Building and maintaining a website is hard work, but a strong presence and a quality SEO strategy always pay off. Better rankings mean more traffic, which translates to more leads and eventually, sales.
There are many parts of SEO, all of which are important to your website. One big element is backlinking. A backlink is when another website links to your website from its content. There are many ways to make this happen, and more backlinks can lead to better rankings in any industry. Read on to learn how to build backlinks for your dental website.
The Importance of Backlinks
It can be a lot of work building backlinks for your website, so what’s the point? Search engines consider many things when ranking websites and pages, including the perceived authority and value of a piece of content.
If your content has other websites linking to it, this tells Google and other search engines that your content must be real, useful, and valuable. In turn, they’ll rank it higher. Even better is if you get backlinks from other highly ranked and authoritative websites.
Backlink Building Strategies
There are many ways to go about building backlinks for your dental website. Some methods cost money, others are free, and they require varying amounts of work. The following are some of the most effective methods that don’t require a financial investment:
Guest Blogging
This is a common method because it’s a win-win in most cases. Guest blogging is when you create a blog post that’s published on another website. Most of the time, the piece will be published under your name and highlighted as a guest article. This gives the readers of the other website a change of pace and a fresh voice, while you get backlinks.
Not only does this get the word out about your business, but you can put a link or two in these pieces that land on your website. It’s tempting to stuff these articles with as many links as you can, but this is counterintuitive. Too many links will appear spammy to search engines, and readers may also feel suspicious.
The most important thing when guest blogging is to do it on relevant websites. For example, an article with links to your dental practice would likely mean nothing on the website of a restaurant or travel agency.
You can usually land a guest blogging spot by scouting out a website you’d like to be featured on and asking them! Some will say no, but it’s always worth asking because some will love the opportunity.
Get on “Best of” Lists
Similar to guest blogging, it’s great when your business can appear in listicles. This could include something like “best dental practices in X area.” Typically, these articles will then link to each item on the list.
Sometimes, you can reach out and request to be placed on lists like this. Other times, publications will research and decide on their own. This is where it pays to have good SEO, a great website, and positive reviews. They may just find you on their own.
Do Interviews
If you’re willing to put in some time, you can try doing interviews for podcasts, Youtube channels, or other platforms. This is a great chance to go in-depth about your business and/or your expertise to an already-willing audience.
Once the interview is posted, they’ll accompany it with a link to your website in the episode description. This counts as a backlink.
Get Mentioned on Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool for many reasons, and SEO is a big one. In addition to having your own social media presence, you can use other pages to your advantage, too! If another website or company posts a podcast or guest post with you, many will automatically share it on social media as well.
If you’re not sure whether they’ll do it on their own, you can always discuss it beforehand and request that they share it. They can tag you in their post as well as link to your website.
Get on Directories
It may seem less impactful among all the interesting blog posts, podcast episodes, and other engaging media. But – directories are still useful. Even if people aren’t reading and using them as much as they used to, it’s still a link! Some large directories have strong domain authority, meaning they could even be high-quality backlinks.
As a dental practice, you can get on local directories for dentists in the area. If you have a robust and informative blog, you may even be able to get on lists for resourceful and educational websites.
Important Things to Know About Backlinking
As you dive into building backlinks for your dental website, there are a few key points you should keep in mind:
- It’s not an instant ranking strategy. Backlinking works but you must be consistent and patient.
- Backlinking is part of a larger SEO strategy. SEO has many elements and if you only ever focus on backlinks, you won’t be as successful.
- Authority is important but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Getting a backlink from a large, high-traffic website is exciting and valuable, but don’t turn down smaller websites. Any backlink from an authentic, relevant website is useful.
- Don’t fall for offers that are too good to be true. There are some services out there that may try to sell you backlinks. They may promise things like “100 backlinks for $5” but these often aren’t worth it. These backlinks will likely be nothing more than spam, and most search engines will be able to tell.
Build a Great Website for Great Rankings
There are many facets to a comprehensive, good-quality, and high-ranking website. If you’re starting from scratch, let us help you create something great. Then, you can focus on creating quality content and other strategies like backlinking.
Contact us today to ask questions or book a consultation. We specialize in creating fabulous websites, quality content, and successful businesses!
