Insights

Link Building Strategies For B2B Websites

Author - Brett Tudor
29.04.2022

An SEO audit of a typical b2b website often reveals a major weakness – backlinks or lack of them.

Yet links gained from other websites operating in your niche or other high authority sources can bring a significant boost to keyword rankings.

According to one study, the websites occupying the top result in SERPS have on average 3.8 times more backlinks pointing at them than those lower down the search results pages.

This isn’t a surprise. Getting other websites to link to your website can be a hugely time-consuming task. This task is made even more difficult if there is no strategy for acquiring them.

While there are many other factors that will feed into keyword rankings, backlinks are one of the most important, and any SEO campaign should include some focus on this area. Any marketer who spends time on strategies to gain backlinks will probably be one step ahead of the vast majority of businesses that don’t spend time on this important area through lack of knowledge or resources.

It has to be said not all backlinks created equal. As a general rule, the quality of backlinks will be closely aligned to the amount of effort put in to acquiring them. Some of the possible ways to build a backlinks will include the following:

Directory links

These acquire the least effort. The internet is saturated with directories. You will find plenty of local directories such as Yell, newspaper directories, business directories and niche directories where you can add links back to your site.

One of the advantages of building links from directories is speed. Directories are the fastest way to build links in volume. Yet building links this way may require a small budget to pay for your website to be included.

Many offer a free listing, however some of the better-quality directories monetise their sites by asking for annual fees for inclusion. These fees can add up so it is important that the quality of the directory is checked out before committing valuable marketing budget. It is also worth keeping in mind that directory links are some of the lowest value in terms of authority which means on their own they are not going to provide a major boost to keyword rankings.   

Press releases

As with directories, distributing press releases online can provide another straightforward way to build backlinks. Press releases are generally used to bring company news to the attention of news outlets and can also be hosted on press release websites for this purpose. If the news posted is genuinely newsworthy, then there is a good chance that this news will be picked up by various other online news outlets, which will leverage the content further.

This is an advantage of using this method, but unfortunately not every press release is going to end up widely distributed and will likely only be featured on the sites it is submitted to. These sites often charge significant sums to host a press release with questionable benefits.

It is worth considering a specialist PR agency to do some good old fashioned PR work and to get press releases featured on industry news magazines.

Link swaps

Emails offering a link in return for a link are often promoted in spam emails. These types of links can potentially do more harm than good and even if the link exchange is a genuine attempt to link 2 sites in a niche, the links are likely to be low value if they are reciprocal and just listed on a web page.  

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is likely to be one of the more time-consuming ways to build backlinks to your website. This will need to be done by an experienced blogger able to produce high quality articles website owners will want to publish on their websites.

Again this method of link building will require a degree of reaching out to other website owners operating in the same niche and a lot of persistence. To gain the maximum benefit with guest posting, blogs shouldn’t be promotional in nature. Websites that host promotional guest posts and sell guest post slots for financial gain will tend to be of low link value. It is far better to post on sites that have a genuine focus on publishing content that is helpful rather than salesy.

Become an industry spokesperson

Another way to build links is to become a thought leader in your niche. It can be tough coming up with ideas for guest posting and far less resource intensive to simply offer yourself up for comments on newsworthy topics. Time will need to be dedicated to finding out what those topics are and you will need to be fast enough to respond to journalist requests but the results are likely to be well worth it if you can ride the tide of news coverage.  

Become a thought leader

Becoming an industry thought leader can be a potent link building strategy but again this will take considerable time, effort and industry knowledge for someone in the business to achieve this status. Gaining this status will involve a focus on building a strong social media profile as well as producing a variety of content including video, press releases and guest blogs.  

There are plenty of ways on and off your website to build links. Even networking in person or attending trade shows can be a means to build links with other in the industry and drive awareness of your business and its expertise. Other link building techniques can include embedding links to your site in infographics and images, or video content.

Link building for a b2b business is most effective when they are gained from a variety of sources. These should include a combination of the various links mentioned here. Being smart about the types of backlinks and the time spent on your link building strategy can bring long term rewards and keep your business well ahead of the competition. The important thing to remember however, that when it comes to backlinks, quality is much better than quantity.