Generating online visibility for your website is challenging. Getting people to click on your search results or type in your web address is even more difficult. But if you’re looking for a way to simultaneously enhance your SEO efforts and increase traffic to your company’s website, link building assets are your friend.
5 Tips for Creating Powerful Link Building Assets
A linkable asset is a piece of content that’s purposefully developed with the intention of generating visibility and attracting backlinks to your website. Linkable assets help businesses overcome the challenges of traditional link building – namely that people don’t link to commercial pages, like product and sales pages.
When you attract external backlinks, you enhance your search engine rankings, increase your chances of generating referral traffic, and build up greater brand exposure in your industry or niche. But the actual process of creating link building assets requires an investment.
For readers that are unsure of how to proceed or what qualifies as a link building asset, here are some tips and suggestions:
1. Publish Interactive and Resourceful Content
Linkable assets extend tangible value or worth. The surest way to create value is to produce a piece of content that’s interactive and resourceful.
Interactive content includes things like online tools, calculators, quizzes, surveys, and games. There’s an element of the content that asks for user input and enables manipulation or customization.
Resourceful content is also useful. Sometimes resourceful content doubles as interactive content. Other times it’s merely informational – but in a magnetic way. For example, infographics, visual maps, videos, and aesthetically pleasing graphs and charts are resourceful in a manner that’s worthy of being linked to.
2. Leverage Influencers
Every brand is limited by the size of their audience. To grow your reach, you have to expand your audience. One of the quickest ways to do this is by leveraging online influencers.
Online influencers are people who already have large audiences that are highly responsive to what they do and say. This makes them fairly easy to mobilize. By partnering with an influencer who has an audience that overlaps with your own, you may be able to generate additional traction and backlinks to your site.
3. Conduct an Interview Piece
If you’ve conducted an interview, you’re missing out on a chance to elevate your marketing efforts. Done the right way, they can be goldmines.
For starters, an interview basically creates your content for you. Your subject provides the quotes and sound bites. You simply have to organize the piece in a way that’s digestible for your audience. But the benefits extend far beyond this.
The most valuable part of an interview is that the interviewee has a vested interest in making the content visible. Both parties stand to benefit from the sharing, distribution, and promotion of the piece, so you’ll quickly double your shareability.
4. Create a Long-Form Guide
Short-form content may work on sites like Twitter and Instagram, but these are the exceptions. In terms of SEO and content marketing, long-form pieces are far more linkable.
Long-form content that’s 1,000 to 5,000-plus words in length gives you the chance to establish authority on a topic and fully convey an idea. The length alone sends an authoritative signal to your audience that you have something valuable to say. From a text perspective, the length gives you the chance to really hammer home long-tail keywords and topics that provide an SEO advantage.
5. Give Something Away
People love free. It almost doesn’t matter what it is. If someone can get something for nothing, they’re going to latch on. You can use this to your advantage by giving away free content and resources on your website.
Ebooks, video courses, exclusive content, software tools…these are all good “freebies.” If they’re appealing enough, bloggers and social media users will share these linkable assets with their followers.
Adding it All Up
Linkable assets play a catalytic role in brand awareness, website visibility, and business growth and sustainability. You won’t be able to implement every single tip discussed in this article, but try to find one or two techniques that you can sink your teeth into. Slow and steady is the best path towards digital marketing and SEO success.
Take your time and don’t deviate from the plan when challenges emerge.