What To Expect from SEO and Link Building Services?

As a businessowner in a highly competitive industry, your priority is to ensure that your brand stands out from the rest of the competition. Without proper marketing, you may have the best product or idea in your industry and yet struggle to hit your expected sales volumes. Due to the rapid shift towards online sales and marketing, one of the most viable ways to reach your potential customers has turned out to be search engine optimization.

Link building and SEO services are an integral part of the success of any online business irrespective of the industry. The idea is to deploy various techniques and strategies in line with your business objectives to improve your SERP rankings, which will contribute to higher conversion rates and sales.

However, SEO is a rather complicated practice and requires certain skills and experience. There are two ways to incorporate search engine optimization for your website, ie, set up your own digital marketing team or outsource the same to a professional SEO agency. Each one has its pros and cons and the one you select depends on your business objectives and available resources.

What is link building as part of an SEO campaign?

Search engine optimization or SEO consists of multiple techniques and strategies, all of which aim to improve the position of your website on the SERPs. Link building is a part of off-page SEO, which consists of practices done outside your website to influence your rankings.

Link building essentially refers to the process of obtaining high-authority backlinks from other websites in your industry to improve your search engine rankings. The share value of backlinks is one of the most important ranking factors and high-value links signal to Google and other search engines that the content on your website is credible and trustworthy.

In its early days, link buildingwas limited to building a high volume of backlinks without much preference for context. Now, Google prefers backlinks that are relevant and contextual and penalises those that aren’t, meaning that backlinks from high-authority domains value more than one from irrelevant websites.

Building backlinks is primarily achieved by guest posting and content marketing, which involves reaching out to other top names in your industry and posting authoritative content on their website with backlinks to the landing pages of your brand. When done correctly, building backlinks can save you countless hours and reward you with a long-lasting boost in search engine ranking.

What to expect when hiring SEO services for link building?

As a rule of thumb, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. A reliable link building company will not promise you overnight results, simply because it is not possible. SEO services take time and you will need to be patient and put consistent efforts to see results in your favour.

Instead, the link building company will tell you about their process and how they work towards achieving the desired outcomes. Some of the top SEO agencies allow you to select the URLs and the related anchor texts to promote as there is nobody that knows your business as you do. Some of the top link building services provided by SEO firms include:

• Guest posting
• Blogger outreach
• Anchor text management
• Content marketing
• Competitive link placement
• Broken link rebuilding
• Curated link building, etc.

Things to look for when hiring link building services

1. Diverse linking

Arguably one of the most important things to look out for in an SEO firm is link diversity. Some SEO firms specialize only in directory listings, while some concentrate on blog posts or press releases. A reputable link building company can help you get high-quality backlinks from industry-relevant PageRank powerhouses. When hiring a link building company, make sure that you go with an agency that offers a bit of everything as it provides a higher chance of success.

Depending on your requirements, link building and SEO services, in general, can be very costly. SEO agencies offer a wide range of pricing plans, which can depend on the number of links, retainers, etc. Most commonly found plans are renting link advertisements on a monthly basis. Before you hire any link building agency, make sure to review their pricing plans and check if they work well for you in the long run.

Another important factor you need to consider is responsiveness and customer service. You need to ensure that you can reach out to them when you need to before signing on the dotted line. Make sure that they provide at least a contact number, email, or instant messaging username while negotiating the contract, else you may run into issues later.

• Reputation and connections

With a complex task like SEO, a safe bet will be to go with experienced agencies with a good reputation. When hiring, look at their past employment history, their profile names and forums, along with other blogs where they contribute. Chances are, if they are thoughtful and develop useful content for their website, they will be equally diligent when working on your link building campaign. If they have no track record online, you might want to look somewhere else.

Some link building agencies list client portfolios on their website, which can be used to guess their preferred industries and other information. Note that link building often comes with NDAs, so if you see them sharing too much information about their previous clients, chances are they will do the same with your brand. Ask for their work history but respect the privacy of their other clients.

Link building services are absolutely a necessary part of any effective SEO strategy. It brings several benefits on top of improving your brand credibility and trustworthiness. That said, link building is not a one-time thing and requires consistent efforts. You will need to create and update your content regularly and find brand mentions without links, etc. A reputable firm offering high-quality SEO services allows you to offload some of these tasks and focus on your core business.