Startup Link Building

Designing a successful website is paramount to startup businesses, as it can help drive your company’s growth, but paying for a domain and hiring a web design expert is only a small fragment of creating a functional, profit-generating website. 

The other part is link-building, or creating backlinks, which are high-quality hyperlinks from other websites pointing towards your startup’s page. However, there’s more to backlinks than meets the eye, so we’ll cover everything there is to know about link-building for startups in this guide. 

Startup link building best practices

While massive corporations have the means to hire link-building experts, startups usually have more limited budgets. This means that link building usually falls on the company’s internal team to build relationships with other high-authority entities and secure link placement. Here are some of the best link building strategies for startups: 

Produce high-quality content 

The backlinks to your startup will require integration into relevant, high-quality content, like a guest post article. You can generate tons of backlinking opportunities with good-quality content and good promotion. 

In contrast, no link-building tactics can help low-quality content earn backlinks. Work on your content marketing strategy by researching your competitors’ content. That way, you can develop better content compared to your competition. 

It’s worth noting that content creation is time-consuming work, so it’s best to commission such work if you don’t have the time yourself. Repurposing old content would also work, as long as it is relevant and of good quality. 

Try to acquire “dofollow” links

“Dofollow” links are those backlinks that allow Google’s algorithms to point back to your startup’s website or blog. A standard “dofollow” link looks like this: 

<a href=””>Example</a> 

You’d generally want more “dofollow” links; however, links from major legitimate platforms, like Facebook or Wikipedia, are mostly “nofollow” links, as these don’t generate any SEO value.

Build relevant backlinks

Relevance became one of the most important factors ever since Google added Penguin 4.0 to their core algorithm. Besides providing users with high-quality WEB results, Penguin 4.0 massively impacted SEO in terms of relevance, so much that it punished low-quality and manipulative websites by stripping them of their ranking. 

As a result, it’s imperative to consider the relevance of your content and the content you’re acquiring links from. Make sure that the links you acquire come from a website that’s thematically relevant to your product or service. 

For example, if you’re covering digital marketing, getting a high-quality backlink from a marketing blog is much more effective than getting one from a cat GIFs website. In contrast, getting too many links from irrelevant sources might even confuse the search engine and incur penalties. 

Optimize your anchor text

Anchor text tells Google, what your web page’s content is about. In the past, the best way to rank for a keyword was to use it as the anchor text as frequently as possible. However, if you did that today, your site is more likely to get penalized than to rank.

For this reason, you want to link to your pages use a lot of unique terms and phrases. By creating relevant content and gettting linked from relevant sites, Google will pick up on what your page is about without you having to use exact match anchor texts – so keep it natural.

How to build backlinks for a startup

Web users rarely look past the first few search results provided by the search engine. Having a strong SEO strategy will definitely help you rank higher on search pages.  

Connect with bloggers 

Building links for your startup implies reaching out to bloggers or websites with high domain authority (DA). Your links would be typically included in guest posts uploaded or published by these websites. 

The more high-quality and relevant backlinks your website has paired with the higher authority of the blogger you’re collaborating with, the better your website will rank in Google searches. 

Promote your content

Building a valuable backlink profile will get you page views and new customers to promote your content to. Promoting your content is best done through blog posts and news features, though social media like LinkedIn can also serve as a promotional platform.

Look for link insert opportunities 

Creating content naturally generates linking opportunities, but so does reaching out to websites with high authority. In most cases, authoritative sites usually link only to pages with great content. By looking for existing “roundup posts” and listicles, you may be able to get added to existing pages by sharing your quality content or resource.

Another way you can increase your website traffic is through broken link building. Broken links are non-working links featured on authoritative websites. These are terrible for the site’s SEO rating, and spoil the user experience, so the webmasters are likely more than willing to replace the broken link with a link from your startup – if you provide real value on your page.

Guest post

Link builders love guest posting since it gives you control over the link placement, type of link, and anchor text. As always, it’s more effective to pursue relevant, authoritative websites over low-quality guest blogging. 

Getting featured in the news and on social media is fantastic, but if those options aren’t available, focus on the website authority of the site you’re linking to rather than its size.

Why is link building important for startups?

Apart from thematic relevance, the number of high-quality links leading to your startup’s website is one of the major ranking factors for Google Search. 

Improves ranking

Ranking on the first page of Google is essential for engaging with new customers, given that approximately 75% of searchers don’t go beyond the first page of links. Even with the best possible content, and strong relevance, you still need high-quality links from authoritative web pages to improve your rating, thus increasing your organic traffic. 

Increases organic traffic

As your link-building efforts increase the number of backlinks you have, you’ll see an increase in organic traffic. Your target audience interested in the goods and services your startup provides would be able to reach you once you’re listed on the pages of trusted experts.

Summary

Link building is one of the most important ranking factors for SEO, but the quality of your backlinks is paramount, so creating a good link-building strategy is now more important than ever. If you want to learn more, you can read the comprehensive link-building guide or schedule a free consultation to discuss our link building services.