Backlinks What They Are & How To Get Them - More Than A Few Words Podcast

🚀 Hey everyone, it's Brandon Leibowitz here! I had an awesome time chatting with Lorraine Ball on More Than a Few Words 🎙️ all about one of my favorite topics—BACKLINKS! 🔗

💡 Want to know how backlinks can boost your website’s credibility and skyrocket your rankings on Google? 🤯 I break it all down—what they are, how to get them, and why they matter! Plus, I share some pro SEO strategies that will help you stay ahead of your competitors. 🚀

🔍 We cover:
 ✅ What exactly are backlinks?
 ✅ How to find out where your competitors are getting theirs 🔎
 ✅ The best (and worst) places to get backlinks 👀
 ✅ Why Google cares so much about link quality!

If you're a business owner, marketer, or just someone who wants more visibility online, you don’t want to miss this one! 🎧

📌 Listen now and get those backlinks working for YOU! #SEO #Marketing #Backlinks #Podcast #MoreThanAFewWords

Transcript

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Welcome to More Than a Few Words Marketing conversation for business owners. This is your host, Lorraine Ball. In Life and Online, you are judged by the company you keep. And how do you demonstrate those connections online? Well, it's through backlinks. What are backlinks? How do you get them, do you need them, and where do they come from? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. And to have this conversation, I've invited Brandon Leibowitz to join me. Brandon runs and operates SEO Optimizers and he's been doing it since 2007. It's a digital marketing company that focuses on helping small and medium sized businesses get more online traffic, which in turn converts into clients, sales and leads. Brandon, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me on today. I am so excited to have you and to have this conversation about backlinks because I think it's something that a lot of business owners don't really understand. So maybe let's start with a definition. What is a backlink? A backlink is a clickable link from another website that points to yours. So let's say you're reading an article online on Forbes.com and there it says Brandon Leibowitz. And if you click on that and it goes to my website, I'd be getting a backlink from Forbes.com so the more websites that have clickable links that point to your website, the more popular or trustworthy Google sees you as. Okay, so I need to get backlinks and how do I go about maybe cultivating some backlinks? There are tons of different ways, but the first way that I always look at is let's look at your competitors. Because the SEO, it's not really a one size fits all. Every website's different. And we gotta figure out who your competition is, who ranks for your keywords in Google. So going into Google, typing in your keywords and seeing who's on that first page of Google, taking those websites and throwing them into different tools. These are all paid tools. Unfortunately, there's no free tools that will let you look at backlinks. They're all about like a hundred dollars a month. The more popular ones would be like mods or Semrush or Ahrefs. But these tools will let you look at any website's backlinks and then you can see where your competitors are getting talked about. Are they running articles? Are they doing blogs? Are they doing press releases, are they doing podcasts? Are you doing interviews? Whatever it is, you can reverse engineer their entire strategy and look through all their backlinks and find the ones that are good quality backlinks. And what is a quality backlink to Google? A quality backlink means it comes from a site that's related to what you're doing and it has some authority. So you don't want just any random site linking out to you. You want to find somewhat related sites. So like I do SEO, I'm not going to get any other SEO companies to link out to me since we're all pretty much direct competitors. But I could find other websites related to marketing or business or entrepreneurship or anything somewhat related. That's what Google wants to see. Lend authority. Like, how popular is this website? If I give you a backlink from my website, it's a good website, but it's not the same as like a Wall Street Journal or New York Times or Wikipedia. So the bigger the website, the more SEO value and the more related to your industry, the better off it's going to be. Awesome. Well I want to go back and break down several things that you said. And the first thing that you said is that the good tools for figuring out who's linking to your competitors are all paid. The nice thing is that it's a monthly subscription. So in theory you could hop in for a month and hop out. The challenge is that using a lot of those tools also requires a certain level of expertise. And the average business owner hopping in may stumble around for a month and a half before they actually figure out what they're looking at. And so I might argue that that's a place you might want to invest in getting some help. Are there ways, other ways to find some of those links? Maybe not as comprehensively, but can you do creative Google searches that will help you figure out where your competitors are showing up? Yeah There's different ways to search called advanced search operators. But one way I like to search is just by, well, blogging on other people's websites. So like I was saying earlier, you might be on sites that are related to what you're doing, and the best way to do that is offering them something free or a value. If you just ask a website, can I get a backlink? They're not going to say yes. But if you offer value, like offer a free article or blog post or be a guest on their podcast or do an interview or something like that, that incentivizes the website a little bit more to possibly say yes. So you could go into Google and search and if you want to put like advanced Search operator. I would put like