How to Get High Quality Backlinks for Your SEO

Google’s constantly changing algorithm can be overwhelming. Each year, Google makes hundreds of changes to their algorithm and this can be scary and stressful for business owners and marketers. You want to acquire high-quality links to improve SEO but you don’t want to do it in the wrong way, which could cause your keywords to drop and your SEO to suffer.

Fortunately, The Media Captain’s team is always on top of trends and updates when it comes to Google’s constantly changing algorithm. From the proper way to structure a website to building high-quality links, we are obsessed with Google’s updates.

Related Podcast: How Jason Helped a $1 Billion Car Insurance Company Recover from Google Penalty

We are fortunate enough to have data from hundreds of businesses within our SEO reporting dashboard (SEMRush) to detect trends with keyword rankings. We have extensive data between our clients, our in-house eCommerce brand along with our digital agency to know how to acquire high-quality links to improve SEO.

Google’s algorithm gives more credence to quality content and authentic user experience – and this makes sense. If you write highly-targeted content that’s focused on providing maximum value to your visitors, you should have nothing to fear when algorithm updates occur.

Backlinks have always been an integral part of Google’s algorithm and building the “right” type of links is extremely important. Quality and authority are two musts and we’ll discuss the best way to achieve these essential components. All of the strategies below are extremely effective, however, they also take time and dedication to achieve.

Related Blog: What is Domain Authority and How Does It Impact SEO

Utilize Your Own Blog

Having a great blog strategy can greatly help you utilize links to improve your SEO. Again, quality content and authentic user experience are vital here. Create a blog strategy that focuses on writing articles that will be helpful and useful to your customers and your team. If you do this and lay the right foundation for your blog, great links will come naturally.

Related Podcast: Your Blog – Laying the Right Foundation

First, within your blog, you’ll be able to link internally to other pages on your site. This means adding a link on one page of your site to another. For the Media Captain, for example, when we’re talking about internal linking in a blog post (which we are right now – how convenient!), we can link to a related article that goes more in-depth on the topic we’re discussing. We wrote a whole blog post about internal linking, which fits extremely naturally with the topic at hand. Make sure your internal links are natural and that they make sense. Don’t include links just to include them, really think about what’s going to add value for your readers.

In addition to internal links, if your blogs are well written and provide value, you can acquire external links pointed back at your blog as well. This will happen when someone takes a quote from your blog and links to it from their own site. Our in-house eCommerce brand, DermWarehouse, has blogs that are all written by a dermatologist, Dr. Parks. From time to time, another source (Women’s Health, for example), will find a blog that Dr. Parks wrote on a particular topic and utilize a quote from the article. They will link back to the DermWarehouse site and mention Dr. Parks in their article, which is a big SEO win for DermWarehouse because they are acquiring a new backlink from an extremely authoritative and reputable source

Leverage Your Authority 

I keep talking about authority and getting links from authoritative sources. So clearly, authority is an extremely important factor when it comes to links and SEO. If you are an expert in a subject, this means you have authority on that topic, and that’s extremely valuable. After many years of running The Media Captain, I’ve become an expert in digital marketing. I’m able to leverage that authority to build relationships. I connected with the Fisher College of Business, for example, and was able to write articles on their blog. Within each blog post, there is a “resources” section where I’m able to add more depth to each article by linking to a related blog I wrote on The Media Captain’s site. In addition, I was a VIP contributor for Entrepreneur, again writing articles for their website, all of which linked back to The Media Captain’s site. Use your authority to build relationships. Not only is there potential for new business to come out of these connections, it’s also a great way to build extremely high-quality links back to your website.

Leverage Business Relationships 

Leveraging business relationships that you already have is another great way to acquire high-quality links to your site. If you partner with other businesses, ask them to include a link on their site back to your site. Both DermWarehouse and The Media Captain utilize this strategy.

For DermWarehouse, we sell over 100 brands on our site. When we enter into a partnership with one of these new brands, we always ask them to include a link to DermWarehouse on their site as an authorized seller. These are all established and very reputable brands, so having them include that link not only lets their customer know that DermWarehouse is a trusted seller, it also greatly helps improve our SEO.

For The Media Captain, whenever we build a site for a client, if they have a partners page, we’d ask the client to add us to their site. When our clients are happy with the work we’ve done, they’re happy to do this for us more often than not.

Utilize Free Resources like HARO

There are some great free resources out there that can be utilized to make connections. One of our favorites is HARO (Help a Reporter Out). This is a website where reporters send out pitches for quotes they’re looking to use in certain articles. You sign up and receive daily emails with these pitches and can respond to the ones that make sense for you and your business. This is something we used a ton for both DermWarehouse and The Media Captain, especially as both businesses were starting out and beginning to grow. Again, if you are an authoritative source, it’s likely you’ll have a lot of luck with a platform like HARO.

For DermWarehouse, many reporters look to quote dermatologists in their articles. Maybe you’ve read an article on “The best exfoliators for smooth skin”, for example. You may have noticed that the reporter quoted different dermatologists throughout the article. We would respond to the queries asking for advice from a derm with quotes from Dr. Parks giving his recommendations or advice. HERE is a link to an article from Today.com that quoted Dr. Parks about the best exfoliators for smooth skin!

The Media Captain has also utilized HARO to get quoted in articles related to business and digital marketing. Because we have authority on these topics and can provide detailed responses, our quotes are often selected.

There are a few good rules of thumb when it comes to HARO. First, timeliness is key. Reporters tend to be on tight deadlines, so if you can respond to queries quickly, that’s always really helpful. It’s important when responding to the queries, you actually send the direct quote over and answer the reporter’s question right off the bat. This makes it much easier for them to find what they’re looking for and much more likely that they’ll select a quote from you. Lastly, make sure to include your name, link to your website, and a short bio that they can use to quote you.

In Closing

Again, when it comes to building links to improve your SEO, focus on quality and authority. There are many great ways to start acquiring links, but having a process in place is extremely important. All of the strategies mentioned above are great suggestions to get high-quality links to improve your SEO. As we mentioned, this is a process that takes a lot of time and dedication, so don’t get frustrated if things don’t happen extremely quickly. If you put in the time, the results will be worth it.