7 Compelling Reasons Why You Need to Invest in Backlinks

by Venchito Tampon Jr | Last Updated on January 12, 2024

One of the most common questions we get from new SEOs or business owners is why they should do link building for their websites. 

It is a valid question for marketers as they want to learn more about the importance of backlinks before putting their money into this search engine optimization activity. 

Without understanding its value, they won’t invest in this highly important area of SEO, let alone take the first step.

Now, let me go straight to the 7 reasons you should invest in backlinks. Then, we give you actionable tips on achieving it with your link building campaigns.

Why You Need to Invest in Backlinks?

1. Branding

When you build links, you associate your brand with other brands and entities in your space. The exact anchor text, placement of the link, and the type of website where you have gotten the link tell so much about how you take care of your brand.

We’ve had the privilege of working with enterprise clients for the past couple of years. And it is critically important before we actually engage in any link building strategies for them to know that any plan would 

For example, we are working with an enterprise SaaS, and given their prestigious reputation, we could quickly get links across different industries by simply suggesting their resource or free product.

That kind of branding has amounted to several online and offline recognitions and has proven to be effective in bringing the company (not just the website) to the next level.

As a branding tool, link building helps new websites engage in SEO to increase their brand awareness further and, ultimately, get a more significant market share in their industry through SEO means.

“Link building as a branding” mindset will impact how you plan, strategize, and execute your link building strategies. 

You won’t engage with publishers and bloggers that are too far-stretch regarding relevance to your brand. This forces you to qualify domains/sites in the link prospecting stage before emailing them for link requests.

When you properly place links on sites/entities you want to better associate your brand with, you’ll have higher chances of bringing in new branded searches for your company, personality, or product. 

When readers see your backlinks featured on reputable A-list digital publishers, it would spark interest in them and try searching for your brand on search engines. 

Link building is significant in developing your holistic branding campaigns, not just in organic marketing. 

One of the ways backlinks affect branding is you can populate your brand name’s SERP real estate with your owned media or web properties. This would help you establish a robust online reputation. 

Actionable Tips To Enhance Branding with Backlinks:

Focus on the reasons why people link. 

Two primary reasons people link to your brand are relationships and content. 

The content you publish and distribute (i.e., product, service, offering, information) and the relationships you establish with link sources (e.g., strategic link partners, industry friends, or brands you actually partner with or use).

When strategizing for a link building campaign, answer these questions:

• What content assets are going to attract linkable audiences? 
• Can we leverage existing relationships for content distribution (for links)? 

Treat your content as a product. 

Most marketers view content creation as another marketing activity they have to do consistently. But when you treat your content as a product, you release with the highest quality possible.

At SharpRocket, we share case studies and actionable link building strategies that are proven to work for our clients and we think might be useful to our readers. We differentiate our content assets from other agencies’ blogs by diving into the real practical side of link building and SEO – to share the most actionable advice in every blog post.

2. Crawl Budget 

Crawl budget refers to the quantity of pages crawled on a website within a specific timeframe. When your site has a larger crawl budget, more pages are indexed and reassessed, improving search engine rankings.

Simply look at Google Search Console to get an idea of what your crawl budget is. 

According to many SEOs, there are key factors to optimize the crawl budget: 1) popularity and 2) freshness. 

Popular domains get crawled more often (popularity). Websites with more updated and new content will likely be crawled (freshness). 

Three link building activities can help make websites more popular and fresh: proper internal linking, inbound link acquisition, content audit, and upgrade.

You help optimize your site’s crawl budget by actively pursuing inbound backlinks. SEO Spyglass did an SEO test in which they found a strong correlation between having more inbound links and more spider visits to a page.

3. Traffic

“The links that people want to follow carry the most weight”. – Bill Slawski. 

The types of links that matter in today’s SEO are the ones that send relevant traffic to your site. These are most potent in that they capture the very purpose of having a link to drive users to the destination page (serves as an additional reference or offering). 

Link building allows the site to capture a constant traffic flow from relevant sources. And this traffic can bring additional sales (conversions) to the business site. 

Actionable Tips To Gain Traffic with Backlinks:

Distribute content on relevant websites. 

Not all potential link sources should be highly relevant to your site. But at the foundational level, you should aim for an initial set of backlinks within the same industry. 

I’ve covered this degree of relevance (Searchworks’ framework) in my other link building guide on strongest backlinks to help you marketers expand their link prospecting lists by tapping into different levels of target link sources. 

