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June 20, 2023

What You Should Know About SEO Link Building & Content Syndication

With organic search driving 53% of all web traffic, it’s no wonder digital marketers continue to invest heavily in bespoke SEO campaigns.

Despite all the hubbub about AI and the impending shift in how we search—or, more fundamentally, how we use the internet—SEO is very much not dead. In fact, it’s more valuable than ever.

Correctly implementing the technical aspects of SEO and publishing high-quality content that follows Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines are crucial to your success. However, achieving true search engine dominance requires going further. With SERPs becoming increasingly more dynamic and crowded, on-page SEO on its own might not be enough to outrank your competitors.

To stand head and shoulders above your competition, you’ll need to pursue off-page efforts that enhance your brand’s visibility, build authority, and push your most valuable pages to the top of search rankings.

The key lies in establishing a robust backlink profile, and content syndication remains one of the best link building strategies to achieve this goal. The good news is you no longer need to grind away days at a time firing off emails and hoping for a 1-in-10 response rate from publishers.

To help you get started with organic link building via content syndication, we’ll walk you through the particulars of each process, how they relate to one another, and what they mean for the ROI of SEO.

What Is Link Building and Why Does It Matter?

Put simply, link building is the process of getting other sites to link to yours. This can organically happen in a variety of ways, but typically it will be in the form of a reference.

For example, if you publish a detailed, helpful blog post on summer skincare techniques for people with oily skin, beauty sites may share your insights on their pages, linking to your site for reference.

Besides feeling important, what’s the value in another site linking back to yours?

In a word: Authority.

As crawlers evaluate and index your pages, Google uses a variety of signals to determine which SERPs your pages belong on and how highly they should rank. Google’E-E-A-T guidelines tell us with a fair degree of precision what content needs to do in order to enjoy optimum organic visibility, and the “A” stands for “authority.”

When other websites—especially relevant sites or those in the same niche as yours—link back to your content as a go-to source for reliable, accurate information, Google recognizes this as a sign that these sites see yours as dependable and trustworthy.

By linking to your pages, these other sites pass what’s known as link equity to yours, enhancing your authority in the eyes of Google and demonstrating that your page deserves to rank higher.

In making this determination for a given page on your site, Google looks at all the links pointing to that page—known as your backlink profile—and considers the quality of those links.

Link Quality vs. Link Quantity

Generally, the more links to your content, the better, but this is not a universal truth. You’ve probably heard the quote, “Quantity has a quality all its own,” but Google disagrees.

Any inbound links that fall into the category of black hat SEO, such as links from spammy sites, low-quality directories, or paid links, will do far more harm than good.

The idea that a high enough number of links, even if they’re questionable or of poor quality, will benefit your site is one of the top debunked SEO myths.

Bottom line: 10 high-quality links will always outweigh 100 spammy links. Quality links will inspire Google to reward your site with better visibility, which leads to higher CTRs and more conversions. It’s a widespread practice that digital marketers have employed for quite some time, but there are many ways to go about link building.

How Do You Build Links?

Once upon a time, we’d send email after email asking webmasters of relevant sites to check out our pages and consider linking to them. But the internet has evolved, and far more efficient link building services are now easily accessible.

Content syndication is among the most effective and enduring ways to establish building link relationships—even in the face of constant search engine algorithm changes and Google’s cornerstone Helpful Content Update.

Although blogger outreach can still be valuable, it takes considerable time. Content syndication shares some similarities with one key benefit: it’s less time intensive and allows you to publish your content on a larger scale.

Content Syndication’s Role in Link Building

Like it sounds, content syndication is the process of strategically distributing content for publication on other sites and platforms, including social media.

The primary value of content syndication is the use of strategic keywords as anchor text for links to your most important pages, such as revenue-driving product pages or newsletter signup pages.

Say your business sells forestry products. Effective content syndication would involve creating helpful how-to guides for acreage management, such as milling lumber or maintaining forested property, then having those pieces published on blogs and other sites geared toward the forestry industry audience.

When you mention a chainsaw or tractor in your content—two keywords you’d like to rank for—you use each keyword as anchor text to link back to your site’s product or category page.

Search engines like Google see this link, from the forestry blog to your site, as an indication that the information on your site is relevant to people using that keyword in their search queries, which lends credibility to your page and helps it rank higher over time.

Keep in mind there’s more to it than simply stuffing keywords into generic articles that don’t provide any value. The quality of the writing is still crucial, and you must write with searchers in mind—not just search engine crawlers.

Along with establishing your backlink profile, don’t discount the value in referral traffic through content syndication.

Syndicating Evergreen, 10X Content

Sure, you could create content and have it syndicated on low-volume sites. This can provide an advantage in your organic search visibility and CTRs as your page rankings improve. However, your keyword links can drive more referral traffic if you create high-quality content syndicated on popular sites that people actually visit.

Sometimes, this requires altering your content for different sites and their respective audiences. Whether this is a worthwhile investment of time and effort depends on your unique situation, but it can certainly pay dividends, especially if you create what’s known as evergreen content.

This type of content avoids being time-sensitive and instead delivers ageless advice, answers, or solutions that will prove valuable to new and returning users for the foreseeable future.

Whether you’re actively trying to maximize referral traffic or not, all content you create for syndication should be evergreen. Save your newsworthy content for your blog and social media, but keep your syndicated content focused on the future.

Can You Skip Link Building and Focus on PPC Instead?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Compare organic vs. paid search, and you’ll note some significant differences.

While you can’t substitute one for the other—at least, not if you want durable, long-term results—there are some intelligent ways to use PPC and organic SEO in tandem to achieve a sum greater than its parts.

For example, as your organic SEO efforts, such as link building and on-site optimizations, ramp up at the beginning of your search marketing campaign, you could use PPC to gain immediate visibility and garner site traffic right off the bat.

While PPC can generate real value for your brand, it can be expensive in the long run, and once you stop paying for clicks, you disappear from SERPs. That’s why it’s always better to leverage the power of PPC and SEO working together. Hit the ground running and maximize your digital potential with both link building and paid ads.

Are Quality Link Building Services Expensive?

In SEO, as in life, you get what you pay for. Discount services tend to deliver discount results.

No, that doesn’t mean you need to blow up your marketing budget or pay for services you don’t need, but you’ll find that the right digital marketing agency can make all the difference when it comes to link building.

If you’re just getting your business off the ground, do a little research to determine what you should spend on SEO and link building services. In most cases, organic search marketing centered around link building should be front and center in your digital marketing strategy, but you don’t have to go it alone.

When you partner with the right agency, you can leverage the expertise of their PPC and SEO teams. The leading digital marketing agencies will take the time to learn the ins and outs of your business, where you are, where you want to go, and how quickly you want to get there.

Let VELOX Media Customize Your Link Building Strategy

As a Google Premier Partner, VELOX ranks in the top 3% of agencies worldwide for SEO and link building services. With over 15 years of experience, we know every business is different, so we tailor every SEO and PPC campaign to each client’s needs and revenue goals.

With a world-class content team and an innovative approach to content syndication, we deliver link building services that drive visibility and exceptional revenue growth.

For a winning link building and content syndication strategy, contact VELOX today and see how we can help your brand grow online.