"*" indicates required fields
One of the most important factors in a successful online marketing strategy is building high-quality backlinks. Without them, you may be struggling to rank on search engines like Google or Bing. So what are backlinks, and why are they so important for founders aiming to scale their visibility and reduce their burn rate? Keep reading to find out!
Quality inbound links (aka backlinks) are the foundation of your successful backlink development strategy in an SEO campaign. However, finding high-quality backlinks can be challenging, especially if you’re unfamiliar with the process. That’s where a backlink company like Take the Stairs can help early-stage entrepreneurs build credibility, drive traffic, and prepare for investor visibility.
We specialize in link building and can help you secure links from high-quality websites. In addition, we offer a range of other SEO services that can help improve your website’s search engine rankings. If you’re serious about increasing your online visibility, then working with a backlink agency is the best way to achieve SEO success and set the stage for stronger go-to-market strategies and future seed funding rounds. Here are some important things about our backlink services.
To build a startup-centric backlink strategy and improve your website’s SEO, you need high-quality links from high-authority websites. This means identifying opportunities for guest blogging, public relations, and creating shareable infographics that position your startup as a credible market player for potential angel investors and media partners.
At Take the Stairs, we pride ourselves on being a white-hat-only agency. That means we only use startup-safe backlinking strategies in line with best practices and guidelines set forth by search engines like Google. This ensures your brand reputation stays clean while you scale.
Our backlink agency offers automated outreach services for backlinking. We develop and reach out to a list of qualified, high-quality backlink opportunities on behalf of our clients — especially those building momentum ahead of Series A or looking to stabilize churn rate through organic traffic growth.
As a startup founder or early-stage entrepreneur, you’ve probably heard it’s important to invest in high-quality backlinks. But what are they, and why do they matter for your next fundraising round or GTM pivot?
Backlinks are links from other websites that point to yours. They’re a signal to Google and other search engines that your website is enough of an authority on a particular topic to be sourced by another website. When you have lots of high-quality backlinks, it communicates to Google that your website is worth ranking higher in search results, a critical trust factor if you’re preparing for seed funding or pitching to venture capital firms.
Think of the internet as a popularity contest. The more votes from websites you get, the more popular you are.But even more importantly, the more popular the voting websites are, the more those votes count, especially when you’re trying to lower your customer acquisition costs or reduce burn rate through organic traffic.
Websites can show their confidence in your business by linking back to it, offering their visitors easy access to check out your information. This can increase the domain authority of your site, which can help increase your organic ranking, increase your traffic, increase your leads, and ultimately, increase your sales. All without relying solely on paid acquisition channels.
So how can you get more high-quality backlinks for your startup? Check out these tips designed for fast-moving founders!
Now that you know what backlinks are and how they can help your business, you’re probably wondering how to get them.
Since building backlinks relies a lot on other people and businesses, it can be a bit of a process, and hiring a backlink building agency that offers SEO backlinks service might be a good plan for your startup’s go-to-market strategy. Either way, here are the best ways to get backlinks for your site and build your SEO.
As part of any backlink strategy, it’s important to keep track of your competition’s backlink profile. This will give you insights into their link-building strategies and help you identify opportunities to build links of your own. There are a few different ways to do backlink analysis. One is to use a tool like Majestic SEO or Moz’s Open Site Explorer. These tools will show you all the links that point to a given website.
Once you have a list of your competitor’s backlinks, take a look at the quality of those links. Are they coming from high-quality websites? If so, that’s a good sign they’re doing something right. If not, that may be an opportunity for you to build better quality links than they have, giving you an edge as a founder aiming for growth-stage traction.
Keep in mind, you want to aim for quality over quantity when it comes to backlinks. A few high-quality links will do more for your SEO than a bunch of low-quality ones. So, when you’re doing your backlink analysis, keep that in mind. If you’re considering hiring a backlinks agency, one way to know you’ve found a good one is if they take this same stance.
This is a great place to start but likely won’t help you outrank your competitors (since you’re using the same links) so we’ll need to pair this with one of our other strategies below.
