Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Consequences of not having enough backlinks
If your site lacks backlinks, it may mean that key pages struggle to rank, especially for competitive keywords and phrases.
A lack of backlinks can also have an impact on how often search engines crawl your site. Search engines generally follow external links into your site. So, if you have fewer backlinks, they crawl your site less frequently.
Also, a lack of backlinks is probably going to have an impact on your referral traffic. If you’ve got less websites linking to you, you’re going to get less referral traffic.
Consequences of having a lack of quality backlinks
When you rely on a large volume of low-quality backlinks, it tends to be a telltale sign that you’re doing things in an unnatural way. This could be seen as ‘spammy’ and may lead to a search engine penalty.
If you have a lack of quality backlinks, it can lead to search engines regarding your content as less important and ranking it lower in search engines.
Also, as Google becomes more sophisticated, it’s all about quality. The quality of backlinks is more important than the volume alone.
So, plan for authoritative, and relevant backlinks in your industry.
Absence of backlinks
When you have an absence of backlinks, it’s obviously not a good thing at all! Sometimes that happens when you focus too much on transactional content or sales pages. So, try and think about how you can create link-worthy content that will be shared on social media and linked from other websites.
Research your competitors. See what they’re doing, get some ideas and inspiration from them, and then replicate backlinks that are relevant.
Also, proactively encourage other website owners to link to your site. If someone mentions you on their website but they don’t link to you, ask them to do it. You can set up brand monitoring to help with this either through Google Alerts, which is free, or through a premium all-in-one SEO tool provider.
Back to TopNikki Lam
Nikki Lam is Senior Director of SEO at Neil Patel Digital, where she oversees the Organic Search offering, leads a growing team of over 20 passionate Search strategists, and assists in award-winning SEO campaigns for NP’s growing roster of enterprise and Fortune 1000 clients.
Matthew Santos
Matthew Santos is the Vice President of Products & Strategy at Neil Patel Accel. He initially built the four major product offerings they provide to customers, and continues to oversee three of those: SEO, CRO, and Email Marketing. He has been in the industry for almost 10 years, primarily focused on Earned Media digital tactics.
Neil Patel
Neil Patel is the co-founder of NP Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.
Joe Williams
Joe Williams teaches search engine optimization at Joe Wills. He holds a degree in Computing Informatics, and he’s been an SEO specialist for over 15 years. He’s consulted and trained many large blue-chip companies including The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, and Sky. He's on a mission to make SEO easy, fun, and profitable. You can catch him on X and LinkedIn.