in URL, so in URL that put a colon. Then in quotation marks I'd put the word like guest post. And then I put your keyword after that. And that's going to say that in the URL it has to have the word guest post and your keyword. So that's an advanced search operator. There's tons of them out there. If you're just a little too confused, you can just really just go to Google and just type in your keyword and type in blog after it and you'll be pulling up websites that are related to what you're doing, that all have blogs or change blog to podcast and you'll be able to pull up podcasts if you want to be a guest on podcasts or whatever it is that you're trying to do. But you can really get granular with those searches if you want. And so the second thing that you talked about is getting these links from reputable sites because there's all sorts of sites out there that will happily link if you link to them. But the truth is, if it's not a high quality link, it won't impress Google. But will it actually cause search engines to perhaps look at you a little askance and think you're not nearly as good as they used to think you were? If you're getting links from low quality sites? So I would avoid. So there's lots of different ways they'll get the quality of a website, but a lot of times if it's just like a startup and it's a brand new business and they're only around for like a couple months or a year, Google, they're a low quality site, but if they're really relevant to what you're doing and they're a real business, I would say go for it because you hope in three or four years they become from that low quality site to medium and a bigger one. So going after those low quality ones or smaller sites I would say are fine. But low quality would be something that's like in a foreign language or what are called PBN's private blog networks, where they look like a real website but it's really just a blog and they're just taking any industry, any article in there. It's kind of like a free for all where there's no real quality standards, those are the ones I'd avoid. But if it's a real business and they're just a startup and they don't have much traffic or much SEO rankings. You hope in the long run that they will. So those ones I would still go after, but the ones that seem a little spammy or where it's just too easy, or you see like websites that have nothing related to what you're doing in those websites, like if they're blogging and about. If you're like a mechanic and you see them blogging about auto body shops and cars, but then you see like gambling and casino sites in there, I would say, all right, maybe stay away from this because it's really not a good website in the long run. It's totally not. Again, it's. I don't want to hang out with them. It's not the kind of people I want to hang out with in real life. I don't want to hang out with them online either. So as you're building your website and you're building your authority and you're working with companies maybe to get articles published or cross promote, are there things that you should do when you're considering adding backlinks to your site to some of these other people? Because I went through a period there where I probably got three emails a day offering me content if I would give them a backlink. And I usually turned it down because it wasn't good. It just didn't fit who we were. But what do you advise small business owners to do when thinking about backlinks for their site? Yeah, that's where I do that cold outreach where I reach out to targeted websites. But a lot of the ones that you're getting, and I get the same ones I get, probably like 10 of them a day, are really spammy and they're just blasting emails out to everybody. And they're not really focused on providing value. They're just trying to spam and get anybody to say yes. But if you become a little more meticulous with it and really pick and choose who you reach out to and build those relationships, then it works better. But when people email me, usually I just delete them. Unless it's coming from a good website or someone that's reputable and trustworthy, then I'll look at it. But you have to understand, like Google looks at who you link to and who links to you. So you want good websites linking to you, and you also want to link out to good website. So if somebody offers you a free article or blog post and it's from a gambling or some other weird kind of sketchy site, if you link out to them, that actually negatively impacts you. So you want to pick and choose. And you only want to link out to good sites that are relevant to your industry because Google looks at who you link out to and who links out to you. Both of them are pretty important. Absolutely. And I think also from a user and also from a user experience, if I put a link on my website that goes to something that's irrelevant, that visitor that I worked so hard to attract is gone. They may not come back because the link they followed wasn't very good quality. So in their eyes, I'm perhaps not as good a resource as they thought. Yeah, we lose that trust and credibility from Google and from humans. So you have to have that balance. And just think, if you're on your website and you click on this link, is this actually providing value for your readers, your visitors, or is this just something that you're doing just to try to game the system for SEO? Absolutely. Well, Brandon, this was great. I can tell you that when we publish this particular episode, we will link to SEO optimizers.com because it is going to be a value for our listeners. Thank you so much for being a part of the show. Thank you for having me on today. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, if you'd like to find other resources for your business, subscribe to mtfw. Wherever you listen to podcasts, listen to too. They're short. This has been another episode of more than a few words. Thanks for listening.