Enhance authority

“Enhance authority” sounds like an esoteric SEO term of art but all it means is increasing the influence of your website. To a large extent, the meaning of “influence” conforms to our everyday understanding of the word. Do people refer to your website for in-depth, expert information about a given topic? Do people trust your website as an authority on the topics you write about?

Google does not read websites like human beings and cannot independently assess the quality of their research, writing or scholarship. Instead, Google has devised a reliable proxy for measuring the influence of a given web page and that is the citation by other sites of that page and how influential those sites are themselves.

Thus, persuading well-ranked sites to link to you is one of the most important components of SEO.

Building authority on Google requires two types of marketing knowhow. The first is understanding how Google weights backlinks to your site and identifying those sites whose backlinks can substantially boost your rank. (The term “backlink” means inbound links to a website.) Step two of this digital marketing challenge is persuading third-party sites to link to you by offering them relevant, high quality content which their readership will find valuable. Some content opportunities are obvious. For example, a marketing director for a new hotel will send press releases to all the top travel publications, hoping that they will write about the hotel’s launch. If, say, The New York Times covers the hotel launch and links to the hotel’s website, that link alone can send the hotel’s website zooming up search results. But there’s a lot more than PR which goes into building a strong catalogue of backlinks.

Backlink analysis

To begin, Cogney uses technical tools to conduct a backlink analysis of your website. This analysis reveals all the sites linking to you, including those backlinks which are boosting your search rank already, quick wins (such as links to your site which are presently broken but can be repaired, redirected or replaced quickly) and spammy links that you should disavow because your site shouldn’t be associated with any site engaged in questionable SEO tactics. Just as important, we conduct an analysis of competitor websites to see which sites have linked to them. This is important for two reasons: to reveal backlink opportunities for your site because it’s likely that sites linking to your competitors will be interested in your company as well. We also study what kind and quality of content give rise to backlinks within your industry.

Outreach

As you can see, obtaining a backlink isn’t like changing a header tag on your website. Ultimately, the decision isn’t up to you but the owner of another website.

Luckily, Cogney has years of successful experience in this area. To increase backlinks, a very proactive marketing approach is usually required. You need to create reasons for third party websites to link to you regularly. Thus, we study your industry, its calendar of major annual events, affiliate programs, directory listings, referral programs, influencers, writers and bloggers, to come up with an overall strategy for creating a strong backlink catalogue. Some elements of that strategy might include publishing a blog on your website about the topics and themes of greatest interest to your potential customers, getting listed on shopping portals and directories linking to suppliers like you, setting up affiliate and referral programs to send more potential customers to your site, etc. Make no mistake, building backlinks requires a systematic, ongoing effort, backed up by significant marketing resources, for example, copywriting and online business development. If your competitors are engaged in similar content outreach, you might lose rank over time unless you keep up your linkbuilding efforts. Ideally, Cogney should train your marketing department to function like an in-house PR agency consistently generating new and compelling content relevant to your industry, so that there are fresh reasons to link to your site regularly.

Without a doubt, building backlinks is one of the most powerful methods of improving search rank. Certainly, one-time linkbuilding campaigns can boost a website’s visibility but the best approach is programmatic and long-term. In the case of authority, out of sight is not just out of mind, it’s out of sight.