make the link the whole sentence, which again, you can't always control that. But if it's somebody, you know, that you're building this link from and you're happy to actually ask them, is there any chance you could use this as the link text  that will help them. And you can explain that to them that actually this helps them that they've got outgoing links that have got good anchor text in that link. That's what we call the actual text that's in the link. And it helps massively helps you as well, because ideally you want that variety of links coming into your site. So they don't all say just your website name, or they don't like for me, they don't all just say SEO report, they're sentences, they are more likely than that people will click on them as well.

 And then the third thing is the number of links.  So this was before when we went back in the day this and actually I say back in the day up until really recently this was what the key thing was the number of links you've got to your website is going to help your domain authority and it does but it's less important now than those first two of relevance and quality.

So Yes, we want to be building more and more links. Ideally, what we want to happen is, is for them to happen naturally. So you have good content that people naturally want to link to. And if that can start happening, that can then be going on in the background. And it's something that you then don't have to worry about.

You're just creating good content, putting it out there. You can then reach out to people if you want to. If you want to build a, do a link building campaign, you can reach out to them. And ask them if they would like to link to your content. But hopefully, as I say, that happens naturally and just happens in the background without you realising.

So, the reason that  we want to build links. It's that SEO authority, but also  it's that it's actually bringing traffic into our website. So if somebody links to our website, hopefully the goal is people are going to click on that link and it's something that's relevant to what they were looking for and the information they want.

And so  they're going to come through to our website and hopefully spend some time there as well, because it's not just about getting people over to the website and then bouncing away again. That doesn't help our  our SEO. It's about them actually staying there, spending time on our site.

Hopefully they're bingeing our content as well.

Internal Linking and Content Strategy

And this is where we come to internal linking.   This is the thing that's really in our control. It's something we can't always control, the external links coming into our site. But we can control how we link our own content together. And I think it was episode 9 where I talk about  Establishing your core topics.

If you haven't listened to that episode, it's definitely worth a listen because  this is how you can then  link all your content together and help people to go on a journey, help people to understand and get the most out of your content really. So establish your core topics and then work out how those things link together.

So say for me, my core topics are. SEO, conversion rate optimization, and content  optimization. So those are the things that I like to talk about. And there are other things within that. So within SEO, I can talk about local SEO, I can talk about SEO for podcasts, I can talk about SEO for course creators, I can talk about links, I can talk about all these things within that.

And that will all link back to that primary content I've got around SEO. So I a one big article, a piece of cornerstone content that's, that doesn't necessarily bring traffic into my site because SEO is very competitive and I'm not going to be showing up on page one. My small website isn't going to be showing up on page one of Google for SEO.

That doesn't mean to say that I shouldn't have the article there and then link into that from all of those other articles that are.  So think of that as like your main city and these are all the other towns coming off of it and those Towns those those other articles might link to each other as well They may not all link together, but they there might be something if I'm talking about links then certainly talking about Your content so we even within this  podcast episode I'm talking about other things other episodes other other content I've Created before and that's something that then could be a link in a blog post around that  So that's how you would sort of build up those internal links.

And again, using the same principle of not all the links being the same text.   If I wanted to link to my article about  content creation, then I would say you can read more about content creation or more read more about creating your core topics or understanding your core topics here and have that whole thing as the link.

 So that's going to help them.  Me to build that. That link authority on my own website and help Google understand where that link is going.

 What you can also do with links is make sure that your keyword for the page that you're trying to link to. So my keyword on that article about core topics, for example, could be core topics or cornerstone content.

I can't remember what I decided on as a keyword for that page, .  So say it was core topics, having that within that link also then helps Google to understand that keyword in that article, if that makes sense. I feel like that was a little bit rambly Hopefully that does make sense what i'm talking about there But essentially if you can that's another place that you can use your keywords So when you're using your keywords in your page titles your page descriptions your h1 headline Your image alt text your url if you can The other place you can use them is in  any links that are coming into those pages as well So  if you're creating an article as a guest post for somebody and then linking to something on your own website Think about where what?

Keywords need to be in that link that you're giving out as well.

Practical Tips for Link Building

So , whether you're thinking about SEO or not, whether you're thinking about  actually launching an SEO campaign or not,  link building is something that you can, you can, you can consider. And even if you're, even if all you're doing, even if you're not doing anything with your SEO right now, but you are doing guest blogging, you are doing, , guesting on podcast episodes,  you're posting on social media, you're, anything where you're actually creating content that links back to your website. If you just have a few considerations around that, around the link that you, you can get from that, and thinking about whether you can get a link as well. So if you've created a guest blog, if you've created a guest blog  post, and  that person hasn't linked to your site, then definitely reach out, ask them   or you've just had done an interview on a podcast and that person hasn't.

link to your site. Most people do, but if they haven't, it's definitely worth asking them. And a good way of doing that is if you've got a freebie that you can give to them so that it benefits their audience as well. But just having that thought in mind of, okay, where is the best place on my website for these people to come into?

These people who've heard me on this podcast, what can be helpful for them to actually come in and be the first thing they see about my website? And thinking of that in mind. So anything you're doing.  Well, you're creating content or you're doing anything really how can you bring links into your website from there?

And it's something you can do from your own Google business profile as well so if you're creating posts on your Google business profile if you're which ideally you would be if you're creating posts on social media and You've got a Google business profile, and you're not Creating posts on there.

That's the first priority start doing that and link to your website from there because that's all extra links coming through And it's extra ways that people may click on it. But also it might just give you that a little bit more seo juice as well    so with seo you can with link building You can have all kinds of intricate campaigns and you can think about stealing competitors links and looking for broken links on the internet or there's so many different ways of link building and so many different strategies  for doing that but that is a little bit more advanced seo and it's not something that you probably need to think about when  There's definitely things that are more important than that, but we shouldn't ignore link building because it is, it is an integral part of SEO.

It's a really critical thing of having website success. It's creating those links. And if you're doing things any way that could naturally build links into your website, then I would definitely say not to ignore SEO.  I keep saying that not to ignore link building as a way to get more traffic to your website and get more authority to your website as well.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

And it, it's just all about at the end of the day, the goal is our website making more sales. I talked about this in last week's episode of how , we sometimes forget that the goal of our website is to make more sales or to get people onto our email list.  We'll get them coming into our shop so that we then make more sales So link building is all part of that.

I hope this is helpful. I hope you can start thinking about  where your links are coming into your website and start thinking about how you can build some new links that could just help to increase your domain authority.  I'll link to a site where you can actually go and check your domain authority as well.

And I would love to know what your domain authority is currently. And  let me know if you need some help trying to figure out how to make it better See you soon. Bye.