When it comes to link building, choosing the right pages on your site to build links to in your SEO campaign is just as important as having high-quality backlinks to your site. Building links to the wrong pages of your site can result in wasted time with little to no SEO results to show for it.
Our link building experts at Ballantine have created this list of helpful link building tips, including how you can determine which pages to focus on for your link-building campaign.
Factor 1: Choosing The Right Keyword To Target
The first step is to determine which keywords you want your site to rank for. Your keyword link building campaign must be targeted at the pages built and optimized to rank for keywords that will bring meaningful traffic to your site.
Meaningful traffic is all relative to your objectives, but be sure that the keywords you are targeting are the result of proper keyword research and are being searched by your ideal site visitors.
Factor 2: Having The Right content
As stated in factor 1, the links you build must link back to the page on your site that properly targets the keyword or keywords you are trying to rank for. This means that you’ve done proper on-page optimization for this page, but also that this page will fit into the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) it’s trying to occupy.
What do we mean by fit in? Enter the keyword you’re trying to rank for on Google and look at the results. Visit a few of the pages of your potential competitors, and see what type of content they’ve created. You’ll want content similar to what’s appearing on page one of Google. This means that if the majority of pages that show up on page one for your keyword are blog posts, you’ll probably want to build links to a blog post optimized for your keyword, and attempting to rank something like your homepage by building links to it for that keyword would probably be a waste of effort.
There’s no hard and fast rule on this; many SERPs are mixed with blog posts, home pages and service pages. In that case, you can focus links towards whatever page you’ve optimized to rank for this keyword. A good rule to follow is that if you don’t see one page of a similar format to your own on page one of Google, then it probably isn’t a good idea to build links to that page, for that keyword. If you don’t have content of a similar format to what’s on page one, we recommend creating it.
Factor 3: Keyword Difficulty
Building links to a page for a keyword that’s too competitive to rank will turn out to be a serious waste of effort and should not be a part of your link building strategies. You have to make sure that the page you’re building links to is actually capable of ranking for the keyword you’re after. This is determined by the number of links it will take, along with the page and domain authority of your potential competitors.
Luckily, there’s a completely free, and quick way to see if you can rank on page one for a desired keyword. All it takes is downloading the Mozbar, and creating a Moz account, which are both free.
Once MozBar is installed, open up two tabs, one with Google, and another with the page you want to start building links to.
In Google, enter your target keyword. With MozBar installed, under each search result, you should see this data.
Now, you should see the same data at the top of your own page:
What you’re looking for is at least one page, ideally more, that has an equal, lower or just slightly higher Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) metric than yours. This means that you can rank on page one for your desired keyword with enough high quality links.
If you’re looking at building links, building them to the right page is crucial, and we hope this guide was able to show you how it’s done.
Contact Ballantine for High-Quality Link Building
If your company is looking for more SEO (search engine optimization) help, reach out to the experts at Ballantine. With proven SEO campaign and content marketing experience, we can help increase your website rank and overall digital presence. Learn more about the benefits of link building by contacting us!
I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