Another way to build backlinks is to create awesome infographics that other sites will want to grab from your site and use for themselves. They cannot legally use your image without your permission. If you find websites using your infographics without your permission, you can simply ask them to link back to your site to give you credit for the infographic in exchange for you allowing them to use it. Most people will feel a bit of shame that you caught them using your resource without their permission and will appreciate the chance to continue using it with simply a link back to you and no consequences.
Giving your brand more reach without additional burn rate.
However, In order for this strategy to work, you’ve got to create great graphics in the first place. You can hire someone to do this for you, or you can create them yourself. The important thing is to make sure you’re using interesting, pertinent content and lots of useful data to keep your infographic relevant and informative.
Creating a visually attractive design will go a long way toward attracting other websites to your infographic. Infographics designed to reflect your business’s branding will go even further to build brand awareness for you when readers of those other sites come across your branded infographics, especially if you’re targeting founders, investors, or industry analysts in niche verticals.
Another part of a good backlink strategy is citation building. This is the act of providing quality content that automatically includes backlinks to you for other websites. These citations can help improve your business’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) and can also help to build brand awareness.
Citation building can be a time-consuming process, but it can be well worth the effort if you want to improve your SEO and build your brand.
If you need help getting started, consider working with a backlinks agency that offers SEO backlinks service and can take care of this for you as part of a comprehensive backlink strategy for early-stage startups.
One of the most effective ways to build quality citation backlinks is through guest blogging. This involves writing articles for other websites in your industry with a link back to your own site in the article or the accompanying author bio.
A great tactic for founders looking to build visibility and thought leadership before fundraising.
Not only does this help to build your brand and authority within your industry, but it also helps to increase the reach of your website.
When guest blogging, make sure you only agree to write for a high-quality site that is relevant to your industry. Writing interesting and engaging articles that make complicated concepts simple will resonate with the site’s audience. Include a link back to your website in your author bio, and reference any relevant posts from your own site within the article. Make sure your articles are well-written and free of any errors to help your business put its best foot forward.
If you can follow these guidelines, guest blogging can be an extremely effective part of your backlink strategy.
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is another great way to get quality backlinks for your site. By connecting with reporters and providing them with valuable information, you can earn their trust and get your website mentioned in their articles.
A tactic frequently used by startups to build PR traction before or during go-to-market pushes.
This not only helps improve your SEO but also gets you more exposure and traffic.
To get started with HARO, simply sign up for an account and start browsing the opportunities that are relevant to your niche. When you find an opportunity you’re interested in, simply send a pitch to the reporter. Be sure to include your website URL so they can link back to you if they use your information.
If you consistently provide valuable information to reporters, you’ll soon build up a reputation as a trusted source. This can lead to more opportunities and higher-quality backlinks for your website. So, if you’re looking to improve your SEO, HARO is definitely worth checking out.
Public relations is the process of managing communication between an organization and the public.
A successful public relations strategy is another way to help build backlinks for your website and increase visibility with venture capital and angel investor audiences.
There are a few different ways to go about creating quality backlinks through public relations. One way is to distribute online press releases. A well-written and newsworthy press release can be picked up by journalists and bloggers who will then link back to your website. Another way to create backlinks is to pitch stories to journalists and influencers in your industry. If they write about your story, they will likely include a link to your website.
A successful public relations strategy requires good communication and relationship-building skills. If you can create quality relationships with journalists, bloggers and influencers, you will be more likely to build backlinks and improve your SEO.
One more way to create backlinks is through forum posting. Forum posting is when you post on forums such as Reddit or Quora and include a link back to your website in your signature. Usually these are situations in which you can answer a question related to your industry. Answering questions on forums is also a great way to get practice making the complex concepts simple for future clients.
Forum posting can help you get exposure for your website and build backlinks. However, it’s important to make sure that you’re only posting on relevant forums and that you’re providing quality posts that align with your startup’s value proposition and audience.
Otherwise, you could end up getting banned from the forums.
When you’re posting on forums, always make sure to add value to the discussion. Don’t just post a link to your website and leave it at that. Take the time to contribute to the discussion and add value for other users. If you do this, you’ll be more likely to build relationships and get backlinks.
