Content
What are the benefits of linkbait?
What types of linkbait are there?
How can I measure the success of my linkbait?
What is the benefit of a linkbait?
Backlinks are an important off-page ranking factor. The more high-quality backlinks point to a page, the higher the trust in this page. Google regards backlinks as recommendations and will consider pages with more high-quality backlinks to be more relevant. (Other search engines such as Bing or Yahoo! also value backlinks)
However, it is not that easy to get links to your own site. You should avoid buying links, as this is against Google's guidelines. To get as many people as possible to link to your site, you should offer content that is worth linking to. You can do this with a linkbait: Create content that is interesting, funny, unique or useful and spread it around the web.
What types of linkbait are there?
In principle, any type of content can be a linkbait. Viral videos, for example, are mainly shared on social media. They are usually funny, curious, polarizing or otherwise generate an emotional reaction in the viewer. The desire to share such content is inherent in humans.
Further examples:
- Free tools
- Free e-books
- Infographics
- Tutorials
- Sweepstakes
- Top 10 enumerations and other lists
How can I measure the success of my linkbait?
If you have placed the linkbait, e.g. a free tool, on one of your subpages, you can use the Google Search Console to check how many links have been placed to this URL. However, you should not rely 100% on these figures. However, this is always a good guide. There are paid tools that work much more accurately and even provide an evaluation of the link - after all, quality counts more than quantity.
If you offer an e-book or something else for download, you can use Google Analytics to measure the number of downloads or clicks. These figures are much more accurate than those from the Search Console.
If you are running a competition, you can measure the number of participants. Incidentally, this is also a good way of obtaining the email addresses of potential customers.
If you evaluate your content in social media such as Facebook, you can measure the reach and number of shares.
If you would like to be successful with a linkbait yourself, the SEO team at arocom will be happy to support you. Get in touch with us!
