3 Simple Link-Building Tactics for Better Franchise Marketing
Today’s post is all about link building as it pertains to your overall franchise marketing strategy. Read on to learn why we build links, how it benefits your business, and 3 tips you can use for better franchise marketing.
What is link building?
Whether you’re a business owner trying to market your products and services to a bigger audience or a franchisor trying to find qualified franchisees, link building is crucial for the success of your online campaign.
But what is link building, exactly?
Stripped down to its barebones, link building refers to the process of acquiring hyperlinks from different websites. Every time you convince another website to post a link to your site, you’ve successfully built a link. There’s more to it – the quality and trustworthiness of your reference is very important, for example – but this is a good starting point for now.
OK, but how does link building factor into franchise marketing?
Employing link building strategies helps your branding, lead generation, and anything else that’d get a boost from having greater online visibility.
For starters, building links to your website gives organic users more opportunities to connect with your brand. For example, acquiring a link for your senior care franchise website in a community blog would encourage their reader base to take a look. In this way, link building is essentially a free form of online advertising that targets anybody who visits the host’s website.
More importantly, link building helps Google’s crawl bots find your site, and signals to them that it is safe, high-quality, and deserving of a high ranking in the search listings.
Though Google’s exact ranking algorithm remains a secret, experts agree that if all other factors are equal, websites with a higher quality and quantity of links will rank higher. If your franchise marketing campaign is neck-and-neck with a local competitor, tweaking your link-building could be all you need to claim the number-one spot.
3 Link-Building Strategies for Better Franchise Marketing
- Use the nofollow attribute to filter out low-quality links. Building a high volume of links is great, but quality links are what really matter. In fact, a high volume of low-quality links will could be considered a “Blackhat” (aka exploitative or underhanded) SEO strategy, which Google will penalize you for.To keep Google’s crawl bots happy with your site (and ensure you’re not unwittingly participating in some blackhat SEO tactics), make sure you use the nofollow attribute on your blog, forum, guest book, Wikipedia entry, and any other open or unregulated channels you might be using to publish content or interact with your audience. Setting the nofollow feature tells Google that you are not vouching for any links that spammers might drop there, which will keep you safe from penalties. Nofollow is now a standard feature with most WordPress themes and template sites, so there’s no reason to forget!
- Swap links with guest blogging outreach. Guest blogging involves approaching other websites in related sectors and inquiring as to whether they’ll publish a piece of your content on their blog. Though it can be tough to find appropriate sites to work with without courting the competition, this strategy is highly successful in part because it’s mutually beneficial: in exchange for a free piece of quality content, you get a backlink. Contact our content marketing team to learn more.
- Experiment with ego baiting. “Ego baiting” is a tongue-in-cheek term used to refer to the practice of publishing content which includes references to other sites, companies or people, in the hopes that those included will see it as a chance for self-promotion and their egos will move them to share the content with a link.For example, if some crafty tech company started talking about how great FranchiseSoft is for franchise marketing, staff management, and process automation, we might be more inclined to share it! A similar strategy for a kitchen renovation franchise might be to post a list of top-10 accent pieces or storage solutions with links to manufacturers in hopes that they’ll give you a backlink.
Admittedly, link-building is much bigger than this. Don’t worry – we’ve got plenty more to share. Find more free link building tips and franchise marketing strategies on our blog.
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