WHAT ARE BACKLINKS (AND WHY THEY MATTER FOR SEO)?

Wondering what backlinks are and why they’re a big deal for SEO? Backlinks act like votes of confidence from other websites, signaling to Google that your content is valuable and trustworthy. In this episode, Jesse explains what is backlinks in SEO and how they help small businesses rank higher. Quality backlinks from credible sources can boost your authority, driving more leads and visibility for your business.

How to Build High-Quality Backlinks for Local SEO

Link building is a game-changer for local SEO, and it’s simpler than you might think. Use tools like competitor analysis to identify directories such as Yelp or your local Chamber of Commerce where you can add your site with strategic anchor text for strong backlinks. Your Google Business Profile is a must-have for an authoritative link. For proactive wins, reach out to vendors, partners, or local organizations you sponsor—ask them to include your site with relevant anchor text. Quality beats quantity, so prioritize credible sources like local news or established directories that Google trusts. Even non-topical local links, like those from a community group, signal your community presence. By mastering what are backlinks and focusing on link building with authoritative tools and anchor text, you’ll boost your rankings and attract more small business customers.

Listen to this episode below;

Episode Transcript – What Are Backlinks And Why Do They Matter for SEO?

Jesse Dolan (00:19)

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Luminate Local. I’m your host Jesse Dolan. And for the last 25 years, I’ve been helping small and local businesses get found online through smart and effective SEO strategies.

If you’ve been tuning in or diving into SEO for your business lately, you’ve probably heard the word backlink tossed around quite a bit. Do you know what backlinks are? What the heck is a backlink? Why do backlinks matter? And how do you get one right for your business or for your website?

That’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode. And hopefully by the end, you’ll understand what a backlink is in plain English, how a backlink will impact your rankings in Google or other search engines. And hopefully a few ways to start building backlinks and getting backlinks for your business, starting today. So let’s dive in.

So you are sitting there right as you’re maybe you’re a local business owner, a marketing manager, webmaster creator, whatever it is, you’re trying to rank higher in Google and in search engines to bring in more leads, grow your business online, things like that, right? That’s the case. You’re in the right spot. You’ve been learning SEO, maybe working on your website and you’re ready to level up, right? What are these backlinks and how do I take advantage of this? You know, what’s important again, you’ve probably heard about them by now, it’d be a little fuzzy though, right?

Maybe you’re not where you want to be in search engines. You’re not getting the rankings that you think you should be getting. Maybe you’ve done some other optimizations thinking that maybe backlinks is going to be the key for you. But again, you just don’t understand what they are, how to get them. It’s confusing. What are the behind the scenes things that only these tech wizards or big brands where you don’t really know how to do and use. That’s not what backlinks are. They’re not magical for results.

They’re not magical to create, but it is frustrating because SEO has a ton of moving pieces, you know, why does something like backlinks, which sounds very technical, you know, have to matter. It’s not that hard and we’re gonna, we’re gonna break it down here. Like I said earlier, I’ve been doing this SEO for over 25 years now and helped a lot of businesses and business owners and managers, just like you understand this and implement strategies that actually move the needle.

I can tell you that backlinks don’t have to be again, mysterious, right? Or magical, they’re pretty easy to understand and you can do it. I’ll show you how here. So let’s start with a plan first. What is a backlink? Okay. So a backlink is just a link from a website that points back to yours. So think about it like if you’re going to

You’re on your website and you’re typing in, maybe you want to show people where this podcast came from. When you want to say, Hey, go visit Luminate Local to check out this episode. If you were to go to our website, luminatelocal.com and just copy that web address and put that into your website and make it a link, right? Where people, once you publish it, people click on that link on your website and they can visit Luminate Local.

That’s a backlink, right? That’s a backlink for Luminate Local because it comes to Luminate Local when you click on it. So if you understand that analogy, a backlink is that for your business. It’s a link on another website that will bring people to your website, whether it be your homepage, an inner page, a landing page, whatever it is. A backlink is just a link from one website to another.

Now you can also have that be internal linking, right? So when we say backlink, we typically mean, you know, from one website to another, we don’t mean, you know, within your website, linking from one page on your website to another page on your website. That’s more of what we call like an inner link or just a link, but a backlink refers to another website linking to yours. It’s basically saying within the business website world, if you will.

