Do you want to build a stronger, more diverse link profile for your website? Link building with content allows you to pitch the most valuable assets your website has (content) to offer in exchange for a link. In this post, we’ll look at the top reasons to build links with content.
25+ Benefits of Link Building with Content
1. Google Loves Content
Google, according to StatCounter’s Search Engine Market Share monitor, is the most used search engine worldwide. If your goal is to get your website on the first page of Google search results, then you need content.
Google recommends that websites have content, particularly in the form of blog posts. In the Advanced SEO section for Developers, Google offers the following advice.
“If you have a website but don’t have a blog, consider creating one: A blog is a great way to connect with people who share your interests, or to publicize your site or product. Blogs are easy to create and update, and rich, useful, and original blog content will encourage readers to come back to your site.”
How do you publicize your site or product with content? Create content that helps inform your target customers about why your site or product is the best fit for their needs. Then, Google’s Webmaster Guidelines suggest that you, “Make sure that any sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.”
2. Consumers Love Content
Thanks to research by Demand Metric, we know that 70% of consumers would rather learn about a brand through articles on their website than advertising.
In a more recent Consumer Content Survey of 2,000 adults in the U.S., UK, and Australia, consumers said they trusted content from family members, friends, and brands over content from acquaintances or influencers.
3. Content Has the Power to Attract Links Organically
Google, according to StatCounter’s Search Engine Market Share monitor, is the most used search engine worldwide. If your goal is to get your website on the first page of Google search results, then you need content.
Google recommends that websites have content, particularly in the form of blog posts. In the Advanced SEO section for Developers, Google offers the following advice.
“If you have a website but don’t have a blog, consider creating one: A blog is a great way to connect with people who share your interests, or to publicize your site or product. Blogs are easy to create and update, and rich, useful, and original blog content will encourage readers to come back to your site.”
How do you publicize your site or product with content? Create content that helps inform your target customers about why your site or product is the best fit for their needs. Then, Google’s Webmaster Guidelines suggest that you, “Make sure that any sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
4. Consumers Love Content
Thanks to research by Demand Metric, we know that 70% of consumers would rather learn about a brand through articles on their website than advertising.
In a more recent Consumer Content Survey of 2,000 adults in the U.S., UK, and Australia, consumers said they trusted content from family members, friends, and brands over content from acquaintances or influencers.
5. Content Has the Power to Attract Links Organically
Content creators are always searching for valuable resources to include with their content. They may not want to link to your homepage or your sales pages. However, an interesting piece of content would make for a great resource for their readers.
6. Content Comes in Many Formats
One of the advantages of creating content for links is that you can utilize a variety of content formats. These include text-based content (blog posts, case studies, white papers, etc.), audio based content (podcasts and audiobooks), and video based content.
7. Content Can Accomplish Multiple Goals
Your organization can use content to achieve multiple marketing objectives. Content Marketing Institute’s 2022 B2B Content Marketing Report found that the top goals marketers used to measure content marketing success include website engagement, conversions, website traffic, email engagement, social media analytics, quality of leads, search rankings, email subscriber count, quantity of leads, and customer/lead acquisition cost.
8. Content Helps Establish Your Business as an Expert
Google uses search quality raters to evaluate websites for their expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. To determine if a website has high-quality content, the search quality rater uses detailed guidelines to evaluate the main content of a page and the person or organization behind that content.
Therefore, your high quality content has the potential to impress not only potential linking partners, but also Google’s own search quality raters.
9. Content Creates a Favorable Impression With Consumers
In addition to helping you increase visibility in search results, content also helps consumers get to know your brand. In fact, 70% of consumers prefer to consume articles from a business website to learn about them rather than other methods of research.
10. Content Increases Traffic
83% of marketers use traffic as a factor for measuring content marketing success. This is because ultimately, the links that you build to your content will drive traffic to your traffic in combination with the organic sewer here traffic increase you will see.
11. Content Increases Conversions
According to a study from the Aberdeen Group, content marketing adoption leads to higher conversion rates and email marketing click-through rates. This means that people are more likely to submit a lead generation form or make a purchase after reading a piece of content versus having only product or service sales pages.
12. Content Is More Readily Shared
The New York Times conducted a survey of 2,500 consumers. They found that 49% of consumers shared content to inform people they know about products they like. Most importantly, those consumers share content to change an acquaintance’s opinion on the product or to take action (such as making a purchase).
This means that your content marketing also plays a vital role in word-of-mouth marketing. Considering that 92% of consumers believe in recommendations from family and friends, you definitely want content that attracts links and shares.
13. Content Can Be Repurposed
85% of leading marketers reuse and repurpose content, with 29% of companies having a specific plan on place to repurpose content.
Repurposing is an effective way of increasing the size of your content library. Once you take one piece of content, such as a blog post, and repurpose it into different formats, such as a video and podcast audio, you have increased the likelihood that someone will link to it in one format or another.
