How to Create Referral Links That Boost Your Ranking AND Drive Traffic

Are you underestimating the power of referral links for your online business?

Referral marketing can boost your SEO, drive traffic to your site, and increase conversions. That’s like a magic trifecta from one marketing program.

On top of that, customers acquired from referrals spend more and are more loyal customers than those who are acquired through other means. You have dream clients from your referral links, too.

Read more to find out more about how you can build a referral links program that allows you to maximize your online business.

What Are Referral Links?

Referral links are also called backlinks or inbound links. They are links that are on other websites that point to pages on your site.

There can be some confusion between referral links and affiliate links. The main difference is that affiliate links are links that marketers use to link to your site. If someone signs up for your product or service, the affiliate will get a commission.

Affiliates may or may not be customers of yours. Referral links usually don’t involve financial incentives. People are willing to link to your site if they tried your product or service and really believe that it’s an excellent offering.

Another example is if you have a blog post that you have on your site that others found to be very useful. People will link to content that they think is outstanding.

Why Are They So Important?

Your website can be categorized into two parts. On-site and off-site. On-site is everything on your website that you can control. You can control the user experience, site speed, and overall design of your website.

Off-site is everything that happens away from your site. Referral links have the biggest impact of off-site because they impact SEO, traffic, and conversions. Let’s take a look at each part.

SEO

Search engines look at over 200 factors when determining search results. Keywords, your business location relative to the person searching, and site security are just a few factors.

If two sites are all but equal, referral links are seen as a vote. The more high-quality votes you have, the more likely you are to rank higher in search engines.

Traffic

The more people that link to your content the more traffic you’ll get. The caveat here is that you need to make sure that you have sites that have a significant amount of traffic linking to your site in order to reap the benefits of referral traffic.

Conversions

Does referral traffic really help with conversions? Yes, it does. The reason why can be said in one word: trust.

When someone is reading content from a site they trust that links to your content, that level of trust is carried over to your site. You already did the hard part and automatically created trust online.

The higher the trust level, the more likely they are to make a purchase.

How to Boost Referral Links?

Now that you know why referral links are so important to your site’s success, how can you get more sites to link to you? Follow these steps below to get more links to your site.

Decide Which Pages are the Most Important

In an ideal world, you’d get a ton of traffic to every page of your site. We’re not in a perfect world, so you have to pick and choose your battles here.

There’s a good chance that there are some pages or keywords that you want to rank for. You really want to focus on those pages and keywords to start with and then expand your efforts.

For example, there might be an in-depth article about your service that you can easily get others to link to. Start with 2-3 of your important pages that you want to link to.

You want to make sure that the pages provide a lot of value. The most appropriate pages would be blog posts or landing pages. A standard home page or a product page isn’t compelling enough to start with. As you build your online reputation, you can focus on those pages.

Create a Targeted Strategy for Those Pages

Once you have those pages set, you can start to create a targeted strategy for those pages. You’ll want to set goals for your site in terms of traffic and the

One of the biggest mistakes that webmasters will make is that they focus too much on the number of referral links and not enough on the quality of links to your site.

You need to make sure that you focus on the quality of links. You can have a hundred links to your site, but if they’re spammy or low quality, you could hurt your site in the long run. Google penalizes sites that have a lot of low-quality links to their site.

Leverage Your Audience

Are there influencers in your circle who already love your business? They already have a wide reach and they love what you do. Ask them to link to one of your pages.

Target Relevant Sites

If you want to rank for very specific keywords, you can do a search for those terms. Make a note of the top results that appear. This is your competition.

You’re going to use a tool like SEM Rush to get the backlink profile of the sites that link to that page. You can then reach out to those sites and ask them to link to your content or if you can write a guest post for those sites.

Referral Links Can Build Your Business

Referral links play a huge role in driving traffic and sales to your site. They can impact your site’s SEO, the quality of traffic and conversions.

As you start to build your referral links profile, remember that the best referral links strategies focus on a few pages and are highly focused on quality.

Would you like to learn more about SEO to get quality traffic to your site? Check out this article for tips to find out if your SEO strategy is working.