That, this business is worth checking out. And that’s how Google sees it. I like to say it a lot. It like helps you, you know, show that you’re cool, right? The more websites that link to Luminate Local, Google sees Luminate Local as being important and prominent and authoritative for something, right? So Google likes to see these backlinks. It’s a signal that

Kind of in the real world, maybe helps to show edification or authority on topics. The more credible the backlinks that you have pointing to your site, the more trustworthy and authoritative you’re going to appear in the eyes of search engines. And what do I mean by credible? You know, if you were to get a link from, let’s say your local news agency, whatever they are, channel four, channel nine, channel 13, whatever. Um, if a local news station were to link from their

Any page to your website. That’s pretty credible, right? Google, AI, search engines, they’re all going to know of the entity of that local news station and trust it. That’s going to be a credible backlink. Now, if I just whip up a brand new website today that nobody’s ever heard of, and I just throw up a page and have a link on that page to your website, well, that’s not very credible, right? It’s a brand new website. Nobody even knows it exists. Nobody

Has left reviews for it, right? There’s just no like tangible real world credibility for that website. So even though that’s a backlink to your website, just like the backlink from the news outlet to your website is a backlink, know, one is more credible than the other. So I hope you understand that. You don’t wanna just get backlinks for the sake of getting backlinks. The credibility, excuse me, and the authority of that backlink.

Has a lot to do with the value there, right? So again, the more trustworthy and authoritative that that website is, which is then linking to you or giving you that backlink, the more credible, the more authoritative, the more trustworthy you are in the eyes of search engines. So keep that in mind as we dive deeper into how to get backlinks, what are they, why do they matter? That’s a big part of it is quality, credible backlinks.

So why do backlinks matter for SEO? Backlinks are one of the most important ranking signals within Google. It doesn’t mean just getting a backlink is going to drag your rankings up. But it’s one of the most important signals because they’re, they’re like votes of confidence, right? The more high quality, credible, relevant websites that are linking from themselves to your website.

The more Google assumes that your content is valuable. And the higher you can rank and search for that, right? They’re like, they’re like votes for you on that topic, if that makes sense. The backlinks, like I said, are not created equal. So there is an inverse. You, maybe there’s a, an X rated website that’s linked into yours. And if you’re not in that space, that could be a bad backlink, right? That could actually bring some, some negative side.

Effects to your website. So, uh, just like you want trustworthy, credible links to help you, you want to avoid low quality backlinks that may hurt you. Um, you know, they can just be sketchy. They can be considered spam, things like that. Um, I guess moral of the story on this where I’m really trying to go is that quality is going to win over quantity for backlinks, you know, just one or two good quality links from an authoritative and trusted website.

You know, could do some great things for your site. You know, if you got a hundred crappy backlinks from websites, nobody trusts or has heard of, it probably isn’t going to do anything for you and may actually hurt you. So again, quality over quantity for sure. When we’re talking backlinks, how do we get backlinks? Right? So let’s talk about two approaches, passive and proactive. Passive backlinks, those are easy wins that you can.

Control a little bit. Let’s start with some of the basics. So add your website to different directories. Yelp is one that I use a lot. People know what Yelp is depends on your industry, if it makes sense for you, but you can understand what Yelp is. I think we all know. Doesn’t mean I’m a fan of Yelp necessarily. There’s some, some business practices there that a lot of marketers want to avoid with them trying to upsell you with paid promotions and things like that. But everybody’s familiar with Yelp.

So when you list your business in a directory like Yelp or the Yellow Pages or maybe your local Chamber of Commerce, whatever it is, right? You’ll have a profile, maybe your name, a little bit about your business, maybe some photos, phone number, things like that. Well, you’re also gonna have a spot to put your website and that will link back to your website, right? So that is a backlink from Yelp or a backlink from the Chamber of Commerce, okay?

So you can add your business to all those directories. What directories should you be putting yourself in? That’s up to you. If you are completely unsure, just do some searches for your competitors, type in their brand name and see where they show up, right? See if the local chamber of commerce shows up, see if Yelp shows up and just start making a list from there. You’re going to want to be in the same place as they are. And then some, another one that people.

Kind of miss sometimes as being a backlink is your Google business profile, your GBP. Within your GBP, you have a spot to add your website and that’s going to be a link, you know, back to your website. Getting listed in your GBP is super important for your business in general to show up in maps and in local searches. But that’s also an opportunity to get a link back to your website. All of your social media profiles is another great opportunity to get backlinks. Facebook,

LinkedIn, things like that. I don’t know if Instagram, if that’ll show up and be a link, but you get the idea really any property that’s not your website that you are managing or being listed in, make sure you’re having a link back to your website from there. These are foundational backlinks that are easy to set up and still send great signals to Google. In addition to that too, just bear this in mind for best practices. This is good to get backlinks.

