Link Building on a Budget: You’re Not Screwed

Link building is one of those SEO tasks that tends to get sidelined when working on a tight budget. Though I see bigger companies with bigger budgets making this mistake as well, inadvertently opting out of some very obvious–and easy–visibility opportunities with their off page SEO. It’s totally unnecessary too, because link building doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. In fact, for businesses on a budget–and especially ones with a geographic focus–it can be downright simple. That’s why I loved a recent Q&A piece from the Queen of SEO herself, Jill Whalen.

Jill removes the smoke ‘n mirrors element from SEO, boiling it down to the basics every time. She may get websites to page one in Google, but as she’s about to demonstrate, there is no magic wand. In fact, link building on a budget often takes no more than a little “creative common sense.”

Check out this “Inbound Links Q&A” with Jill Whalen:

Jill,

Inbound, good-quality links are a struggle for me. I can sort though all sorts of tech stuff resulting in a good-looking, professional website, but link building is a real challenge.

Partly it’s a challenge because of tiny budgets, but also because of some lack of experience in doing this, especially with brick-and-mortar businesses that don’t have much going on. They might be a member of a Chamber of Commerce, probably no other professional organizations, certainly not in the news, don’t have much to say other than the fact that they do a job. They’re not social bees, as neither am I…so I can empathize. Coming up with 5 pages is a challenge in itself.

Do you have any suggestions, anything you can point me to?

Bob

Jill’s Response

Hi Bob, I definitely feel your pain! Unfortunately, today, in order to be successful for mildly competitive keyword phrases, you do have to have something on your website that goes beyond your products and services. Many small businesses are not willing or able to do that.

If they’re not, then they should still be able to do okay with the not-so-very-competitive keyword phrases. You really only need a handful of links to show up in a local market for those types of phrases. Getting them into all the directories available should take care of that.

But if they want to take things to the next level or if they’re in a competitive industry, they’ll probably need more than that. In which case, they’ll need to have a blog or a resource section, free white papers, videos, or anything else on their site that gives others in their industry a reason to link to them.

It shouldn’t cost that much to have an intern or someone aggregate industry news and post a few thoughts about the interesting stuff on a blog each week. Those types of posts can also link out to the other bloggers in the field and create relationships whereby they may link back to your site as well.

If you’re really stuck for ideas, we’re offering a new “Link-Building Roadmap” service where we do the research and provide a boatload of places that would be a good fit to link to sites in your specific niche.

Of course, as previously mentioned, you do need something worth linking to for this information to be worthwhile. Hope this helps!

Jill

Nuthin’ to it eh? No shortcuts. No magic. Just some leg work (okay and maybe a little hard work). Give your market useful information. Help them find you in the obvious places. Improve your SEO.

So what do you think? Are you going be more proactive with your own link building efforts? What’s stopping you if not? Leave a comment below.

Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings a Boston SEO Consulting Agency, has been providing SEO services since 1995. Jill is also the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.