You will have heard about “backlinks” if you have ever read anything about search engine optimization (SEO). For dentists who are new to SEO, you might be wondering what a backlink is and why they are relevant to your dental website.
The SEO landscape is constantly evolving, and today, building high-quality links continues to form an important part of any local SEO campaign. In this article, we will explain why backlinks are important for your dental website.
What are backlinks?
When another website links to your dental website, they are giving you a backlink. For a long time, backlinks were the most important factor in a website’s ranking. On all the key search engines, including Google, a page with many quality backlinks tended to rank higher. Although there are now many other factors to consider, backlinks continue to command a high value in SEO.
How can quality backlinks help my dental website?
1. They help your website be discovered by search engines
Search engine bots are use a backlink from existing web pages to find new web pages. This is called ‘crawling’, and they can only crawl your site efficiently when they have discovered your site. If you don’t have any backlinks, finding your site will be harder for search engine bots. Particularly for a new site, backlinks are important as they help to find and index your site more quickly.
2. Once discovered, backlinks help your website rank
Search engines must decide whether they feel that a page is of sufficient quality in order to rank well. When determining on the quality of this page, not only do the search engines examine the number of links from external sites to the page and the quality of those external websites. They also examine the content itself. In general, the higher the quality of the websites that link with you, the more likely your dental website will rank well.
3. They drive referral traffic
Backlinks help to increase the number of unique visitors to your website. Someone who that reads a post may click on the links in the post for further reading. Because people willingly click on your website voluntarily, they are usually more willing to stay on your site. This means those who are interested in the piece of content which is linking to your dental website is more likely to stick around and perhaps even explore other areas of your website.
Quality over quantity
When search engines measure the significance of a site to a keyword, they consider the amount of quality backlinks to the site. So we shouldn’t be happy with just having as many backlinks as possible. Rather, it’s the quality of the backlink that counts. The focus on quality is growing as search engine algorithms become increasingly advanced at filtering out low-quality links.
But what is meant by a quality link? Google places particular significance on the notion of E-A-T — an acronym for expert, authoritative and trustworthy. Ideally, websites that link to your content should have those characteristics.
Search engines examine the content of the linking pages to determine the quality of the link itself. When external links to your site originate from other locations and those sites have material linked to your site, these inbound links are regarded to be more useful for your site. If inbound links are discovered on locations with unrelated material, they are regarded to be less important. The more relevant backlinks are, they higher quality they are perceived to be.
For example, a website about beagle dogs probably has no business linking to your dental website. Since cute dogs are hardly relevant to human dental care, search engines probably wouldn’t consider the link to be very high quality.
The need for a link to be from an expert, authoritative and trustworthy source is becoming increasingly important as search engines continue to emphasize the importance of satisfying a search engine user’s intent.
Dr. Websites
Developing quality links is a time intensive process. If you feel like you could use some help, talk to us! We’re experts in link-building for local businesses such as your dental practice. Contact us today for a consultation.