.png){kind=small}
Struggling to compete with the industry giants? This is one of the biggest issues that small businesses face, especially in hyper-competitive online marketplaces. It is hard to stand out and attract your target market when competing against much larger companies with the resources, credibility, and brand awareness to dominate. While it will always be harder for smaller companies to compete online, you should know that there are a handful of smart link-building tactics for small businesses that will help improve your online presence. In turn, this will increase organic traffic to your website, improve brand awareness, and boost your reputation so that you can compete at a higher level.
Form Local Partnerships
When you are competing with the industry giants, you need to make use of local partnerships to get your name out there. Collaborating with other small businesses (not direct competitors), charities, website publishers, and influencers in your sector can help you get your name out there and generate mutually beneficial backlink opportunities. As an example, a digital marketing agency in London might partner with a web design company and exchange backlinks to boost one another’s online presence. When small organisations work together, they can compete with the industry giants.
Use Guest Blogging
These days, one of the best ways to strengthen your backlink profile is guest blogging. Identify the popular, credible, and relevant blogs in your niche and perform outreach so that you can create high-quality content for these blogs containing a link back to your own website. The key here is creating content that the target audience of the blog will want to read, so you want to have a strong understanding of the target market and the topics that they will want to read about.
Create Valuable Content
Leading on from this, valuable content will always attract backlinks and improve your visibility online. Therefore, instead of pumping out low-quality, AI-generated content, you should focus on creating content that your target audience will find interesting, valuable, and/or entertaining. This can include:
- Comprehensive guides
- Case studies
- Infographics
- Research papers
- Interviews
- Data
Make Use Of Online Directories
Online directories can be valuable resources in terms of link-building, but they are often overlooked. By submitting your information and a link to your website at local and industry online directories, you can earn backlinks from authoritative sources - this can make a big difference to your backlink profile and will boost your ranking.
Engage In Online Communities
Google is increasingly favouring online communities like Reddit and Quora. Therefore, it is smart to engage in these online communities and share links to your website - just make sure that you are not spamming these communities by providing useful and engaging information, such as your industry expertise.
Utilise Broken Link Building
Another effective link-building strategy that is often overlooked is broken link-building. Essentially, this involves finding broken links on relevant websites and offering your own link as a replacement. This is mutually beneficial as you are helping to tidy up the publisher’s website while also boosting your backlink profile. Don't worry - you do not need to spend hours on end testing every link as there are handy tools you can use to find broken links.
Niche Edits
Niche edits are a great way to boost your backlink profile without the need to create fresh content. Essentially, this is a link-building practice that involves strategically placing links into preexisting content published on credible and relevant websites. This allows you to leverage established content that has already been indexed by Google to enhance your own domain authority and increase credibility.
Use The Services Of A Digital Marketing Agency
It is always going to be challenging for a small business to compete with the industry giants. The industry leaders will have the resources to dominate online, so it requires a lot of work and expertise to compete. Therefore, one of the best solutions is to use the services of a trusted London digital marketing agency. An experienced digital marketing agency in London will be able to utilise the best and latest link-building strategies to improve your presence online and increase organic traffic to your website. In turn, this will help your business achieve higher levels of success while competing with the industry leaders. Hiring the services of a marketing agency in London is also smart because it can free up time and energy for you and your team to focus on other areas.
How To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Link-Building Efforts
The above are all strategies that can be highly effective and should help you compete at a much higher level. However, it is important that you are able to measure the effectiveness of your link-building efforts so that you can identify the strategies that are working and those that require fine-tuning. The key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor include:
Referral traffic: The amount of traffic coming from backlinks.
Search engine ranking: Record the changes in your search engine ranking for targeted keywords (keep in mind that it can take a few months for results to begin to show).
Domain authority (DA): Monitor changes to your site’s DA with the use of tools like Moz.
Backlink record: Record the quantity and quality of backlinks earned from your efforts (and remove low-quality, spammy links).
It is frustrating as a small business when you have to compete against the industry giants. The larger companies dominate online, but there are strategies you can use to enhance your visibility and compete at a higher level. The link-building strategies outlined in this post are well-suited to small businesses looking to create a stronger presence online. By combining these strategies together, you can build a strong backlink profile that will help you stand out from the crowd and engage your target audience online. This should help you compete with the industry leaders while also driving new levels of success for your business.
Comments