Link building can be a daunting task for small businesses. To be honest, link building for SEO is generally hard. When you’re a small business, it’s even harder! Because you don’t have a great in house SEO team. You also don’t have the resources to create viral content every day. And because you’re small, it’s simply not as easy for you to attract external links as a well-known brand. But link building is not impossible. Like everything else that’s difficult, it takes time and effort. In fact, link building can work for small businesses. In this article, we’ll introduce 5 innovative link building ideas you can try out. Link building can work very well for small businesses!
Host a Community Event
How can you get external links when you host a community event? It sounds crazy but it actually works. Have you ever heard of Meetup.com? Do you know you can organize meetup groups and get a link from them? Meetup.com is an event website that connects like minded people together through events. For example, let’s say that you’re a language school. Would it make sense to host a local meetup language learning club? Yes! Not only can you generate online publicity, but you also get a chance to meet your potential customers! Organising a meetup group is a very good way to let people know your business. Your goal is to get your business name, logo, products, and link shown in their website.
Meanwhile, you can also choose to sponsor an event. Sponsorships will get you high-quality backlinks from authority websites! When the event is big, it’s going to grab attention from media, bloggers and other trusted websites. And as a sponsor, you can try to ask them to mention you in their articles and link back to your site. This is a good way for you to get high-quality backlinks!
Connect with Local & Niche Bloggers
Who are the popular bloggers in your city or industry? Content creators are supposed to drive valuable content for their readers. Like any writer and publisher, they run out of ideas from time to time. Then it’s a chance for you! Be the one that gives them an idea. And being a small business owner is actually your advantage. Because these content creators are always looking for niche content to stand out. So it would be great for you to give them some ideas. And you have to select bloggers carefully too. Pay attention to what they write about, and see whether it makes sense for them to write about your business or products.
To increase your chance of success, build a genuine relationship first. Follow these people on social media and subscribe to their channels. Comment or share their content when you find them interesting and relevant. Over time, it deepens your relationship with them and they will be more than happy to form a collaboration with you.
Write Guest Posts for Industry-Relevant Sites
Guest blogging takes real effort, because you need to spend time writing and researching. But this is a very powerful SEO tactic. And guest posts provide much more than just a backlink. When you land a guest post on a relevant site, it can drive qualified traffic to your website too. Want to pitch guest posts to The Wall Street Journal? This may be a bit difficult for small businesses. Instead of going after popular sites, pitch your articles to sites that are smaller, but relevant to your industry. Using yoga studios as an example, you can go after personal fitness and wellness sites with engaged readerships. This can promote your business and attract potential customers too. If your business partners with other companies, you can also consider becoming a guest writer in their websites. Writing guest posts for other sites is an effective and powerful way to attract backlinks.
Promote Your Content on Social Media
You’re already writing blogs and sharing ideas on your website and common social media channels. Are you doing anything else to promote that content creatively? There are many popular online blogs that allow you to re-publish your content (like Medium and LinkedIn). But because of their massive readership, these sites are much more likely to rank higher than your website. To adjust this, you can simply post a canonical link back to your website. A canonical tag is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Duplicate content is very common nowadays. It can cause some SEO problems, because search engines may select the wrong URL as the “original”. Using canonicalisation helps you manage your duplicate content.
Creating a controversial post can be a tricky way to boost SEO. But if you manage it properly, your post can go viral on the internet and get a lot of discussion. And remember, you can’t agree with 100% of the people 100% of the time. If no one discusses your business, it’s probably not a good sign. A little bit of controversy makes your business alive!
Sponsor a Local Organization
There are a lot of charitable organizations in almost any community. And they are always looking for sponsors. And it’s very normal for them to include backlinks to a sponsor’s site on their own sites. Also, as a small business owner, always be creative! Don’t limit yourself to traditional charities. Consider schools and local community events as well. Anyone in need of a sponsor is a potential backlink candidate. Ideally, you should sponsor an entity that aligns with your brand values. To make it even better, sponsor something that your potential customers actually care about. This is more effective than sponsoring anyone who will give you a link.
When you’re a small business with limited time and resources, you need to be smart and creative. Make sure that any time you devote to link building is spent on tactics that will actually work. Eventually, you’ll start to see results.