But this is also good to connect your website, right? For people, if somebody’s on Facebook and maybe they want to patronize you, maybe they want to call you, maybe they want to learn more and make sure they have a link to your website so they can take that next step. They’re not just trapped in social. You want to roll out the red carpet. Like here’s my website, take the next step, contact us. So multiple reasons, not just for the backlink here, right?

Now, so those are fairly passive, easy to do and set up and you’re probably already managing a lot of these portals and directories. Now, another one, which is like I a little more

Proactive is going to require some outreach, maybe even some relationship massaging or some relationship building. And here’s some examples. Do you have vendors, right? Any partners, things like that. Who interacts with you, who collaborates with you, who partners with you? Where do you have those relationships that are strategic? Can you get listed on their web pages? Maybe there’s a

A particular page on a website, right? When I say a vendor, for example, it doesn’t have to be like, here’s all of our outlets where you can find us, which would be great. If your vendors have a page like that, you for sure want to show up in their directories or where to buy our products type things. But maybe they don’t have that. Maybe you can find a page on their website that just seems like this is a great fit for them to mention you and push traffic and opportunities to you. Approach them with that. Say, here’s a page. I was wondering,

Can you put a little blurb on my website? Maybe you already mentioned my name, right? And maybe in a weird scenario. I also want a link to my website there. And same with any other partners or collaborators or contractors that makes sense. And maybe even clients in some cases, right? If they’d be willing to link to your website. Now, oftentimes if you were to just call somebody or send an email, they may not know what you’re talking about here. So it’s always important to make this as easy as possible with them.

Here’s maybe the page that I’m identifying. You know, maybe even here, if they need a paragraph or some text to kind of go with it, supply that to be prepared for that, make it very easy where they can just, you know, ideally, if you will just copy and paste this and put it on their website, hit publish and boom, you’re done. Try to do as much work as possible for them because if they haven’t already listed and linked your website, now you’re creating some work for them. They’re not.

Probably gonna get a whole lot of benefits unless there’s something else to the relationship here. They’re really doing this for you. So do as much of the work as you can and you’ll have the best results possible. Not everybody’s gonna say yes to this don’t be deterred right where if you have ten or a hundred targets in mind as you’re hearing this and watching this. Not everybody’s gonna say yes, and that’s fine. This is a numbers game. We want to get as many as possible and good quality and you know credible backlinks, but not everybody’s gonna say yes.

That’s okay, we’ll take the yeses and just move on from the nos. But again, making it as easy as possible for them is gonna get you more yeses. Another thing that’s maybe not as effective or common now, but I do wanna mention is guest blog posting. This is something that was done a little bit more in years gone by. But if you have a connection to a website that needs some content, maybe you’ve been asked to write an article for somebody, whatever it is.

If you’re ever providing content for somebody else, either they’ve asked you or you identify a need and you approach them. When you write that content, see if there’s a way for you to include a link back to your website, whether that be just straight up, Hey, this is who wrote it. And you can find their website here, or if it makes sense to work it into the content of the article. Again, here, I’d make sure that they understand that you’re doing that. Don’t don’t try to sneak that in or hide it. But that is a great way of guest blog posting.

Guest article writing or things like that. Again, in all this, I gotta underscore for your time, for your energy, and for the value of doing this, make sure you’re going for things that are relevant and credible, right? One solid backlink can make a big difference. Again, spending your time and energy for a bunch of crappy backlinks that aren’t gonna make a difference, you just wasted your time and they’re really there, right?

Make a list, do some outreach and just take it one by one and again, quality over quantity. So now that you know what backlinks are and some tips on how to get them, actually, let me back up. I completely forgot. In addition to things that are more business related like that, something that a lot of clients will miss often is local support networks or

Wherever you’re contributing or donating, think like local T-ball team, right? Or baseball team or volleyball team, or your, you know, a church mission that you supported. Wherever you’re donating money, donating time, whatever you’re a member of as a business, things like that. Ask if they have directories, ask if they have listings, ask if they have sponsor pages again, like in the local T-ball team type deal, right? You don’t want to just have your logo on the shirt.

Ask them, hey, do you have a webpage that you can list my business on and put a link back to my website? And in some cases they may say, no, you say, hey, can I help you develop one? Right? It’s going to be worth it for you to get that. Where backlinks are valuable for you is not just in the relevance, right? If you’re a local business, you know, getting a link from the chamber of commerce that’s relevant, right? Now if you’re a local business, you can get a link from the

Local T-ball team, that’s not as relevant. You know, what is, what is the youth athletic association have to do with my business? Well, not so much on the topic relevancy there, but for sure on the local relevancy. That’s an undertone for all of this is we’re talking local SEO. We want to be found locally for our businesses, right? So when we get backlinks, it doesn’t have to be something that’s great for the keyword on the product, the service or the business type. But just those local links are great. So getting the links from the local.

