One of the key strategies an effective SEO specialist should be employing for your home care agency’s website is backlink acquisition. Here’s why.
By now, most business owners are well aware of the need for effective search engine optimization strategies to stay ahead of the curve. Yet these strategies are fluid and dynamic, and unless you’re fully trained, skilled, and committed to ongoing monitoring of the latest trends and recommendations, it’s still easy to fall behind. With the increasing demand for in-home care services, what home care agency owner has the time needed to invest in becoming a search engine optimization expert?
An organization that utilizes a wide range of digital marketing tools and understands the intricacies of each will see far better SEO results than an organization that simply dabbles off and on in SEO. For best results, delegate search engine optimization to an industry-specific expert with proven results, who understands the many intricacies and strategies to use.
One of the key strategies an effective SEO specialist should be employing for your home care agency’s website is backlink acquisition. Here’s why.
Note: A backlink is when one website links to another (also considered an incoming hyperlink). This can be to a particular page or resource and benefits SEO by building authority and increasing how a site ranks on search engines.
What Is So Important About Backlinks?
Backlinks are vitally important for SEO because search engines (Google in particular) give more credit to websites that have a high number of high quality backlinks. Those websites are considered to be more relevant because other relevant and respected websites are linking back to them. It’s Google’s version of a popularity contest.
Basically, the more high-quality backlinks that point to your agency’s site, the higher your site (specifically, the pages that are being linked to) will rank in search engine results.
There are a number of SEO studies that will tell you that backlinks actually correlate with SERP (search engine result page) rankings more than any other factor. In Google’s eyes, backlinks are a signal that a certain website trusts your agency’s site enough to link back to you. The more “trust” other websites show in you, the more the search engine sees your website as a credible source of information.
Is Quality Important When It Comes to Backlinks?
Yes, yes, yes! When search engines are trying to determine how relevant a website is, the quality of the backlinks that are pointing to your site is a big part of that calculation – it’s a quality over quantity approach.
When considering a potential backlink for your website, quality can be evaluated in a couple of different ways.
First and foremost, you should determine whether or not a website has content that is related to your site. Google obviously considers backlinks between related websites to be more relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality. Some examples of relevant websites you would want to establish backlinks with include:
Be aware as well that there are some resources that may initially appear to be relevant but are not, such as handyman or home maintenance services or companies.
Second, you should take a look at the website’s domain authority. In the simplest terms, domain authority tells you how likely a website is to appear in a Google SERP. It is a comparative metric as opposed to an absolute metric, and it’s important to note that it is not a Google ranking factor. In the context of this discussion, it’s simply a useful way to measure the quality of a potential backlink.
What Exactly Are the Benefits of Including Backlinks in a Home Care Agency’s SEO Strategy?
Backlinks do several things for a home care agency’s website including:
There are good and bad ways to acquire backlinks. Years ago, it was not uncommon to see websites acquiring as many backlinks as possible in as little time as possible (a quantity over quality approach). This was quite effective for driving up the total number of backlinks associated with a particular website. However, Google caught on to these practices and has actually implemented rules against doing this and will penalize anyone exploiting backlink acquisition in this way.
Instead, current best practice is what is called “white hat” link acquisition. It’s intensive and takes quite a bit of time, but the results are worth it. Below are some common white hat link acquisition strategies:
Compare these tips against your SEO reports to ensure these tactics are included in your SEO specialist’s efforts. If you don’t currently have an SEO specialist performing ongoing optimization work on your website, it’s high time to find one! Again, we can’t stress enough the importance of choosing someone who understands the home care industry and has specific experience and expertise in that niche.