14. Different Content Types Lead to Different Results for B2B and B2C
Content Marketing Institute found that the following types of content work best for B2B.
- Virtual Events/Webinars/Online Courses
- Research Reports
- Short Articles
- Ebooks/Whitepapers
- Case Studies
For B2C, the content types that generate the best results are as follows.
- Blog Posts/Short Articles
- Email Newsletters
- Videos
- Infographics
- Virtual Events/Webinars/Online Courses
15. Content Appears in More Places on Search
Optimizing content for Google News allows your content to appear next to the latest news stories on a particular topic. If Google Discover finds your content, it could come up on user’s personalized news feeds on Chrome.
16. Content Can Help You Build Valuable Relationships in Your Industry
Have you wanted to make connections in your industry? Use content to do it. There are several types of content you can create that would involve contacting the top people in your industry.
- Interviews
- Expert Roundups
- Ask An Expert
17. Content Assists Your Sales Team
According to research by HubSpot, 47% of buyers view three to five pieces of content before they contact a sales representative. This means giving buyers a satisfying answer to commonly asked questions about your products and services in your content.
18. Content Assists Your Support Team
Answer the most frequently asked questions received by your support team using your content. Your support content will attract links, improve your customer service, and reduce the amount of support your team has to provide.
19. Content Can Be Personalized
Epsilon research found that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase if they receive a personalized experience. Utilizing the right tools, personalization can be based on gender, age, location, device, referring URL, and previous shopping behaviors.
With a personalized content campaign, you can increase the likelihood of conversions with people who click on your content links or arrive from organic search.
20. Content Can Be Used for Native Advertising
In addition to repurposing content in a variety of formats, you can also repurpose your content for a native advertising campaign. Also referred to as sponsored content, native ads allow you to reach content consumers on large websites like CNN and Buzzfeed.
21. Content Helps Build Community
Vanilla Forums ebook on online communities reveals that branded communities have an impact on customer retention (66% of community owners), new leads generation (68%), and sales (55%). Your brand can gain the same benefits from your link-worthy content by sharing it in your own branded community forums.
Alternatively, you can simply enable comments on your current content and encourage readers to ask questions or start a discussion. Each comment thread will act as a forum for your fans and potential customers to come together and discuss your brand.
22. Content Can Be Produced in-house or Outsourced
Don’t have time to produce content assets for link building? Half of businesses don’t according to the 2022 B2B Content Marketing report. Content marketing tasks outsourced by businesses include the development of written and visual content and the distribution/promotion of content.
23. Content can be distributed on multiple channels.
To increase the reach of your content assets and the likelihood that others will link to your content, you have to create a distribution and promotion strategy for your content.
If the ultimate goal is to build links, you will want to house all of your content on your website. That way, if someone wants to link to your blog post, video, or podcast, they are linking to your website, not another publisher, YouTube, Spotify, etc.
That’s not to say you don’t want to distribute your content on platforms like YouTube and Spotify. By distributing your content to these and similar networks, along with your social media profiles, you increase your content’s reach and visibility.
As long as each of these shares links back to your website, people will be able to link back to the original source of your content.
24. Content can help attract new audiences and customers.
If you want to attract new readers to your blog who could ultimately become your customers, you will want to distribute your content on the networks where your customers are. Top channels like YouTube and Facebook are effective for most businesses – both have billions of monthly active users.
It’s important to look at the demographics for other social networks and channels to determine if they will reach your potential customers or webmasters likely to link to your content. You may find as a B2B business, sharing content on LinkedIn leads to better results than sharing content on Pinterest. The opposite would be true for a B2C company’s content.
25. Content Can Inspire People to Act
Use your linkable content assets to inspire people to take action. Each piece of content should have a call to action, whether it’s to sign up for your email list, submit a lead gen form, or visit a sales page for more details on a product or service.
This will ensure that your links are not only beneficial for your rankings in search, but also beneficial to helping your business capture leads and make sales
26. Content Can Inspire People to Act
When it comes to link requests, it’s much easier to pitch a high-quality piece of content. It comes off more as a suggestion that helps the webmaster as opposed to a sales pitch for a landing page or homepage.
Utilizing public social media data, you can personalize your link request to the link partner’s interest. For example:
Hi John,
I noticed you shared a post with your Twitter audience on customer retention. We just published a free ebook on the top 10 ways to retain customers for e-commerce businesses. I’ve attached a copy. If you enjoy it, we’d love a shout-out in your weekly marketing roundup post.
27. Content Authors Link to Other Content
How do you get on the radar of other bloggers and journalists who regularly link to content similar to yours? Start by linking out to their content when it’s relevant to yours.
Most content authors will be flattered and may repay the favor by linking to your content in the future.
Another way to connect with content authors is through social media. Twitter makes it easy to follow and converse with its users. You can share another author’s content on your Twitter profile and mention their @username in the tweet. This will help get a conversation started that could lead to links.
