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Finding Backlinks

Note: This article talks about Google rankings, but the same principle applies to any search engine.

A "backlink" is a link from somebody else's website which links to yours. In terms of your ranking on Google, you can think of each backlink as being a "vote" for your site, and those votes play a part in Google's decision about where your site ranks, and for what terms.

Looking for advanced Google tricks to find competitor backlinks? Click here to watch it.

But not every vote is equal! Some are nearly worthless, if they come from sites which Google thinks are low quality, while some are really valuable and will really push you up the rankings.

This document is about how to find good-quality backlinks. You can apply it to any business, but I'll use the term "widget hire in Prestwich" as my example.

What does a worthless backlink look like?

Google puts a lot of effort into judging whether a site is spammy-looking or not. They try and exclude spammy sites from their index, and any backlinks from these sites won't help your site's rankings at all.

The best way to tell whether a site looks spammy or not is to ask yourself if you could ever imagine using it as a member of the public - does it address a specific need, or is it full of junk?

Some examples of very low quality or spammy links are:

  • Directories that are list websites from all over the world, in all sorts of niches
  • Links in profiles on unrelated websites
  • Comments left on other websites' blogs

Now that we know what a bad link looks like, let's get some good ones!

Essentials

You should make sure your Google Business Profile is up to date and accurate, with a link to your website. Most searches come from Google, and Google prioritises businesses whose profiles are active. You should ask each customers to leave a review wherever suits them - every review is worth having - but you could also tell them that Google is the most important place for you.

You should list your business on all the major UK business directories - Yell, Thompson Local, Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Maps, and FreeIndex.

Next up, you might want to get listed on industry-specific national directories. This could include things like Checkatrade, Rated People, or the directories of industry bodies. You could find these directories by Googling for 'Widget hire directory', and applying to those which are ran by trusted organisations you recognise.

Regional Business Directories

It's like that your local area has a vetted and verified directory of local businesses which you can register for. You can find these by searching Google for terms like "Prestwich directory" or "Prestwich businesses". Here are some of the results for Prestwich:

If you click through to the website and it's full of listings for businesses outside of your local area - it's a spammy site and you shouldn't bother listing there.

Analysing the competition

Now we're going to get into some trickier Google tricks. First, lets explain how the Google syntax works:

  • If you enclose your search term in quotation marks, "like this", then Google searches for "exact matches". This means the exact words you've quoted will be somewhere in the page for each result.
  • If you search for site:example.com then Google will only include results from example.com.
  • If you add a minus to that search, so -site:example.com then Google will only include results that DON'T come from example.com

We can combine these to create searches like:

"stefanswidgets.com" -site:stefanswidgets.com to search for a domain name

or

"Stefan's Widgets" -site:stefanswidgets.com to search for a company name

This will search for all exact mentions of stefanswidgets.com or "Stefan's Widgets", but it will exclude any that come from stefanswidgets.com. This means the results will contain the places that stefanswidgets.com or Stefan's Widgets are mentioned online, except for my widget site.

While a mention isn't exactly the same as a backlink, they're pretty close - and mentions are valuable to Google too.

So, let's do that for a site I made for an Indian curry cafe in Manchester, thisandthatcafe.co.uk (which I'll refer to as 'T&T' for readability's sake). Here is a link to that search - click here to see for yourself.

The results you'll see are things like:

And these are just from the first three pages!

So, the kinds of places that T&T are mentioned are:

  • T&T's social media profiles
  • Restaurant listing websites
  • Articles about tasty, affordable, or Halal food in Manchester
  • Message boards threads about things to do in Manchester and favourite places to eat

If you were trying to promote another Indian cafe in Manchester, these would all be great places to start. Some of these would be really easy to match - you could easily sign your cafe up for the same restaurant listing websites as T&T, or drop them an email and ask if they would write about you.

But I can't make people write about me!

It's true that the hardest links to get are the ones that aren't due to your direct input - in T&T's case, the blogs and message boards that mention them.

But these are also the most valuable - Google recognises that these places are authentic voices and so their "votes" count the most. The article from The Guardian is probably "worth" a thousand directory listings, as far as Google is concerned, because The Guardian is a major, well-respected newspaper with huge reach.

How you go about getting these kind of high-quality links from authentic voices will vary from industry to industry, but the general goal is to be newsworthy! In T&T's case, some newsworthy things about them are:

  • They've been around for 30+ years with a menu that has barely changed
  • The food is delicious and very affordable
  • The restaurant is located on a tucked-away alley so is a "hidden gem"
  • They are known for their cheerful service and lunch time queues
  • They make meals to the homeless
  • They cater to large events like weddings and raves

This has resulted in a steady stream of people wanting to write about them, from local food writers to international visitors doing food tours.

You might believe that your business isn't particularly newsworthy - if that's the case, it's worth thinking about how you could change that. Some ideas could be to:

  • Partner with local charities
  • Provide a service which is exceptional in some way
  • Be mentioned by a well-known influencer
  • Tell your customers how important it is that they recommend you
  • Offer referral discounts
  • Have a really entertaining social media profile
  • Share the specialist knowledge you have

Evaluating the quality of backlinks

There are tools out there which claim to give an objective measure of the quality of a backlink - Ahrefs and Semrush are the two main ones. However, I am very skeptical about the value of these measurements - they do not have access to Google's algorithms, and they might send you on wild goose chases.

Instead, I think it's better to use your own expertise in your field to evaluate the link. The best links are created by real people writing about their passions on websites that provide real value to their visitors - so ask yourself, how close is the backlink to this ideal?

