We’ve talked a lot about the incredible power-up that links can provide to your website and its rankings.
But what we often don’t talk about is how to get your website ready for a link building campaign in the first place.
While your links are important, what’s just as important is the website they lead to. If you’re investing in and launching a link building strategy, you need to ensure your site is set up to reap the rewards of your efforts.
Here, I look at some key website elements that you should get right before you start winning those links.
How does my website affect my chances of securing links?
Your website’s quality and structure directly impact your chances of link building success. High-quality, relevant, and engaging content — whether it’s a resource page packed with interesting blog posts or simply a well-designed landing page — increases the likelihood of inbound links.
Think of your website as a product: if it’s built well, is appealing, and perhaps most importantly of all, is useful to its audience, people will naturally be inclined to endorse it.
On the other hand, a poorly designed or outdated website with irrelevant content isn’t likely to attract much attention.
Crucially, it’s about striking a balance, and your site’s linkability is determined by a myriad of factors, which we’ll go into below.
When is my site ready for link building?
Valuable links aren’t gained by accident. Well okay, sometimes they are — but relying on pure luck isn’t the most viable of link building strategies. Climbing the search rankings requires a methodical approach, and preparing your site is one of the most important steps on the journey.
But how do you know when your site’s primed for link building? Unfortunately, like so many SEO-related questions, it’s like asking “how long is a piece of string” Truthfully, there’s no definitive answer.
However, by actioning some of the tips we’re about to detail, your site should be in a good position to start building links to.
How do I prepare my site for link building?
There are lots of steps you can take to prep your website for search engine supremacy. Whether you’re in the run-up to launching multiple link building outreach campaigns, or you’re simply sipping your toes into the world of guest posts and social media marketing.
Find some of our favourite strategies below.
Integrate CRO into your link building strategy
Link building drives more traffic to your website. Put simply, the more links you have, the higher you will rank in search engine results pages (SERPs), which in turn leads to more traffic for your website.
Obviously it’s a lot more complicated than this in practice, but a boost in ranking from links should result in more traffic for your site.
But if your website isn’t set up in such a way to welcome those visitors (and, crucially, keep them onsite and converting), then it’s a wasted effort.
Sometimes SEOs get caught up in reporting rankings, traffic, and domain metrics. And while these elements all have their own value and are a signal of good progress for your site, as SEOs, we shouldn’t ignore the key metric we are brought in to improve (and the only one clients are often interested in): organic conversions.
This is the money-maker. As much progress as it might indicate, the number of visitors to your website is rarely indicative of business ROI.
Whether it’s sales, sign-ups, or downloads, you need to make sure your website already delivers a strong conversion rate with your existing traffic before you start building links. There’s nothing more frustrating than building links, climbing the SERPs, seeing an increase in traffic, only to fall at the last hurdle because your website is difficult to navigate.
Enter conversion rate optimisation (CRO).
For those not in the know, conversion rate optimisation involves tweaking your website in order to increase the chances of any visitors making a desired action—in short, converting.
While they’re often talked about as separate processes, CRO and SEO go hand-in-hand, as many technical onsite SEO improvements are likely to improve your CRO at the same time.
CRO is an ongoing process, and should be something you continue to invest in and improve long after your link building campaigns launch. However, these initial tips will help you ensure you are link building to a website that allows people to achieve their goals:
- Audit your site’s key ‘money pages’: look at the engagement metrics for those pages and spot some patterns. Once you’ve found some pages you believe are underperforming, consider using a heat map tool such as Hotjar to see how users are interacting with the page, and identify their blockers to resolve.
- Conduct a blind test: if you have a relatively new website with little traffic data, get some colleagues to give it a blind test by navigating it, having them note down anything that irritates them. This will give you a great starting point for what you tweak, amend, and include.
- Give your website a good technical health check: crawling your site can highlight critical issues that make it difficult for your users, such as broken internal links or redirect chains.
- Lean on A/B testing for data-backed fixes: if you’ve got a bigger site with a more established user base that provides sufficient data, use a formal A/B testing tool that lets you move your on-page elements around to see what works best for your users.
These are just a few tips to get you started. CRO requires constant work, so make a CRO audit a regular part of your website strategy. For more tips on driving conversion, check out our marketing funnel masterclass.
