Everyone from your web developer to your aunt’s friend’s dog’s sister has said the word “backlinks” to you. Of course, you know what a link is, but how do you get the good ones and how does it work into your PR efforts?
“Whether you are just getting started or looking to refine existing campaigns, it usually starts with a website audit, or a slightly awkward conversation with an SEO consultant. Your site looks great and the content is turning over nicely, but your competitors are just doing better on Google analytics. It turns out to reach your target audience you need backlinks.
Ok….but how?
Most business owners we speak to already have a working idea of what a backlink is. What they’re less sure about is why some links are worth their weight in gold whilst others can actively damage a website, and where on earth a PR agency fits into all of this.
A quick refresher, what is a link?
A backlink is a link from someone else’s website to yours. That’s it. When a trade publication, a national newspaper or a respected industry blog links to your site, Google reads it as a vote of confidence. Someone credible has vouched for you, in public, without you paying them a fiver to do it and therefore you can be trusted.
Google has used links this way since day one. Its founders built the entire search engine on the idea that the web itself could tell you which pages mattered, based on who linked to whom. Decades of algorithm updates later, that core principle hasn’t budged.
Think about how recommendations work in real life. If a stranger in the pub tells you about a brilliant accountant, you might nod politely. If your most switched-on business contact tells you the same thing, you’re ringing that accountant on Monday morning.
Backlinks work exactly the same way. The messenger matters as much as the message.
Domain Authority is a score out of 100 that estimates how trustworthy and established a website is. A brand new site starts near the bottom. The BBC’s Domain Authority score sits in the 90s. Your solid regional trade publication Domain Authority might be somewhere in the 50s or 60s.
When a website with high Domain Authority links to yours, some of that credibility passes across to your site. SEO content people call it link equity.
Earn enough of it from the right places and your own authority starts to set in, meaning you are becoming more trusted. A strong backlink doesn’t just boost one blog post. It lifts everything.
Backlinks and your domain trust score
Your website is based on its domain rating. The higher its authority, the more reliable you are, the higher your search engine results pages. Backlinks help to build that authority.
Before you even started building a link building strategy, you need to know the position of your website, link types and referring domains. Have you got broken backlinks? How many do-follow backlinks and no-follow links have you got? What is the authority of the referring domains? What anchor text is being used? What is the depth of your anchor text distribution to pages on your website? Are you missing any valuable brand mentions?
Backlink analytics gives you a clear picture of where you stand before you start making any decisions.
You can sign up to backlink checker tools such as Google Search Console (which is free) to do a bit of link monitoring. For a more detailed review which includes competitor updates head to a backlink analysis tool such as SE Ranking.
Then review where you can improve your rankings. Have you go unlinked mentions you can include? Any chances of securing guest blogging with relevant industry influencer marketing?
What exactly does a link building strategy do for us, though?
To begin with, it boosts your search rankings (the most obvious one, but important). Links from credible, websites remain to this day one of the strongest signals Google uses to decide how valuable you are. See it this way…content gets you into the race. Backlinks help you win it.
Then referral traffic. A link in a well-read publication sends actual humans to your website, people who were already reading about your industry, your target audience. That traffic tends to convert far better than cold website visitors.
Of course let’s not forget credibility. “As featured in” carries weight with customers, not just algorithms. Keeping an eye on Google Trends alonside media coverage and guest blog post with a link is proof that someone independent thought you were worth writing about.
Finally, there is, compounding value. Which is to say, a quality link keeps working….that article from two years ago is still out there, still passing authority, still occasionally sending readers your way. Very few marketing activities age this well.
Press links vs rubbish websites
Here’s where it gets important, because not all backlinks are created equal. Not even close. You’ve probably seen the offers. Five hundred backlinks for £99. Guaranteed placements. Instant results. What you’re actually buying is links from link farms, spammy directories and websites that exist purely to sell links, sites with no real readers, no editorial standards and no relevance to your business whatsoever.
Google knows exactly what these look like. Its spam systems have become ruthless about identifying paid and manipulative links, and websites propped up by these don’t just lose the benefit. They can be actively penalised. We wrote about the fallout from Google’s recent updates in a previous blog, and the short version is this: cheap links have gone from being a waste of money to being a genuine liability.
Compare that with a press link. A journalist at a respected publication decides your story, your data or your expert opinion is worth covering, and links to you within a genuine article that real people read. Relevant sector, established website, proper editorial context.
One of those links can be worth more for referral traffic than a thousand of the cheap ones. Genuinely.
Three things to look at when judging any link are:
- Is the website relevant to your industry?
- Does it have decent URL rating and authority of its own?
- Does the page actually get traffic?
If the answer to all three is yes, you have hit the link jackpot.
So where does PR come in?
This is the part that surprises people. To start link building is, at its heart, a Digital PR job. Journalists don’t link to businesses because they’ve been asked nicely. They link to businesses that give them something useful. A newsworthy story. Original research. A sharp expert comment on something happening in the industry right now. Or a guest posting in an article.
That’s what a Digital PR agency does when it starts link building — and well-planned Digital PR campaigns are one of the most reliable ways to earn the kind of press links that genuinely move the needle.
PR generates:
- Press coverage. Crafting stories about your business that industry publications want to run, whether that’s trade media requests, regional press or nationals.
- Expert commentary. Positioning you as the voice journalists call when they need a quote on your sector. Every quote is a potential for link building, and a reputation boost either way.
- Guest posting and thought leadership. Well-written pieces placed in relevant publications, with links that sit naturally in genuinely useful content.
- Relationships. This is the unglamorous bit that makes everything else work. Knowing which journalists cover what, what they need and when they need it. Relationships take years to build, and they’re precisely why agencies have the link building that cold outreach never will.
Notice that none of this is new. It is simply doing interesting things and using PR to make sure the right people hear about them. The backlinks are simply the by-product – a very valuable by-product.
The honest bit. Link building through digital PR is slower than buying a spreadsheet full of dodgy links. Of course it is.
But it’s the only approach that builds authority Google properly rewards, and the only one that comes with a bonus: real coverage, in front of real potential customers.
We’re Aura PR
Aura PR is a full-service public relations link-building agency offering media relations, social media management, content marketing, technical SEO (search engine optimization) strategy, digital PR and link building strategy for businesses across the UK.
Drop us a line to find out more.