I strongly believe that a niche blog about widgets, where an obsessive fan writes about their favourite widgets and goes into exhaustive detail about the differences between the widgets they've tried is much more valuable to my fictional widget hire company than a link from a directory of thousands of businesses, even if that website has been graded as having a really high "domain authority" or other metric.

Can't I just fake it?

You might be tempted to try and fake these harder to get and more valuable links - to write your own blogs, or to post to forums to promote yourself.

I advise against this, unless you do it in a way which doesn't involve any deception. Google uses a lot of resources trying to catch people who are "gaming" their algorithm, and it is very difficult to build a network of sites that promote one main site without it being really obvious to them. Your site might end up getting penalised which could take months to recover from.

You might also be tempted to pay someone to build links for you. This is also very risky. If you're paying for quantity over quality, it's very likely that the person you pay will just create tonnes of low-quality links, and this also looks really obvious to Google.

Out of date advice that you shouldn't do

The internet is full of outdated advice about link building, from the days when Google wasn't as good at catching spam / rank manipulation. Following that outdated advice could be disastrous for your site, so I'll cover some of it outdated info here.

Anchor text

Before 2012, Google used to pay lots of attention to the "anchor text" of links - the specific words that link to your site. This meant that people would try and ensure that all of their links mentioned their preferred search term, like "Widget hire in Prestwich".

This is now a really bad idea. Google sees these kind of links as being very manipulative - and rightly so - and in 2012 they changed their algorithm to penalise sites that use this tactic. This was called the Penguin update and it meant that lots of sites that did manipulative link building lost their positions.

This means that you should not fret about the specific words in your backlinks. It's fine if a link says your business name, or your domain name, or "click here", or anything else that makes sense in the context of the linking page.

Expired domains

Another old tactic was to buy expired domain names that still have links pointing to them, and then redirect them to your sites. This is very risky nowadays - there's a chance that the old domain has spammy links pointing to it which you can't find, and even if that isn't the case, you'll end up with a bunch of links which mention another business name, which affects your site's "NAP" (name, address, phone) consistency.

Guest posting / paid links

You might read about "guest posting", where you submit articles which mention your business to someone else's blog and they publish them, usually in exchange for money. This is seen as very manipulative - because it is - and goes directly against Google's guidance which says that sponsored links should be marked with a specific tag which will prevent them from being used in indexing decisions.

It's still great to collaborate with other websites, and to give each other a shout-out if it provides actual value to visitors - but don't just pay other sites to add links to yours.

This all feels like a lot of hard work

You're right, it is. There are no shortcuts to building great backlinks - it's a long-term process that will never end as long as your business is running. If you think you can just knock out 10 backlinks in an evening and then call it "done" forever, you are mistaken.

Since this is going to take a while, it's probably better to think about how you can build this into your normal day-to-day operations - and that's what the rest of this article will be about.

Asking for reviews and recommendations

I mentioned this already, but you should tell every customer that you really want them to review and recommend you. You should make this as easy as possible by linking them directly to the places they can leave a review, and putting Google first.

The best way to get recommendations is always going to be by providing a superior service, but you can sweeten the deal with a referral system or even just by shouting out your regular customers on social media and thanking them directly.

Fostering great relationships with your customers will pay off in the long run because they will think of your business when discussing the services you provide.

Keeping an eye on yourself and your competition

Google provide a service called Alerts. This lets you subscribe to certain keywords, and you will be emailed whenever Google indexes a new page which contains them.

For my fictional widget hire company, I might to set alerts for:

  • My own business name, so I know where I am being mentioned and can promote those mentions across my own channels.
  • My competitors, so I get insights into where they are being mentioned, to inspire me to chase similar kinds of spots.
  • Keywords related to my business, so I can find out if someone mentions "Widget hire in Prestwich" online and find out what the context is and if I can help.

Participating in community events

Keep an eye on the local events happening to you - you might want to use Google Alerts for this, too. If you can appear there, or sponsor it, or get involved in any way at all, you should strongly consider it.

If you encounter a local organisation that might like to be sponsored, drop them a message and ask if you can help. This might be a sports team, a local charity, a youth group, a mental health provider, a community party, or any other locally-respected group or occasion.

Be entertaining on social media

This can be a huge time sink, but if you're able to provide entertaining social media content it can do wonders for your reputation, and then indirectly for backlinks. I help This & That with their Facebook page, and just simple things like making a big deal about the day they serve cabbage curry or posting photos of famous people who visit and saying thank you have received tonnes of engagement.

Adding useful content to your site

If you've got skills or know-how that others might be interested in, and you can present that information in an understandable way, you might want to make a 'guides' section of your site where you share this knowledge with the public.

Even better would be if you've done some original research that nobody else has written about - you might be the only result on the internet for that topic, which means you have a great shot of showing in the first spot on Google and attracting lots of visitors.

These can be great ways to indirectly build backlinks, because people who discover your guides and find them useful might share the link in the communities they participate in.

In summary

  • Try and think of link-building as a long-term process. Anything that can be done really quickly is probably not worth it, aside from getting your site listed on reputable and relevant directories.
  • Keep an eye on your competition, and when you spot a link to their website then have a think about whether you could get something similar, and how you might go about that.
  • Provide real value to the visitors to your site in a way which will encourage them to share your website when they're discussing your industry.
  • Get involved in your local community to get your name about.

More reading

If you want to read more about search engine rankings, Google has some great advice published on their sites:

The end

If you'd like professional help building quality backlinks for your website, get in touch.