Don’t ignore indexation factors
You need to be certain that your website is actually in a position to be crawled, understood and appropriately indexed by Google.
If you’re already getting some organic traffic, that’s obviously a great signal.
But there are so many seemingly invisible issues that could be hindering how your site performs. Plus, once you build links, you might find yourself competing with other, better sites, often with more authority and a slicker technical set-up.
That’s why indexation is so important at this stage.
Indexation optimises how your website is crawled, ensuring it is as easy as possible for Google’s bots to index your site from top to bottom.
Here are a few things you need to get right:
- Review your use of noindex and robots.txt directives: this ensures nothing you want to rank is being ignored or deliberately blocked (and therefore not able to rank in search results).
- Embrace Google Search Console (GSC) functions: GSC provides a wealth of information and insight into how Google reads your site, the pages it finds, and the problems it faces. Review your coverage report and look for errors and warnings—and pay attention to what has been excluded too.
- Clean up your duplicate content: ensure that any duplicate content you have is managed with canonical tags and hreflang tags (if your business extends across different countries). Take this one step further and review the excluded pages in your GSC coverage report to see if there are any instances where Google has chosen an alternative canonical tag to you.
- Get your sitemap on-point: make sure your sitemap contains only pages that return a 200 status, and are not orphaned.
Spend some time getting your indexation right—it goes a long way towards creating a link building-friendly website.
Improve your website’s UX
There’s no use driving traffic to a poorly-designed, unoptimised website. In fact, UX and SEO go hand in hand, so enhance your site’s user experience (UX) by following some of the steps below:
Ensure fast load times
Slow-loading websites frustrate users and can significantly increase bounce rates. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights are your friends in this regard 0 use them to assess your site’s speed and identify areas for improvement. Optimising images, leveraging browser caching, and minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML can make a big difference.
Optimise for mobile
With such a large chunk of web traffic coming from mobile devices (62%), ensuring your website is fully responsive is non-negotiable. Test your site on various devices and screen sizes to guarantee a smooth experience. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can help you spot and fix issues.
Simplify navigation
A well-structured, intuitive navigation system helps users find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Use clear labels for menus, keep the number of menu items manageable, and ensure that your important pages are accessible within a few clicks.
Enhance readability
While your content should be engaging, it also needs to be easy to read and digest. Use a legible font size and type, break up text with headings, bullet points, and images, and ensure sufficient contrast between text and background. If you can say something in fewer words, make sure you do. This not only improves user experience but also makes your content more shareable and link-worthy.
Regularly update and maintain your site
Keep your website fresh and up-to-date by regularly adding new content and features. Fix broken links, update outdated information, and continually test your site’s functionality to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Ensure your site’s content is top-notch
Fresh, quality onsite content is essential before you start building links, benefiting both your users and the bots.
During link building, you are offering a value proposition—you’re convincing a website owner that your site is worth linking to. If your website and the content it hosts are good quality and trustworthy, it’ll make your link building efforts run a lot smoother.
Your prospects will actively look at your website content. If it isn’t up to scratch, you might find yourself on the receiving end of lots of rejections.
And it’s not just your prospects that are checking out your content—Google’s bots are pretty discerning too.
A lot has changed in the SEO landscape over the past ten years, but one core element remains steadfast: Googlebot needs written, crawlable content on a page to be able to have even the foggiest idea of what it’s all about.
As such, link building to thin pages with next-to-no crawlable words on the page isn’t the best use of your time or effort.
When it comes to content and quality, there are a few questions you need to ask:
- Does your content contain at least 200-300 words of written copy? This is especially important for ecommerce sites, where written copy can often be overlooked as something that isn’t essential, and often interferes with the look and feel of the site.
- Have you conducted sufficient keyword research? Solid keyword research helps guide your content, making sure you’re effectively targeting the right keywords and the right topics for your users.
- Does your website provide adequate trust signals? Both bots and humans want to know your website is trustworthy and authoritative, so take steps to build up those E-A-T signals.
- Does your website and its content have a clear purpose? If your site doesn’t know what it’s about, neither will your users or the bots. Make sure your focus is clear across your site.
- Is your content easy to read and understand? Accessible content is content that gets engaged with, so opt for short sentences, simple words, one- or two-line paragraphs, and so on.
