Why traffic should be the focus of your business, not building backlinks

I want to talk about backlinks this week. I’ve been interacting with more SEO professionals lately, and I’ve realised there are still a number of people who put a lot of value in backlinks. They’re talking about how to get backlinks, their relative value, and the way they can help in digital marketing.

The point I want to make is that it’s really not that important to get those backlinks.

Backlinks are to SEO what applause is to the theatre; it’s a result, not a cause. Yes, we used to build backlinks back in the day, but it’s counterintuitive now. What you should be concentrating on is building your brand and improving your user experience. This benefits your entire business.

When you’re building backlinks, you’re only focused on the backlinks, right? It doesn’t affect any other part of your business except if it’s done wrong, and then you can suffer a penalty, lose your rankings, and lose business because of it. But if you focus on building your brand, building your end-user experience, and doing good technical SEO, you’re going to make Google happier and rise in the rankings because of it.

You can see the results of that in the work we’ve done with Skinnymixers. She’s continuing to grow, and all the backlinks are organic: links from Pinterest, other bloggers, and people just talking about her site. She doesn’t have a huge budget; she’s doing all of this from home. It’s all about the work you put in, not the funding.

So when people talk about backlinks, my answer is that backlinks are the history of Google. Today you need to focus on delivering traffic, and that means improving your user experience.

This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au.

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