T-ball sponsorship you did, even though it may not push a ton of traffic to you or even be seen by a lot of people, it does send a signal to Google and all the other bots that you’re local and related to this geographical area, right? So still pretty valuable and worth your time.

Okay, so now you know what backlinks are, we’ve talked about how to get them, some ideas, things like that. There is a…

Other parts to SEO that are important. And I want to take the opportunity here to remind everybody that you can do a free SEO audit using our website. Go to luminatelocal.com, click on the yellow button, and you’re going to list your webpage and type in a keyword that you want to get a SEO score on for that page, do an audit. And it’ll give you a score on a lot of key SEO factors, including backlinks. Show you where you’re

Doing well, where there’s room for improvement, things like that. It’s fast, it’s free, and it’s a great first step for smarter and more effective SEO. So take advantage of that completely free, and again, continue your SEO journey. So I also wanna take the opportunity here to read a review if you’ve listened to any of our other episodes or watched them on YouTube.

You know that we value reviews from you, our audience. It helps us know if we’re putting out the right content. It helps us know if we’re bringing value. And it’s the way that we just know the show is working and resonating with everybody. So we’ll ask for you to leave us a review. If you’re so inclined, go to luminatelocal.com scroll to the bottom, click on the link for reviews. You can read reviews there. You can also click the buttons to leave us a review on whatever your outlet of choices, Apple podcast, Google, Facebook, whatever. And then we read them.

Here on the show. So this one here I have is from Cherie Monson. SEO has always been scary for me when it comes to my business website. I’ve been paying my website designer for this service, but I’m not sure I like her choices. Sorry about that. Jesse made SEO less scary and more understandable for me. I’ve already made some changes to my website, SEO using keywords that I’m using in my packaging on my website and other selling platforms.

Great five star review on Google. Thank you very much for that everybody else again. You’re getting value out of this show in these topics. We would love to get a review from you and we’ll read it on the show. All right, so back to our steps here so take action if you don’t. Like I say all the time your competitors are right if you ignore backlinks. There’s plenty of other tips tricks strategies

Things to check off on your list for SEO, okay? But backlinks are important and this may help you to get unstuck or move the needle faster than some other SEO tactics are going to. Your competitors are probably actively getting backlinks. If they’re authoritative, they may be getting them passively through people sharing content. Whatever the case is for them, for you, you’re gonna need to actively go out and get more backlinks, okay? Backlinks will continue to help.

Climb, help you climb the search engine ladder, help get more visibility. Again, in addition to wherever you got that backlink, you have a red carpet rolled out. You know, if somebody is on the local T-ball page, they can go right to your website now too, right? It’s not just the backlink signal. The backlink is also now a way for them to connect and get to your website as a human being. Right. So pull in more leads, get more business opportunities, get in front of more people.

Get more backlinks, okay? If you fail to do that, your competitors are gonna keep doing it and you’re just gonna stay put right there. All right, so in closing, I think that’s enough for this episode. Hopefully backlinks don’t feel so mysterious to you anymore. You know what they are and hopefully left you with some ideas on how to go get some and start earning them. Again, be sure to take our free SEO audit on our website.

Learn more about your current SEO situation, backlink profile, what’s working, what’s not working. And as always, if you have a question you would like us to address on this show, reach out. We’d love doing that. Go to luminatelocal.com, scroll to the bottom, click the link for questions. If we use your question on the show, we’re going to send you a swag bag with some Luminate Local gear, which is great. I think that’s it for today, everybody. Thanks again for tuning in. I appreciate you and we’ll catch you on the next episode. Take care.

Get Your First New Backlink Today!

Backlinks don’t have to be a mystery anymore! This episode simplifies link building, showing how to boost your site’s authority through quality links. Start with marketing strategies like adding your site to directories or creating pages with optimized anchor text to attract referring links from trusted sources. Tools like competitor analysis can reveal where rivals earn their links, helping you target similar opportunities. Focus on credible referring sites, such as local organizations or industry blogs, to strengthen your marketing efforts. Quality link building isn’t about flooding your site with links but earning ones that signal authority to search engines. By prioritizing relevant pages and strategic anchor text, you can enhance your site’s visibility and attract more customers. Take action now to implement these backlink strategies and watch your small business climb the search engine rankings!

Episode Notes and Resources

• Free SEO Audit Tool: Evaluate your website’s SEO performance with our free tool

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