There are two sides to backlinks: one is the good side, which indicates the optimal quality of your site, therefore boosting search engine optimisation (SEO) performance, and the other, which provides a total boomerang effect from its counterpart.
Backlinks, or inbound links, are like a double-edged sword. And how you use them determines the path of your site towards making it to the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). Business owners and marketers alike need to know how inbound links are valuable to their overall marketing strategy.
The Importance of Link Building
The truth is, inbound links are still one of the most critical aspects of achieving success in SERPs. When links from other trusted websites point to yours, they have the potential to bring in many organic visitors to your page. Just imagine that your website is a vast, grand hotel. Inbound links would be part of your marketing team, standing in the entryway while offering the warmest smile they could wear.
Now, think about how your SEO hotel is located in one of the prime locations in the city. You can see your top competitors right outside your hotel premises. On the left is your competitor, whose hotel is awarded more stars than yours, while on your right is a competitor at virtually the same level.
Of course, you’d want to get your hands on the best-kept secrets of your top competitors so that you can outrank them on search results. Here goes your marketing team, going right outside your top competitor’s venue to pull out some of their visitors. If your marketing team consists of top-performing members, you will find yourself welcoming hundreds (or even thousands) of visitors without you knowing it!
The SEO hotel is the simplest metaphor to demonstrate how critical inbound links are to SEO. When a user clicks on a link from another site that directs to your website, it ends up creating a massive impact not only on your SERP rankings but also on the website’s index.
The more incoming visitors your marketing team brings, the more you trust them. And the more you trust your “marketing team” to do the promotional work for you, the more you can focus on improving the interiors of your hotel. When this happens, you can make your customers much happier, leading to word-of-mouth recommendations and more organic traffic. More and more visitors will then be able to f find information about your hotel!
However, unlike in a hotel, the number of visitors on websites don’t always mean more conversions and leads. Now, let’s discuss how inbound links can be harmful.
The Downsides of Link building
In 2010, Google announced that all inbound links indicate how relevant your website is. Because of this, digital marketing saw an upward trend on directory sites where any website owner can post listings and create 1 to 50,000 backlinks in one go.
This means that instead of prioritizing quality, marketers focused on the sheer number of backlinks, regardless of where they came from. Of course, Google has evolved in recent years. Today, if your website has too many irrelevant links, it could pull your rankings down to the bottom of the SERPs. Google determines if the inbound link is irrelevant or inappropriate for your visitors and negatively impacts your SEO performance.
Conclusion
There is always good and bad in everything. It’s always best to remember that you need to maximize the benefits you can get from SEO, but at the same time, this benefit can be prone to abuse. In the end, quality still wins over quantity, especially with the use of your backlinks.
Are you looking for a bespoke digital marketing agency in Toronto to assist you with building high-quality backlinks for your website? The New Digital Marketing Agency is here to help you out with everything SEO-related. Feel free to contact us for a consultation today!