A backlink company like Take the Stairs that provides SEO backlinks service is already familiar with all of these common backlink strategy pitfalls and can help guide you through the process to avoid them. To familiarize yourself with the most common backlink strategy mistakes, let’s take a look at three things to avoid.
Backlinks from unrelated niches or low-authority sites are not helpful for a few reasons. Firstly, backlinks from unrelated sources can actually hurt your SEO. This is because Google’s algorithm devalues backlinks from sites unrelated to your site’s topic. Secondly, backlinks from low-authority sites don’t carry much weight. Google looks at a site’s authority when determining a backlink’s value.
So, a backlink from a high-authority site will be worth much more than a backlink from a low-authority site. Finally, backlinks from sites with little content are also not very valuable. This is because Google views these sites as less relevant and, therefore, of lower quality. If you’re looking for a backlink building agency
to build a backlink strategy that will actually help your website, focus on getting backlinks from high-quality, relevant sites. These kinds of backlinks will make a difference in your SEO.
When another site links to yours, they have the option to link as a follow link or a no-follow link. A follow link gives your site some “link juice” or a measure of credibility, while a no-follow link does not.
A distinction every founder should understand when evaluating backlink quality.
We’ll explain no-follow links in more detail below. The most important thing to understand here is that follow links are valued differently. While no-follow links aren’t useless, follow links are far superior. So if you’re looking for a backlink manager to develop backlink strategies that will help improve your website ranking, make sure to get follow links as often as possible. Stick with follow backlinks from high-quality websites that will actually provide some link juice and help improve your SEO.
It can be tempting to purchase backlinks when you’re looking to improve your site’s ranking on Google. Unfortunately, this is a risky strategy that goes against Google’s guidelines and can backfire. If Google believes that you have artificially inflated your backlinks, it will penalize your site. This can result in your site being removed from Google’s search results altogether.
To improve your SEO, focus on developing high-quality content and building organic backlinks. These are links that are earned naturally through shared content and networking. While it takes more time and effort to build organic backlinks with the help of a SEO backlink agency, it’s worth it in the long run as they’ll help improve your site’s ranking without putting it at risk of being penalized.
There are three key ways an SEO agency typically will use backlink monitoring to measure progress in your rankings: domain authority, page authority, and the PageRank.
Let’s break them down to clarify how they compare and why they matter for growth-focused startups.
Domain authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engines. You can improve your website’s domain authority score by increasing the number of high-quality backlinks from other websites.
Page authority is a score (on a 100-point scale) developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page on a website will rank on search engines.
PageRank (with a capital P) is a vital component of the original algorithm that Larry Page, the founding CEO of Google, developed to determine a web page’s authority based on the count and quality of backlinks it contains. However, Google’s algorithms have since become more complex. Today, Google relies more heavily on domain authority.
Since you want to focus on the whole site rather than a single page to make meaningful progress in your ranking, we recommend paying closer attention to domain authority.
Especially if your goal is to increase organic inbound during a critical fundraising cycle.
There’s a lot of confusion about no-follow and follow links. So let’s set the record straight: no-follow links are simply links that don’t pass along as much link juice or equity to your site. For example, setting your blog comments to only leave no-follow links on your website will likely prevent desperate SEOs from spamming their clients links on your website.
So what’s the big deal? Well, if you’re trying to build up the search engine ranking of your site, then you’ll want to focus on getting as many high-quality follow backlinks as possible.
Unfortunately, most people only know how to get no-follow links, but you need both. That’s why backlink strategies that focus on building follow links are so valuable. They can help you get that search engine ranking boost you’re looking to achieve.
If you want your website to rank higher on Google and in the minds of prospective customers, backlinks are a must. But not just any old links will do. You need high-quality links from credible websites if you want to see real results.
That’s where Take the Stairs comes in. Take the Stairs is a backlink company with years of experience helping startup founders like yours build successful marketing strategies. Our SEO services and backlink packages can help you develop an effective backlink strategy that will increase your website’s credibility and drive more traffic your way.
Whether you’re prepping your pitch deck or launching a go-to-market strategy, we’re here to help.
Contact us today to get started!
Take control of your business strategy by setting a discovery meeting with Take the Stairs right now.
Schedule a Meeting"*" indicates required fields