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Why Are Backlinks Important for B2B Companies

2020 March 23 14:10 GMT-06:00

We will be talking about why backlinks are so relevant and why they can help your business grow.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is created when one website links to another. When website A links to website B, website B now has a backlink. Backlinks are also called “inbound links” or “incoming links.”

Backlinks are essential to SEO. Essentially they represent a vote of confidence from one website to another. It is a signal to Google and other search engines that this other site vouchers for your content or getting backlinks has a positive effect on your site’s ranking position and search visibility.

How do you earn and give backlinks?

Link building or the process of building more links to your website is essential for offsite SEO.

Followed backlinks from popular high domain authority websites are the best backlink to earn. In contrast, backlinks from a lower authority, spammy site are not good, and hopefully, they’re not linking to your website as much. Being mentioned on high-quality websites gives your brand a boost.

How do we do competitive backlink research?

Backlinks can be time-consuming and, at times, hard to earn. Start with competitive backlink research. You can look at the backlink profile, a website which is a collection of pages and domains linking to the website, and I’ll show you how to do that on Moz.

Look at the competitor that’s already ranking well for your target keywords. Then, you can gain insight into the link building that’s helped them. You can build backlinks by reaching out to those same websites, by having a better blog or infographic.

How can link building build and benefit your B2B business? 

Increasing the number of high-quality links increases your chances of ranking well on Google and a caring on page one.

Through Building Relationships

Link building involves outreach to other relevant websites in your industry. Outreach helps you get a link but also helps you build long term relationships and key influencers in your industry. You create evangelists for your business, so then your business becomes highly regarded and trusted online.

Through Brand Building

Link building on high authority sites can help you build your brand and establish you as the authority. In niche content creation, which is a link building technique, shows prospects the expertise of your company, and builds your brand. So for example, if you create a piece of content based on industry data, publish it and go a step further by doing outreach and link building on it so you can become well known for it in your niche. Hence, it can amplify that content by doing outreach and getting backlinks, which show your expertise and allows others to spread the word and increase your website traffic.

Doing Link Building Research on Moz

Go to Moz Pro, Link Explorer, and then you enter the root domain.

For example, Impact Bend has one of or some of the best content online on inbound marketing, and we’ll see why that is. Let’s analyze that.

moz link research overview

You know, they have a high domain authority of 62 and roughly 13.7k domains. Those are the number of websites that link to them. They also have 312.6k inbound links and 197.1k ranking keywords. They are doing pretty well. Let’s go on the left below, from Overview to Inbound Links.

moz link resesarch inbound links
You can see the link source. Impact Bend has HubSpot linking to them and Wikipedia.

moz link research inbound links Impact Bend

But then you can go to their linking domains, and you can see who’s linking to them. You can see that the New York Times, Huffington Post, USA Today has linked to them. For example, in the New York Times, you can go down, and you can see what the exact article has linked to them.

moz link research linking domains NYTimes

Now the Top Pages has been beneficial. For example, Impact Bend created a tool called the blog title generator, and that has 97 linking domains. More importantly, you can view the links. For example, if we were to come up with a blog post title generator, we can go back to some of these websites and ask them to link back to our blog title generator.

Here’s something more realistic. We go back to top pages is some are their blogging statistics, which has a lot of the backlinks to it, high 140 linking domains, and can view the links. So you can see different blogs are linking to this single blog. You can see if you could create a better blog. That’s called the skyscraper technique. And we’ll go deeper into different methods of link building later on.

Moz link research top pages blog title generator

You can also go to discovered and lost on that exact page, or it can go to the root domain, and you can also compare link profiles of different pages. You can look at Impact Bend versus neilpatel.com. And then you can analyze the two and see between the two who have higher domain authority, just Neil Patel at 87. Spam score, total links, total linking domains. And you can see in this comparison whose ranking better. This is more for comparative analysis.

Moz link research compare link profiles

Conclusion

This is just a brief overview of how Moz can help you with backlink analysis so you can create your backlink campaigns to build the brand and authority of your B2B site so that you can rank on page 1 of Google.

Lucas Munisteri

Written by Lucas Munisteri

Engineer turned marketing guru. After many years in the engineering space, it was time to get off of the crazy roller coaster and start my own company so I could be there for my family.

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