This is a guest post by Rhenn Taguiam. For more info on guest posting on Christian Web Trends see Be a Guest Blogger.
As owners of a church website, we want our content to reach as many people as possible. Now that we’re in a time of need due to the Coronavirus pandemic, we’re in the perfect position to spread the Gospel and help more members of our community feel much safer and more secure. If you feel as though your current writing efforts aren’t bringing enough traffic to your church website, you may need help from a digital marketing strategy called organic link building.
What’s Link Building?
Understanding the importance of organic link building stems from the nature of link building as a digital marketing strategy. In general, link building refers to the strategy that marketers use to “spread” hyperlinks to your website across a multitude of platforms.
For reference, the above is an example of a hyperlink and its parts. A hyperlink is composed of:
- Link tag, which is the HTML tag we use to tell search engines we’re including a hyperlink in a post. They begin with <a href> and end with </a>. Everything that happens in between these tags is related to a hyperlink.
- Link referral location refers to the address readers are sent to when they click the hyperlink. This should include your full URL for this to work.
- Anchor text refers to the text where the hyperlink will be “anchored” to. Clicking this text in the article will lead users to the link referral location.
These hyperlinks may appear minuscule at first glance, but they’re very powerful as backlinks. When people click your backlinks, you can experience increased traffic and subscriptions. Link building refers to the process of spreading these backlinks to platforms that people frequently visit, and can be done in methods such as:
- Guest posting, where we ask other prominent websites in the industry to publish our content.
- Social media, where we embed our links to social media posts to reach communities.
- Advertisements, where we put our links to ads so they get led to our site when clicked.
Why Natural? The Strengths of Organic Link Building
Organic link building prioritizes building meaningful connections with other industry members through unique and helpful content. This can be done in two major ways. First, you should naturally integrate your keywords into your posts and blogs. Secondly, you should ways to share your content organically to a wide range of users.
As such, traffic you’ll get will be more natural and organic, and viewers you’ll receive will become much likelier to be loyal to your brand. In fact, considering how 62-percent of Google’s existing Top 10 results across niches are likely to be more than three (3!) years (!!) old, then great link building will most likely help your church website be on top of your niche.
Here are other benefits you should consider:
Generate better traffic for your website.
While basic link building methods can give you a boost in traffic, organic link building methods can position your church website to earn higher traffic at a more consistent rate. That’s because carefully tailoring your content to the right audience through the right platform can give you more organic traffic. This can increase your search engine metrics exponentially, and may even give you more benefits such as increased leads and conversions.
- While we want to get as much traffic to our church website as possible, our increase in traffic won’t be as useful if a lot of these viewers aren’t interested in what we’re offering. Appealing to a smaller but more passionate crowd of viewers can guarantee consistent views and a following that may spread to their respective communities. This is especially helpful if you have a local church, as there’s been a 900-percent growth in “near me” searches. If you’re looking for more followers and attendees in your church, organic link building may help spread the word of your church much better.
- Increasing your metrics naturally will position your website for better growth. Search engine metrics such as organic traffic, bounce rate, Page Authority, and Domain Authority, and even Trust Flow all have underlying effects to how search engines treat your website. Using organic link building methods can help Google and other search engines give your church website high ranking thanks to this “natural” improvement in metrics.
Create targeted and more useful content for your readers.
You’re probably writing blogs to your church website using a few keywords. This isn’t really harmful, as mentioning relevant keywords may help drive a little traffic to your website. However, considering numbers that state 75-percent of netizens reading blogs but 43-percent of readers also just skimming them, you need to make sure you’re making the best content for your users. Organic link building can help ensure that you don’t just make appropriate content, but that it reaches the right users.
- Targeted content can be much more efficient for church blogs as this directly caters to a specific kind of audience. This makes it easier for search engines to index your content and “send” them to people specifically looking for them. This is also why you should create an assortment of content meeting the needs of different users, so there’s always something to offer to your audience.
- Creating targeted content is also why a link building agency may suggest that instead of focusing on just keywords, your blogs should also focus on context and meeting user needs. This means introducing new ideas, answering queries, or clarifying concepts to users through your content. Moreover, this also means you should start tackling ideas related to your keywords, so your content offerings will be more diverse.
Build better relationships with your niche and your readers.
As a church website, we want to build a better community through the content we’re producing. Organic link building can help us accomplish this naturally thanks to our relationships with relevant industry members and interested readers.
- We can accomplish this through link outreach. This process lets you contact websites and blogs within niches you want to tackle. You have to convince them to post your content through methods such as guest posting. Guest posts can help you and the website you contacted as your pieces can reach their audiences and your readers as well.
- Outreach can help us create good relationships with members of different niches. You can improve your relationship with them especially when we continue to provide meaningful content to them. Our great content can pull in users to their site, which in turn can pull in readers to the backlinks we present there.
- Genuine relationships with industry members and readers won’t just build good traffic, but loyal followers that can see the value we provide with our content. Search engines, thanks to language processing algorithms such as BERT from Google, can help your church website rank better when it seems you’re making useful content for your readers.
Improve Your Branding with Organic Link Building
With the above taken into consideration, it’s important to remember that organic link building can do wonders for your church website.
Organic link building can help increase your viewership and subscribers. Moreover, it can help put your church website at the top of your niche. These tips help you reach more audiences and inform them of the Word. You may even help build a better local community!
Feel free to share more tips you have regarding organic link building! Let’s have a lively and informative discussion in the comments if you have other ideas!
2 Comments
Hey Rhenn, thanks for writing this very detailed guest blog post about organic link building. It can be a time-consuming strategy, but it pays big dividends in terms of building relationships with other organizations and improving search rankings.
Thank you all for your appreciation. Link building is what we do every day along with Rhenn who write amazing articles. I’m really pleased to hear this.