Many of the efforts undertaken by small business owners who take charge of their companies’ marketing campaigns have singular purposes. Traditional advertising raises brand awareness in a public that doesn’t generally use the internet. Promotional products subtly introduce consumers to a certain product or service whenever they use such items. Social media efforts ask customers to join a dialogue about how a company functions and which ways of doing business it should continue.
However, there is one act that can provide multiple types of benefits for small businesses and can be worth triple the effort that goes into it as compared to other sorts of actions. Collecting links that are shared with other companies is a great way to increase the value and utility of a company website. Here are some reasons why.
Primarily, links are excellent for working with Google’s search algorithms, reaching the top of a search results page and eventually receiving more page views and hits. This is perhaps the single most important reason to approach other organizations with the offer to share links to one another’s websites. The reason that search engines hold mutual links in such high esteem is because it shows that a web page is a very real part of an interconnected series of pages on the internet. The more that an online presence is connected to others, the more that it appears valuable to the internet as a whole.
Links also increase inbound traffic on top of what better search engine results might provide. Links from other websites are a great alternative method for customers to find their way toward a company web page. This is also a very organic way of attracting customers – the fact that they entered a website from a related page means that they have at least a minor interest in a product or service and haven’t come across an online presence purely by accident. Such customers are good to maintain strong relations with if possible.
On top of attracting customers, links provide organizations with a way to solidify relationships with business partners, collaborators and corporate peers. In the modern cutthroat economy that many small businesses find themselves challenged to succeed in, some cooperation is always welcome. Mutual links help both parties involved in the transaction and hold one another accountable for creating good online content. The more approved inbound and outbound links that a company has, the more friends in the business community it has.