How to Check the Quality of External Links
One of my clients has an SEO expert on their marketing team, which is an amazing resource for me as a blog copywriter! This week, he shared some insights with me about ensuring the quality of the external links I choose for a given blog, and I think everyone needs to hear this.
What Are External Links?
External links (or outbound links) are any hyperlinks or backlinks that connect to a source outside of your website (internal links being those leading to different pages within your website). They are a great way to provide your audience with further information on a given subject, support fellow digital creators, and lend credibility to your authority in a space. They're also good for boosting your website's traffic by giving Google more information about your website and your quality!
Are External Links Good for SEO?
External links are an excellent tool for boosting the SEO ranking of your website! Although you don't want to encourage users to leave your website entirely, including a few external links in each blog post can help affirm the authority of your website. Google ranks content that users consider valuable, so anything that invests in your audience's trust is a worthwhile endeavor!
As like calls to like, so do high-quality pages link to other pages of high quality. This means if you're linking to high quality pages, you're telling Google that your blog content is of similar quality. Of course it's even better when a high quality site backlinks to you, but that level of link building takes a lot of time and established relationships to establish.
What Makes an External Link High Quality?
You don't want to just include random links in your blog without forethought. Not only will this be ineffective for SEO, but you'll lose the trust of your readers as they click these links and are unimpressed by the results. Here are a few things to look for when surveying external blog links for quality:
Blogs or articles should be no older than 1-2 years and no newer than 3-6 months
Links should connect to a reputable source that has authority in their industry/niche
The external link should connect to a website that posts regularly (at least 3-4 times per month!)
Don't link to direct competitors, either for page rankings or for your products/services
How Many External Links Should I Use?
If your blog involves a lot of research that requires reputable sources to back it up, use as many links as you need to in order to establish credibility for your research. If you're creating an affiliate link blog in which the main goal is to share several products, you'll also have a lot of outbound links. Otherwise, most blogs shouldn't need more than 1-3 external links. The rest of your links can be internal to other pages and blogs on your own website.
How to Track External Links in Google Analytics
Once you've begun implementing external links on your website, you can track how often those links are clicked using Google Analytics. This will help you improve your outbound linking over time as you study how users respond to the sources you share.
The #1 Reason to Include Outbound Links
Beyond benefits to your audience and your SEO ranking, by externally linking to fellow industry experts - and I mean that in the broad sense, not your direct competition - you're helping them with their own SEO ranking and credibility! Doing that increases the changes of one of them simultaneously linking back to you, which is a much stronger form of link building and boosting the ranking of your website.
The point of SEO is to share quality content with users that they'll actually want to see in search results, so taking the relationship-building approach will help you the most in the long term!
Need an SEO Audit?
I offer one-time website SEO audits specifically focused on helping your blogging to become more effective at growing your reach and search result rankings. If you need a jump start on your SEO blogging practice, contact me to book a free 30-minute call!
