In recent decades, more and more people are opting for entrepreneurship. It is because of the technological advancements and rapid digitalization, which offers new opportunities to enter the business market. However, it might sound easy to set a business, but it is really hard to ensure its sustainability in the growing market. According to a survey, 21.5% of startups fail in the first year, and the percentage increases to 70% in the 10th year. It depicts how startups struggle for their sustenance.
These startups fail due to different factors such as lack of research, poor customer outreach, and ineffective marketing strategies. Therefore, marketers must practice modern SEO techniques that allow startups to maximize their target audience and increase their revenues. Undoubtedly, SEO is one of the cost-effective techniques. However, one of the most significant parts of SEO is link building. It is a process of getting other links onto your website to increase visibility for a business. It helps a startup to improve its ranking on search engines, generating higher traffic on its site.
5 Quality Link Building Hacks
Though link building can be challenging, it is equally rewarding. An effective backlink strategy can help a startup during difficult phases to attract maximum traffic. Usually, a struggling startup has budget restraints that do not allow it to opt for heavy marketing strategies. Therefore, link building can do wonders. Hence if you are struggling with your startup, you need not worry. Here, we present some of the high-quality hacks for building an effective backlink strategy for struggling startups.
#1. Begin by Fixing Broken Links
Conducting an audit of all the existing links must be the first step for any struggling startup. Before creating any new backlinks, it is essential to ensure that the current links are working effectively. Broken links not only cause a negative ranking for your site but also portray a substandard user experience. Imagine clicking on a site and being redirected to a page that shows ‘Error 404 or Page Not Found.’
Therefore, several free tools can be opted by startups to find these broken links and fix them. Google Analytics is one of them and perhaps the best tool for tracking website performance. It shows a detailed overview of every page through graphs. Any broken links or pages appearing with ‘404 error’ can be checked here. Therefore, fixing broken links can increase the traffic on your site. It will offer an enriching experience for the user and increase your rankings. Besides, you can find broken links on other relevant websites and request them to replace them by linking your web page.
#2. Generate Worthy Linkable Content via Infographics
Startups need to create linkable content that is valuable. In other words, the content on your site must be considered valuable by other blogs and websites. Through conducting your research can help in generating worthy content, but it is most time-consuming. The use of infographics is perhaps a better and much quicker option.
An infographic is an aesthetically appealing asset that can help attract a large audience. It proves to be quite effective in creating backlinks. Canvas allows the creation of simple yet engaging infographics. These infographics are much easier to comprehend than any other statistical data. Therefore, it becomes much easier for the user to interact with such kinds of infographics. Once your infographic is ready, you can start creating links.
You can even opt for a three-tier approach. Firstly, you need to identify the relevant readers and business person who will be interested in your infographic. For this, categorize your domain according to your target audience. Then there is a need to find a contact for every web domain. Finally, you can send each contact an email. An email outreach along with a social media promotion can make an infographic go viral.
#3. Build Healthy and Strong Relationships
Startups need to build strong relationships of mutual trust in the industry. By participating in online communities related to a particular niche, you can receive various backlinks free of cost. Not only this, but you can also build contacts and gain beneficial insights. One way is to post messages on social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit, with backlinks to your page. This practice can be beneficial for startups.
#4. Learn from Competitors
Copying one’s competitors is wrong, but learning from them can be advantageous for struggling startups. By using popular tools, rankings of competitors’ pages can be checked and therefore analyzed. This analysis can get you an idea about competitors’ strategies in increasing traffic on their site. Perhaps, adopting different practices can help you get quality backlinks on your site. By tracking inbound links, you can even gain an insight into the audience that visits your competitors’ links. Therefore, a similar audience that visits your competitors’ links might be interested in your content too. After analyzing this, you can smoothly begin your outreach.
#5. Be Careful with Optimizing Your Anchor Text
Anchor text- must be optimized effectively for search engines and users. It is because keywords in an anchor text help algorithm to determine the page and the link. Google uses anchor text and backlinks to check whether the site had been over-optimized. Consequently, it imposes a penalty for doing so. Therefore, the best practice is to use relevant keywords along with some other words. Besides, anchor text should be clear and precise for the user. By creating a unique anchor text, you can offer an enriching experience for users. It will eventually increase your website’s ranking.
Final Notes
In a nutshell, link building can help struggling startups achieve success. However, here the focus should be on the quality of link building rather than quantity. Gone are the days when building the utmost links was the recipe for success. With modern SEO techniques, it is significant to prioritize building quality links to gain traffic from search engines. For long-run success, startups must focus on the quality, authenticity, and relevancy of their backlinks.
Although building low-quality spammy links are a lot easier, it will lead you nowhere. In addition to this, fixing broken links and creating infographics can be an extremely fruitful hack for any struggling startup. It ensures that your content reaches the relevant audience who brings meaningful traffic to your site. In this case, infographics are the best tool to interact with your audience. Apart from this, building relationships and networking helps a lot in getting quality backlinks on your site. Also, it will increase your experience in a particular niche or industry. Keeping all this in mind, don’t forget to look out for your competitors. It is perhaps best to keep an eye on their link-building practices and learn from them.