Are you producing awesome content and promoting it across social media accounts? Are you struggling to get results? You’re not alone.

Content marketing isn’t a fad. Creating content as a marketing tool has been around for decades, it’s just the form of how we are delivering the content that has been rapidly evolving thanks to the presence of the web Google.

Content marketing has become a common term, but a vital ingredient often missing when discussing the term, is links.

Content marketing works and is a central SEO tactic. Google will appreciate you for writing great content, but you need to have links coming into your website and the content to see outstanding results for your website.

Many gurus out there will preach if you are developing content, that’s enough. But here are seven reasons why links matter as much as developing content.

1. Links Help Google Decide What Your Content Is About

When you start a website, you could start writing about anything in the world. That’s awesome, but poor Google doesn’t have a clue what you’re an expert in. To help Google, you can get links from websites that also talk about the topic you’re developing content around. This is known as topical relevancy.

If you create content around bikes, but go and get links from websites about blenders, this is going to confuse Google a lot and they’ll refrain from showing your content in search results.

However, if you have bike related websites linking to your website about bikes, then Google will put two and two together and realize this is what you are an expert in and will rank you for bike related terms.

2. Links Help You Become Known As An Authority

The more links coming to your website from different websites is correlated to higher rankings in Google. There is no fact about this, as Google doesn’t say what the factors are but this is a common truth among SEO experts. With lots of incoming links to your various pieces of content, Google starts to realize you are an authority in the industry.

Note: you want links to come in over time at an increasing velocity. If you have 100 links linking to you one day, then nothing for the next year, something dodgy is happening.

3. Links Help Increase Your Brand Awareness

The more people mention your brand on their website with a link, the more people are becoming familiar with your brand. Why do you think display ads work? Often it’s not for the direct click through they’re paying for, but the impressions of their brand that people see. This develops over time helping them associate you with their needs.

4. Links Promote Your Content & Ideas

If you have a new concept you’d like to introduce to the world, getting everyone to adopt a new term isn’t easy. Therefore you need to educate as many people to the term as possible to help it become mainstream.

There are dozens of examples of this, but the term ‘Golden Keyword Ratio’ (GKR) is a recent one. This was a concept Doug of NicheSiteProject.com wanted to own, so people associated GKR with him.

He posted about the GKR on his website, and created a video for YouTube but this wasn’t enough. He needed to spread the word beyond his audience. So Doug reached out to guest post on other websites in the digital marketing industry. He has since seen people start to naturally discuss about the GKR when it comes to content marketing.

5. Links Help Bring New Readers To Your Website

While these are a whole bunch of SEO reasons, the ultimate reason links is great is you are bringing referrals to your website. These are people who are looking to find out specific information from a resource you can help them with.

This is the top of your sales funnel. It’s upto you to keep them engaged on your site from here.

6. Links Help Build Relationships In Your Industry

Often forgotten but to build links you’ll often have to ‘work’ hard to get them. This may mean getting friendly with the leaders in your industry for months before you consider asking them to link to your content or asking if you could guest post on their site.

Alternatively, they may start linking to you naturally without asking. Either way, new relationships in your industry are a great idea for more than just the links.

Developing content is great. Google likes to see people who are updating their content regularly to ensure they aren’t a one and done expert who has ghosted the world. By gaining links to your website with a strategy behind it, you have the potential to make a real difference with your content to your audience.

Looking for help with your SEO link building? Contact Custom Fit Online, a Whistler-based SEO company established in 1995. We're here to help!

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