SEO is at the heart of marketing today, and to show up in the SEO rankings, you need links – quality links. But you shouldn’t build them yourself. Though you may know your business better than anyone else, SEO is complicated and outsourcing your link building needs means you’re more likely to place links on high-quality sites. This is how you parlay an SEO strategy into placement at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).

In addition to placement power, it’s easy to fall prey to Google’s algorithms when building your own links. Due to changes initiated under Google Penguin in 2012, websites need to focus on quality links, not just any link, when developing connections; that means embedding links in meaningful content, in context, and on sites where they’re relevant. And it’s an overwhelming project to take on in addition to running a business.

When you outsource your link building, you put your website’s reputation in the hands of specialists. Here’s what you have to gain by seeking professional support:

Focus On Growth

Business outsource projects for a number of reasons, including to free up key employees for other projects, increase growth, and tap expertise that no one in-house is capable of providing. By outsourcing your link building program, you can accomplish all of these aims at once, but their potential for fostering growth is truly unparalleled.

By pushing your business’s website into a top SERP result, quality backlink building ensures that potential customers can find your site; the general wisdom of content marketing is that between 71% and 92% of all clicks are on Google’s first page of search results. Unless you’ve placed links on high domain authority (DA) sites, though, and unless other pages are linking to you, you’re not being seen. Web users know what to expect when they scroll through Google’s search results. If it’s not at the top, it’s probably not worth their time.

Leveraging Connections

So what do professional link building services know that your business’s marketing department doesn’t? First, they’re up to date on constantly changing SEO rules and standards. These change regularly and they’re always becoming more stringent and more challenging to comply with if you don’t have support. This is especially true when it comes to link quality. For example, the link building company AudienceBloom uses existing media relationships to place articles on appropriate, high DA sites. If your company wanted to attempt this on your own, you would have to spend a great deal of time cultivating those relationships before you could even get started.

In addition to having high profile connections, professional link building services also understand the difference between a popular site and a target site. You can’t choose a website just for the size of its readership. It’s equally important that a site attract your target audience. If the people reading a website aren’t likely to use your services or your product, then why are you targeting them? When you outsource your link building campaigns, you’ll get the best of both worlds – placement on high DA sites that are relevant to your niche. And this is way beyond what you’ll accomplish guest posting with your current connections.

Developing Diversity

Just as professional backlink services have a lot of valuable connections for distributing your links, they also can ensure that your links are distributed across a variety of sites and that those links are natural. This is known as link diversity and while some suggest that link diversity is no longer relevant – the concept stems largely from 2005 research on statistical link analysis and the idea of a natural link profile – diversity has its own advantages.

First, when you have a diverse link profile, you’re reaching a broader audience, and they can all be your target audience. It’s just a matter of forming the necessary Venn diagrams where your site is in the middle.  

The Audit Advantage

While link building typically focuses on creating new connections, sometimes you need to offload bad links. That means monitoring who else may be using your company’s links as a source and auditing those connections. One of the advantages of working with backlink building specialists, though, is that they monitor how well campaigns are working for your company. If they see a sudden drop in your SERP standing, bad backlinks are a likely source of the problem. They can audit backlinks and use Google’s Disavow Link tool to eliminate harmful connections and bring your ranking back up.

What’s The Alternative?

If you don’t hire professionals to handle your backlink building process, are there alternatives? Yes – but approach with caution. A lot of the strategies used by inexperienced individuals can put you on Google’s radar for all the wrong reasons. If you’re considering developing backlinks independently, you need to avoid these three common strategies:

Stay Out Of The Comments

It’s easy to embed links to your business in the comments section of other sites, but Google will target these as a reason to knock down your SERP. Your links need to be in close connection to meaningful keywords – this is one of Google’s primary metrics – which also means your link shouldn’t just be in the bylines. Comment sections, more than anything else, though, tend to make it look as though you’ve just gone out and left your URL as spam.

There’s No Value

One of the most common objections to outsourcing your backlink creation is that another company can’t possibly know your business as well as you do – and on some levels, that’s true. You have a special relationship with your business and that’s important. Just because you have a great depth of knowledge in this area, though, doesn’t mean that you can translate that information into marketable content.

When developing content for backlinks, you need to be able to cross the boundary between fields, to make connections that will funnel readers toward your business. Backlink developers are experts at this, but individual business owners often make the mistake of getting too caught up in their own niche. If you’re just describing your service or your product, you’re not creating value for your readers. And if you’re not creating value, then all your work is for nothing.

Release Your Anchor

Both individual companies and backlink services will come up with keywords that they think will drive traffic, but it’s typically in-house marketers who become overly attached to their anchor text. Well, it’s time to let go. Specific anchor text rarely looks natural and it will be detrimental to the rest of your content. If you’re going to write your own content for backlinks, you need the writing skills and marketing savvy to back it up.

Developing content for backlinks is different from writing internal marketing copy or promotional material, though it’s easy to conflate them all – and that’s why backlink outsourcing is so valuable. The professionals understand the difference, can manage the shift between tones for different sites, and can use their connections to gain entry into otherwise unattainable markets. By the time you negotiate those connections yourself, your business will be too far behind the competition and may never catch up. You don’t have the time or money to experiment.

Businesses outsource key services all the time, but many are reticent to let go of control over their content because they fear that an outside company will miss the nuances – that they won’t understand their market or their mission. With the right company and a commitment to communication, though, you can get your message across – and your backlink developers can get that message out into the world.