If you’re in charge of marketing your pet business or veterinary practice, I encourage you to think about adding a link strategy to your online marketing toolbox if you haven’t already done so.
The reason is, inbound links from other websites — especially high-quality websites with lots of healthy, relevant traffic — are a major part of the SEO (search-engine optimization) formula for ranking your site well.
Google and other search engines consider quality inbound links to be a strong indicator that your site is a helpful site worth ranking above others.
Louie and Bentley, getting along nicely – representing a smart pet-business strategy for SEO quality links
This is why it’s important to have a clear linking plan… starting with these key questions:
- Which websites reach the same types of customers you’d like to reach?
- Are you making the most of pet-industry associations, where there are hundreds of businesses that might align beautifully with yours?
- Are there local community websites that would be ideal for exposure to your local business?
Once you’ve identified high-quality, relevant websites for your business, the next step is to reach out to them and see what opportunities there are for linking back and forth (known as reciprocal links, a.k.a. “You link to me, I’ll link to you”).
Reciprocated linking = opportunities for you
When you consider that a quality inbound link is similar to a great referral or endorsement of your business, why wouldn’t you take the time to establish relationships with organizations that reach your prospects?
For example, I’ve been very happy and honored to join and participate in pet-business organizations and veterinary groups such as Women in the Pet Industry, the BlogPaws Community, and many others. As an active promoter of their sites, I’m finding opportunities to share links back and forth… all for the good of my business AND theirs. I’ve met some wonderful allies that I never would have known if I hadn’t become part of their communities. It’s a nice win-win for all!
It also works well with individual businesses. For example, I include a link to my client websites so they get some inbound links from me. It’s my pleasure to feature their companies on my site. I do the same on my Pet Marketing Resources page. To me, the more links, the merrier. And remember, it goes both ways.
Let me know if you feel we should be linking to each other.
Until next time, here’s to a prosperous pet website!
Pam Foster
PetCopywriter.com