Don’t neglect your content! Give it purpose, accessibility, and lots of trust signals, and your website is on the way to engage your new organic traffic.
Optimise page experience
Of course, no article about SEO is complete unless it mentions Core Web Vitals. Since their introduction in 2021, these metrics have continued to be crucial in shaping both search engine rankings and user experiences.
These include:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long it takes for your page’s largest content element to load. The quicker the load time, the happier the bots (and your users) will be—aim for at least 2.5 seconds or less.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This refers to the amount of unexpected shift that your website’s visual content has. Ideally, this is less than 0.1, but the smaller, the better.
First Input Delay (FID): This is the time it takes for a page to become interactive for the user. Shoot for 100ms or less.
Since their rollout, Google has continued to refine and update these metrics. Notably, the introduction of Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a potential replacement for FID measures the total responsiveness of a page by considering all interactions during a user’s visit. This underscores the importance of a consistently smooth experience.
These elements are essential for creating a positive page experience for both the bots and your users. Focus your efforts on these, and you’ll build a website that’ll keep visitors hooked and search engines satisfied.
The next step: building your backlink profile
So you’ve prepped your website and you’re ready to start building its backlink profile — where do you start?
Here at Seeker we’re experts at link building. It’s a topic we’ve covered plenty of times before (check out this excellent guide to ecommerce link building, for example), but as a little extra bonus, we’ll wrap things up by outlining a few of the most straightforward ways you can give your site a fighting chance in the SERPs.
Guest posting — yes, it still works!
Despite what plenty of naysayers might say about guest posting is still one of the most potent ways to build backlinks, provided you stick to the following rules:
1: Try to avoid paying for links. Sites that charge for guest post submissions will usually accept any old rubbish, and it’s considered bad practice to harbour links from spam-laden domains. The most reputable websites usually won’t expect a penny. Instead of flashing your cash, you’ll need to impress them with your creativity, knowledge, and authority. It’s hard work, but it’s well worth the effort!
2: Create value-driven content. Your blog posts should offer real value to your audience. Since the advent of ChatGPT the web has become clogged with second rate cut’n’paste genero-posts. Buck the trend and be the change we all want to see.
3: Each site will have its own set of guidelines for guest posts. Adhering to these is crucial. Follow them to the letter, from formatting preferences to submission rules, make sure every I is dotted and every T is crossed!
Get social with influencer partnerships
Whether it’s co-authored content, interviews, or product reviews, influencer collaborations can result in high-quality backlinks and increased exposure. You might be surprised at the number of influencers that’ll be happy to partner up in return for a few freebies, but be aware that most high-profile personalities will be managed by an external agency. In those situations monetary compensation will be expected.
Harness broken link building
Broken link building is a win-win strategy. The strategy is simple: find broken links on other websites and suggest your content as a replacement. This not only helps the site owner fix an issue but also provides you with a valuable backlink. Use Ahrefs (other tools are available!) to identify broken links on relevant sites, then send a friendly email with an eye-catching subject line offering your content as a suitable replacement.
Make use of outreach tools
Outreach is a game of numbers — speed things up by using some of the tools below. They’re tried and tested by our team and come highly recommended!
BuzzStream: This tool helps manage your outreach campaigns, from researching influencers and websites to tracking your email conversations. BuzzStream’s features allow you to organize contacts, automate follow-ups, and measure your campaign success, making it an invaluable asset for link building.
Hunter.io: Finding the right contact information is crucial for successful outreach. Hunter.io allows you to quickly find email addresses associated with any domain. With its Chrome extension, you can gather contact details directly from websites and LinkedIn profiles, ensuring you reach the right person with your pitch.
Pitchbox: Pitchbox automates the prospecting process, helping you find potential link opportunities based on your criteria. With it, you can create personalized email templates, schedule follow-ups, send outreach emails in categorised batches, and track your outreach performance all in one place.
There you have it! Five elements you need to consider when creating a website that’s ready for link building. Your site is an important part of your link building strategy, so it’s essential that you spend time getting it right to get the most out of your efforts.
Want to start link building but your website isn’t up to scratch? We’ve got you covered—drop us a line today and get your website on-point and ready for the link building process.
