The ultimate guide to link building for SEO in 2022

Guide To Link Building For SEO In 2022

SEO plays an absolutely critical part in determining how successful your business’ web strategy can be — and no SEO effort is complete without a well-designed link building campaign. The reason is simple. Building quality backlinks will raise your profile, and your rank in the SERPs. Your business website will get more traffic, and better traffic, if you give link building the priority it deserves.

Link building is also, however, intimidating. Many businesses are overwhelmed when they even consider the idea of a link building campaign. Too often, link building is put on the back burner or forgotten about entirely — and that can hurt your business. 

What’s the best way to go about link building in 2022? Start with this guide.

Why Does Link Building Matter In 2022?

If you run a business website, or you play even a small role in maintaining your company’s website, the fact that pages with more backlinks  (links from another website pointing to your website) tend to perform better on Google won’t have escaped you.

You want more links, then. You don’t want to wait around hoping that those backlinks will organically appear, because that could cost you potential traffic that would otherwise help you make your business website more successful. 

Enter link building: the process of nudging other websites to link back to yours. 

Link building campaigns don’t just mean that you’ll get more links, either. By engaging in a link building campaign, you’ll be able to go after high-quality backlinks. That means backlinks from authoritative and highly-relevant websites that let Google and other search engines know that your business website matters. You will benefit even more if you can convince those authoritative and highly-relevant websites to use an anchor text that helps you to rank better on your targeted keywords. 

Anyone who has set out to get more traffic is probably familiar with shady link building tactics, and particularly buying links. In 2022, that’s not going to work any longer, and has a high risk of actively harming your web strategy. 

How do you get those quality backlinks in 2022, then? We’re glad you asked!

Offer Content That’s Valuable Enough To Link To

Offering genuinely useful and authoritative content remains one of the best ways to encourage others in your niche or community to link back to your website. If you provide unique research, statistics, or information that others will want to reference, they are likely to link back to your website in order to credit the source. 

Are you running a local business? You’ll want your content to be uniquely relevant to your local community. To name one example, countless people all around the world might want to know “how to fix a clogged sink”, but if you’re a plumber in South East London, data about the emergencies for which people in your area most commonly call a plumber might be more helpful when you are trying to build links. Local newspapers might even pick it up!

Reach Out To Local And Highly-Relevant Websites

Local businesses can be especially successful in their link building efforts by reaching out to authoritative and relevant websites focusing on the same region. Maybe you run a local restaurant. You could get in touch with:

  • Local bloggers who might want to review your business.
  • Blogs and website covering the most exciting things to do in your area. 
  • Newspapers, especially if you are opening a new restaurant or have something new and unique to offer. 
  • Local partners, such as the business from which you order your custom napkins. They’d benefit from linking back to you as much as you’d benefit from getting the backlink, especially if your business is well-known in the community.

If your business is relevant and linking to your content would add value, businesses, newspapers, and bloggers from your area likely to respond positively. 

Link building Beyond The Web: Be Active In Your Community

Simply being newsworthy is another great way to build links in 2022. If you run a business, you have a wide range of opportunities to build your reputation — and you can do that online and in the real world at the same time! Building links is ultimately no different from building relationships, and both can be very good for business.

You might be able to:

  • Start or be involved in a charitable campaign. 
  • Give discounts to certain groups of customers, like senior citizens or students. 
  • Call attention to a problem in your community that needs solving. 
  • Provide an expert opinion on an important issue in your community.

By being active in your local community, and writing about it on your business website, you’ll create the perfect conditions for others local to you to link back to your page. Those links will be highly-relevant as well as filled with glowing reviews.

This works even if you don’t run a business with a physical customer-facing presence, by the way. Your ecommerce website could be newsworthy by embracing steps toward greener practices, by donating to charity, or by speaking up about a problem your industry faces.

The good news? Local newspapers (which all have online versions, now), online news magazines, and blogs are always hungry for content. You don’t have to wait for them to pick your story up. You can get in touch to see how you can collaborate and build links, and you will often end up with a quality backlink.

Contact Websites That Should Be Linking To You, But Aren’t

Did another website mention your website, or use your data, but forgot to credit you? Simply email them. Point out that they’re using your info, and invite them to link back to the relevant page on your business website to help their audience get more information.

Did a website that used to link to you remove a quality backlink? Chances are that it’s due to an internal restructuring effort, and not because they don’t want to link to you any more. Why not reach out and see if you can get the link reinstated? 

Don’t Forget About Internal Links!

Your business website won’t get more traffic and increase search engine results page rankings solely by crafting well-placed internal links with great anchor texts. Yet, internal link building is a key part of your overall link building strategy. You hold all the cards here, because you get to decide precisely what to link. Internal links are “free” links. 

Link to the pages that describe your most popular services on your About page, for instance. If you have a blog, find creative ways to link to your products from blog posts. Internal link building might fully be within your control, but never underestimate its power!

Be Active on Social Media

Not only can your audience find you more easily if you use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and other social media platforms to promote your business website, being active on social media also offers you the opportunity to send a constant stream of links into the ether. This is a great way to encourage others to link back to your pages, as well. 

A Final Word

No matter what anyone says, SEO marketing is very much still alive and kicking in 2022. Link building can easily be described as the backbone of any SEO campaign, and underestimating its power can only hurt you. It’s true, though, that embracing the principles of link building, and seeing value in this practice, is much easier than actually building quality backlinks. 

Are you stuck? That’s only normal — you already have an area of expertise, and if you run a small business or have a startup, you’re far too busy doing your job to also become an SEO master.

Reaching out to a web design and marketing agency in Manchester might be the solution you are looking for if you want to build relevant and quality backlinks in 2022. When you outsource your link building campaign to professionals, you can expect to see results very quickly.

If you’re looking for the right company to handle your SEO & link building campaigns, look no further than the local experts at Blue Whale Media.