Ultimately, the hardest part of SEO for most small businesses is building links and authority. Keyword research, on-page optimization, local SEO – it's all doable and to Phone Number List some degree mechanical. But raising your authority? Not really. While the importance of links is clear, Google's messaging is confusing and unnecessary. We are told to “make sure other sites link to yours” while “avoiding link building as it can do more harm than good”. So what should a small business do? In this article, I'll take a quick look at why links influence results, then outline Phone Number List a simple link building strategy. The goal is to help small businesses build authority and target business search terms that matter to them. There is still a creative element required here, but my goal is to
Provide a simple strategy that small businesses can use to build authority and improve their overall visibility on organic search. How important are links in 2017? In the most recent search engine ranking factors released by Moz.com, domain-level link features and Phone Number List page-level link features are still the top two ranking factors. The keywords and content factors aren't far behind, but things that are directly under the site owner's control are much easier to call. There are a few other factors to consider for local businesses that generally fall under the Phone Number List local SEO banner. Address, citations, NAP consistency, Google My Business and reviews all factors. However, in Ranking Factors study, links are still the second most important factor after on-page signals, yet they are considerably harder to influence.
Both of these studies were published in 2015, but things aren't moving so fast and new signals tend to have a softer influence. Much more recently, Google's Andrey Lipases Phone Number List revealed that links, content, and Rank rain are the top three ranking factors, so links are just as important in 2017 as they were in 1998, when the first prototype from Google was launched. Penalties, spam and link quality I really don't want to go too far down this rabbit (penguin) hole, but given the Phone Number List financial rewards associated with search engine visibility, it didn't take long for individuals to start trying to make a reverse-engineering PageRank.