Building Brand Trust: The Role of Backlinks and How to Use Them for Success

What does it mean to have brand trust? It means having customers who have confidence in your company, product, and service. It’s also about building loyalty that turns regular buyers into brand advocates who help others gain confidence in your company, too. Ultimately, it means building stronger relationships with every client and thus making your business sustainable.

In today’s world of tough competition and fight for prospects’ attention, trust is one of the most important attributes of sales and growth. Without it, you can’t persuade your target audience to make a purchase, return to buy again, and transform into loyal clients. And among many tactics for establishing credibility, SEO backlinking tends to be one of the most pivotal ones, as backlinks help you build trust and expand your visibility at the same time.

What Are Backlinks and How Do They Affect Your Business?

A backlink is an incoming link located on another website that points back to your site. It can be compared to a citation–when another webmaster or blogger adds a link to your site in their content, they acknowledge the value of you as a source and recommend visitors to check out your page.

This term is widely used in search engine optimization (SEO). As you should know, SEO is the backbone of online brand visibility—it’s the process of optimizing your site for ranking higher in search engines, which ultimately means receiving more organic traffic and building recognition. How important are backlinks for SEO? Backlinks matter for SEO (and, respectively, for your visibility) for a number of reasons:

• They give you greater exposure at the expense of other sites’ audiences.
• They drive more traffic to your website.
• When a trusted site points to you, it’s a trust signal that lets search engines know that your content is worthy.
• It sets you up as an industry expert in the eyes of your target audience.

What Makes a Good Backlink: Understanding the Main Trust Signals

As you now know, backlinks are essential for SEO and brand trust. They act as votes of trust, confirming that your content holds real value for the audience, but not all links are the same. While some mentions can take you higher in search engines, others can do more harm. These are called toxic backlinks. They can lead to a variety of adverse effects, including reputational damage, lowered rankings, and even penalties by Google.

To avoid these adverse effects, it’s typically recommended to disavow toxic links from your site. You can do it easily, with the help of the right tools—first, find the best free backlink checker tools to select the solution that suits you, regularly check your backlink profile and detect toxic mentions, and then disavow them from your site.

Okay, but how do you avoid toxic links in the first place? To do this, you need to know what makes a good citation before you start generating them. Generally, there are four trust signs in relation to backlinks:

• Relevance—The site that mentions you and the specific piece of content where the link is placed should perfectly align with your niche to offer real value to users.
• Placement—The citation should be placed organically and fit the overall context of the article so that it doesn’t look out of place or overly advertise.
• Link type—Dofollow backlinks pass on authority to your website and can potentially improve your rankings. Thus, they are prioritized over nofollow mentions.
• Domain authority—Finally (and most importantly), you need to strive to generate links from high-authority websites that people know and trust, as these will improve your own credibility. Mentions that come from substandard, spammy, and low-authority sites appear as a red flag to search engines and users alike.

Link-Building Tips to Build Brand Trust and Enhance Visibility

Now that you know about the bad and good backlinks, you might be wondering how to gain high-quality mentions that will stimulate growth. Let us give you a few practical tips for success:

Use Working and Ethical Link-Building Strategies

In order to generate quality citations, you need to integrate the following tactics into your strategy:

• Use your content as a powerhouse. Focus on delivering top-notch and original content that others will want to share—detailed tutorials, expert opinions, case studies, and original research findings work great.
• Generate visual assets. Data visualizations and infographics often get featured in relevant blog posts. Thus, by creating appealing and valuable visual assets, you can encourage more sources to refer to you.
• Engage in guest posting. Research potential link donors that have high domain authority and align with your niche, use personalized outreach to connect with them, and create excellent blog posts they will publish, integrating your link into them.
• Watch competitors. Use analytical software to identify high-value competitor backlinks and use them to your benefit—for example, try reaching out to the same blogs or adjust your content strategy to surpass the competition.
• Use the skyscraper method. Research and analyze top-ranking pieces of content for your target keyword, create a better and deeper version, and reach out to site owners to pitch your own piece.

Leverage PR and Strategic Partnerships

If you want to grow your brand visibility and boost credibility, you want to go beyond the standard link-building methods and get creative. PR and strategic partnerships can really help by showing you as an expert in your field.

Here are a few tricks you can try to gain quality mentions from PR and partnerships:

• Provide your expert opinions related to your niche through the HARO method (help a reporter out). This tactic basically implies becoming a volunteer source of valuable information to reporters in exchange for mentions.
• Establish your brand on social media (unless you haven’t done it already) and develop a focused tactic to deliver quality content and increase your following. Once your account is well-established, actively engage with influencers and industry leaders to partner in content creation. You can also leverage user-generated content, though it may not bring you more mentions, it can greatly contribute to your trust level because user-generated content works similarly to customer feedback.
• Build and nurture relationships with potential partners. These can include bloggers, local businesses, non-profits, etc. Strategic partnerships can also help you expand your outreach while exchanging resources and gaining high-level mentions.
• Write quality press releases and distribute them through popular PR platforms. This will let you gain branded mentions and further increase the authority level.

Measure the Results and Improve

After you implement the aforementioned strategies to generate brand mentions for SEO and authority, don’t stop there. Use these tips to start assessing your results and tweak your strategy for greater results:

• Pick a backlink checker tool that suits your objectives.
• Regularly analyze your profile for the following key metrics: the number of referring domains, referral traffic, link placement, anchor text distribution, and domain authority (DA). These metrics will help you see if your link-building efforts are working and bringing tangible results.
• Detect areas for improvement based on your metrics and make relevant changes to your strategy.

Common Link-Building Mistakes That Undermine Brand Trust

Now that you know how to generate mentions for improved brand visibility and SEO, let us tell you about some common pitfalls that can throw off the progress and actually harm your trust:

1. Putting quantity over quality—Now you know that not all citations matter equally. For this reason, you should always strive to get fewer but more high-value links instead of generating plenty of spammy ones.
2. Using black-hat techniques—Spammy tactics like link exchange or buying citations from private blogging networks (aka link farms) can bring you instant results. However, most often, these results have adverse effects in the long run.
3. Ignoring relevance—When someone mentions you in an article that’s fully off-topic to your brand, readers will most likely disregard it and quickly leave your site, increasing the bounce rate.
4. Over-optimizing anchor text—Anchor text is a great place for target keywords. Still, it has to sound natural and perfectly fit the context of the article, which is why striving to optimize it to the maximum is not always the best approach.
5. Blindly copying competitor backlinks—Not all strategies that work for your competitors will be just as effective for you, which is why it’s generally not recommended to copy them blindly. Still, analyzing your competitors is helpful for understanding what helps them receive quality mentions, what makes them trustworthy, and what brings them high in search engines. You should use these insights to develop your own strategy rather than copying someone else’s approach.

Conclusion

Trust is one of the primary building blocks of every business. It helps attract new customers, generate sales, and, most importantly, retain your clients so that they turn into real brand advocates.

As you now know, receiving high-quality mentions from authority websites can greatly increase your trust level. At the same time, backlinks can help you enhance your traffic, reach a broader audience, and rank higher in search engines, which also stimulates growth.

After reading this article, you should have a better understanding of what makes quality citations and how to generate them effectively. Follow the tips we shared with you here to set your strategy up for success. And don’t forget about keeping the fine line between SEO and reputation and avoiding common mistakes that can harm trust!

To read more content like this, explore The Brand Hopper

Subscribe to our newsletter