The COVID-19 pandemic forced many companies to quickly adapt to new business models. With physical offices and stores gone in lockdown, there was no other way but to employ modern means of e-commerce more widely. Frankly speaking, global trends were following that direction anyway, but the events of 2020 just speeded them up a bit.
Not a big deal actually, as there are probably millions of companies (including startups all around the world) with business models grounded predominantly on intangible assets. A certain object of intellectual property or a service to offer, and a website serving as a platform to meet with customers - that’s basically all. The main goal is to make your product more recognizable and distinguished from what is offered by competitors.
The second goal (although they are connected) is to attract more people to where they become aware of your offers - the business website. You won’t have successful sales figures if your product is of low quality, that’s understandable. But the risk of going out of business is high even with high-quality offers if there is no one to purchase in the first place.
Driving Traffic to Your Business Website
That’s why there are so many publications on the Web with recommendations on how to get as much organic traffic as possible. The whole activity on which modern companies spend million dollar budgets is called search engine optimization. Who would have thought two decades ago or so that sales ratios would directly depend on the website’s current rank in Google's search engine?
Here is a couple of good ways to increase it and attract more potential customers to your website:
1. Choose dofollow backlinks. One should be careful, though, because after last year’s changes in its ranking policy Google now actually recommends using the “nofollow” attribute because it better serves as a ranking marker for web crawlers. There followed big confusion among SEO managers who wanted to know whether they would now be punished for choosing the “dofollow” parameter as they’d used to.
Well, “yes and no” is the correct and short answer. Like Semrush explains in its article of November 2020, Google was to exercise a relatively harsh penalty policy now on for anything unusual, meaning unnatural, by which the company implies:
Paid links,
Links excessively “wired” with keywords,
Automatically built links, or
Links acquired in exchange.
For anything which may potentially be seen as unnatural, it is indeed recommended to put the “nofollow” parameter which serves as an indication for web crawlers not to follow it. On the other hand, a large portfolio of dofollow backlinks from relevant and highly ranked websites will increase your traffic, thus raising awareness of your product among its target audience.
2. Getting guest posts. Another widely recognized and indispensable type of “digital PR”. Advertising a business website as a sales platform implies naming it somewhere else in the Internet space, right? The problem is that today it’s impossible to start throwing it here and there simply for the sake of being mentioned more often.
Some might still remember the times when there were blank pages existing only to aggregate hundreds of virtually unrelated links leading to external sites. Until Google put it all under tough regulation, the paid scheme was used to increase ratings because web crawlers could still see them and count every mention. It doesn’t work like that anymore.
Today search engine managers choose platforms for publication carefully because the website has to bear relevant content to make the placement reasonable. A good idea is to start sifting through possible guest websites with relevant keywords. The way Google now arranges news and articles in its search results (which has been different since the end of August 2021), results generated by keywords search better reflect the pages’ content because they are now less dependent on specifics of the users’ queries.
It is thus more probable to find a relevant website with the same keywords as yours and with a potentially relevant audience, although the latter isn’t necessary. What should be a concern in the first place is relevance of the chosen post subject. The point is to make it worthy of guest posting to attract readers to your website: it can be, for example, an article on risk management, while you could be offering IT consulting services, searching for new customers among the readers.
There are several ways to get backlinks with blog posts. Getting them in large quantities would likely require using specialized web tools not only for building, but also for checking the status and monitoring of backlinks (including your competitors’).
There are whole databases of blogs which may be used as a source, but their quality is sometimes questionable. On the other hand, a truly “hand-made” solution requires getting in touch with a webmaster of a relevant and preferably highly ranked website for bargaining so that each of you could benefit from this cooperation in one form or another.
Guest Posts with Dofollow Backlinks Bring You Customers
That’s basically all a beginner SEO manager should care for. Sounds easy, but “the devil is in the details” as usual. Even bargaining terms upon which you may have settled with the owner of a website you want for guest posting may later turn out badly because of Google's attitude towards prepaid links or links exchange practices.
One of the ways to protect yourself is to place the “nofollow” parameter in case you’ve purchased a large pack of backlinks, or simply not sure. Doing that still wouldn’t prevent users from clicking it.