Think highly of strategic backlink placement. 

You can’t expect traffic to be sent to your site by placing inbound links on any place on the referring page. 

The more visible your links where users click on them, the more likely you’ll get referral traffic from linking pages. 

The best way is to pursue contextual links (backlinks placed within the body of the content) to ensure clicks on links.

4. Trust and Authority 

Trust and authority are intangible SEO factors most marketers ignore when investing in a link building campaign.

The most beneficial part when you’re actively pursuing the right types of backlinks for your site is that audiences who don’t know you before start familiarizing themselves with your work and the content you produce.

When there is trust, the momentum starts growing in building the authority and thought leadership you need to attract new link opportunities and relationships for your business. 

Actionable Tips To Build Trust and Authority with Backlinks:

Acquire links from highly credible sites. 

Get backlinks from sites that both people and Google trust and see as an authority in your space. The way to know it is to see which publications/sites have a massive following of readers and are constantly producing valuable information in your space.

For example, Daily Coffee News and Fresh Cup are highly credible publications in the coffee industry that constantly attract passive links from other content creators. 

These sites get more popular as they publish highly valued content their target audiences (coffee owners, roasters, baristas, coffee lovers, etc..) would be willing to consume, share, and distribute to their peers. 

This blog also gets featured in top listicles because of the credibility and proof of work we did over the past decade.

So, getting referential links from these trusted and authoritative sites can boost any brand’s presence in the industry.  

Utilize Digital PR. 

Digital PR is now mainstream, but I’ve seen brands still skeptical about its effectiveness in establishing the brand’s authority.

If you want to expand your territories in other regions/countries, you will likely benefit from Digital PR campaigns.

In my previous article on SEO in 2024 insights, I covered one client of ours who is heavily invested now in digital PR to push through their brand awareness in the Southeast Asian region (starting first here in the Philippines).

By getting backlinks from reputable sites, readers of those publications start becoming curious about the brand, what it is about, and how it can add value to their lives. 

5. Conversions

Link building helps drive assisted conversions to your site. 

When you target link sources that can drive more customers (highly engaged traffic) to your site, you’re likely to see conversions for your business.

Actionable Tips To Get Conversions with Backlinks:

Aim for referring pages with middle-of-the-funnel intent. 

These include lists of products/services in your sector or region. Getting links from these pages attracts potential buyers to your site who are into their decision-making purchase in finding solutions to their needs.

Leverage relationships to get links from credible sites’ top-ranking pages. 

Some highly credible publications have strict editorial guidelines for publishing content from external authors. This would require you to build internal relationships with in-house editors and staff to land a chance to be a guest author. 

That said, if you have some relationships with link partners that you can use to land authorship opportunities for industry publications, you can get backlinks from these distributed content.

These relationship-driven links are difficult for your competitors to acquire, which increases the link gap against other ranking competing sites. 

6. Rankings

We’ve covered enough reasons to invest in backlinks for your site. 

If you have the right mindset of building links, this obvious imperative to ranking your site is highly possible. 

Google is largely a link-based algorithm that will stay the same for years. But not all links are equal. You should acquire backlinks that matter most. 

Actionable Tips To Improve Rankings with Backlinks:

Build foundational links at the start. 

Google rewards websites that continue to send trust signals (off-page). 

Start by getting backlinks from social profiles, citations, and local niche-specific directories. Do it like what a regular business does. A legitimate company would have complete social profiles (Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). 

Passively attract natural links via ranking for informational keywords. 

Publish assets with the intent to rank for informational and question keywords. When other content publishers find your content helpful to use as references (while researching their topics), they’ll be more likely to link to it from their content. 

7. Innovation For Next Brand Offerings

This one is related to earlier branding reasons. Another core benefit of link acquisition is it allows brands (especially starting ones) to innovate their product or service offerings based on the current demands.

For example, we’ve been revamping our SEO strategies for my coffee brands. We are constantly thinking of new business models we can touch on to expand our offerings. 

Through ranking for the best coffee service keywords here in the Philippines and other link building partnerships, we’ve added a new coffee cart package.

It stems from the idea that other suppliers, like local wedding event companies in the Philippines, are linking to our coffee blog. 

Build links to see consumer behavior patterns and where their attention is going. This would give you insights into new product or service offerings you can offer with your brand. 

That’s all for now. If you have questions, feel free to comment below. And you can also follow me on Twitter @venchito14.