Why SEO Link Building is Like Your Monthly Food Shop
It struck me recently, after spending hours and hours (maybe days or weeks) link building over the past few years, that link building is very much like your weekly shopping when you’re on a tight food budget.
Maybe this isn’t so much of an informative topic than my previous articles, and I know it sounds like an odd comparison, but let me explain.
Ok, so for your monthly shop you’re on a budget. You need to get the all the food you need on a regular basis but money is tight so you need to make your budget stretch further.
After a while, you get to learn which shops have the best prices for certain items. While Supermarket A may be cheaper for some items, Supermarket B are for others or Supermarket C has a good offer on that’s worth going for, so you split your shopping between those three stores or more to get the best overall deal and the most for your money.
Not only that but different stores have different quality items. Some aren’t worth touching and others are really good but expensive for what they are, so you also need to compromise if you’re to get the best deal and work out what is most worth your money.
The same goes for building links – not only ones that you need to pay for, ie. directory listings, guest blog posts and so on, but also for reciprocal links. Let me explain.
Site A is based loosely on your industry area, has an average home page PR and the PR of their interior pages is really weak, but one of them is closely related to your particular industry. Do you opt for relevance (more closely-related content to your industry) over quality (PR)?
Now let’s look at Site B, it’s a general directory covering all industries but has higher PR interior categories with a better PR overall, yet only really covers the umbrella terms for your particular industry.
Or maybe Site C is the better option? It’s relevant and has a higher PR but is expensive.
Now is the time to work out which option is best for what you want to achieve. Which is more worth your money? Don’t forget that you’re still on a tight budget.
Think about which approach is going to be most useful to your potential visitors, which is most likely to bring traffic to your website and which is most likely to help in the areas you want it to help. Factor in cost and quality as well as the value to both the visitors and your site.
Even when it comes to reciprocal link building, make sure that what you are giving away is closely matched to what you are offering. Just as you would with your shopping, you wouldn’t pay over the odds for a tin of beans when you know it will still only make part of one meal at the end of the day.
Have a think about how you can get the best return for what you spend on your online link building campaign, just as you would with your monthly shopping, as it can be the fine line between an average campaign on a small budget and a great campaign on a small budget.
