Do you want to drive more traffic to your small business's website? Of course you do. What about increasing the credibility of your site's content and your brand overall? Accomplishing these goals will provide sturdy foundations to drive long-term growth at your startup.

Building backlinks can help as you attempt to achieve these objectives. This relatively simple concept in SEO can make a significant difference as you look to attract customers and expand your footprint. Learn how in this article.

What are backlinks?

A backlink represents a link from one website to another, using anchor text. For example, imagine a political blog that quotes poll results for an upcoming presidential election. The article uses the New York Times as a source for the numbers, so the blogger adds a link back to the original story on the Times' website.

Backlinks don't just act as a courtesy or as a tool to help readers with further research. They also play an important role in search engine optimization, or SEO.

That can mean a lot for your business. Properly leveraging backlinks can impact your placement on platforms like Google, which can increase traffic on your website and increase your domain authority. This, in turn, gives you more opportunities to make sales and boost revenue.

Properly leveraging backlinks can impact your placement on platforms like Google, which can increase traffic on your website and increase your domain authority.

Why are backlinks important?

Your search rankings make a huge difference in the profile your small business receives. One study found that the first result in a Google search received a click nearly 28% of the time. Meanwhile, the top-ranked result gets more than 10 times the traffic as the item in the tenth spot.

Given this relationship, improving your SEO should represent a key digital marketing goal. As we'll see, backlinks play a substantial role here. However, that's only one of the potential benefits. Here are some of the ways backlinks add value to small business websites:

Improve SEO

Search engines use complicated algorithms to determine where individual websites appear after a user query. The specific details of these operations are constantly shifting — companies like Google are continually tweaking their secret formulas. That said, certain general themes remain foundational to the effort. Backlinks fall into that category.

To put it simply, having backlinks improves your SEO. Search engines count these referrals as a vote of confidence in your content.

As such, fostering more of these connections improves your placement in search results, which leads to increased organic traffic. That, in turn, means more potential customers visiting your website and, eventually, more sales.

Generate direct traffic

SEO is crucial to your business. However, the connection between backlinks and traffic in that scenario represents a winding path. There’s a more straightforward relationship between backlinks and increased readership you should keep in mind as well.

Having inbound links creates an opportunity to get traffic directly from those other platforms. Again, this represents potential new business. Readers interested in the content on the other website will become intrigued by the link back to your site. As they click through, they become a prime candidate for conversion to your offerings.

Expand your reach

Beyond the links themselves, there’s value in the process. As you push ahead with your backlink efforts, you are stretching out into the wider world. The added citations on other websites represent an expansion of your marketing footprint.

Build your brand

What qualities encourage others to link to your website? Trustworthiness, stability, unique insights and a deep knowledge of your area of expertise are among the critical traits involved. It turns out these attributes resonate well beyond the realm of backlinks.

As customers and industry insiders see your work cited on third-party websites, your reputation will increase. You'll become a more visible and a more trusted brand.

How to build backlinks

What makes a good backlink? Or, to put the question more specifically: what factors make you attractive to other websites and lead to backlinks that can help you drive traffic?

SEO experts advise that backlinks happen naturally within the flow of a piece of content. At the same time, the target website should provide information that is both relevant and trustworthy. This means you should strive to exhibit these qualities in the content you produce for your website.

Here are some tips to help you expand the number of sites linking back to you and improve your domain authority:

Include backlinks in your content

If you want to receive backlinks from other sources, the best way to start is by including some in yours. Don't expect one-to-one reciprocity. However, this provides an easy first step in connecting your website with the outside world.

Develop interesting content

Want others to reference your website? Then make sure your offerings connect with an audience. Interesting, attractive content won't just draw readers. A strong website will inspire backlinks and direct engagement, encouraging a virtuous cycle that will make it that much easier for others to discover you.

Become an information source

Create proprietary data related to your industry. This unique information will prompt others to quote you and provide a link back to the source. You can do this through efforts like surveys, research papers, compilations of hard-to-find statistics, and distinctive analysis of publicly available information.

Find the right tools to track progress

To get the most out of your efforts, you'll need to understand how well your backlink campaign is working. This takes information. Gather this data by tapping into some of the target software that exists to optimize backlinks and SEO in general.

Know what works

Once you have the right software in place, it's time to dive into the data. Learn everything you can about your website's SEO. This includes backlinks but goes beyond that narrow concern. Use this information to optimize your ability to attract the right audience.

Make connections

Backlinks represent a bridge between two websites. It's about connections. In this regard, you can leverage your networking skills to fuel the process. By reaching out to others, you can nurture relationships that can lead to regular backlinking opportunities.

Build partnerships

Take the process of fostering connections to the next level. Turn your casual business relationships into formal collaborations. The right partners can boost your small business in many ways, including a proliferation of backlinks.

Shine a spotlight on your content

Let people know about your best content. Use social media and other strategies to drive traffic. This will do more than help you find new customers. The improved profile will also make it likely that other websites will discover (and link to) your offerings.

Eliminate broken links

Getting a backlink is only part of the process. You also need to maintain those connections. Give readers the best experience possible by avoiding broken links and seeking out problem areas that arise.

Wondering what your current website's user experience is like? Discover it here by taking our quiz.

Implementing a backlink strategy

As we've seen, backlinks can boost traffic in multiple ways. They also act to burnish your overall brand, helping you attract potential customers and raising your overall profile. Are you maximizing your opportunity in this area?

Without a focused backlink strategy, you might be leaving significant upside on the table. However, you need to know whether pursuing this path is worth the commitment of resources it will require. Use the information provided here to determine if investing in a backlinking effort is right for your small business.