Backlinks vs Citations: Boosting SEO for Small Businesses
- The Digital Perch
- Jul 16
- 3 min read
When digital marketing agencies like The Digital Perch talk to clients about SEO services, one of the possible discussions may revolve around backlinks. SEO experts know that search engines like Google value backlinks to websites to help them determine if it should rank in top search result pages (SERPs).
What are backlinks & why are they important?
A backlink is a link...
But even though Google is constantly evolving into what it considers rank-worth websites, backlinks remain one of the important (if not increasingly important) efforts you can do to help your website rank on top organic results.
Here's what you need to know about backlinks: quality over quantity, but quantity is still the goal.
It's like having reviews on your Google Business Profile (which, by the way, is another important ranking factor for your GBP specifically). Google — and users — want to see as many reviews as possible on your GBP, but the higher rating they see, the higher likelihood they will consider your business, hence the better chance it has to rank higher on organic results.
The higher quality backlinks you have to your website (domain authority over 40), the better credibility your website will have in the eyes of Google for ranking purposes. The more DA 40+ websites you have backlinking to your website, your ranking can be dramatically improved over time.
What are SEO citations & why are they important?
No, it's not a ticket served to you by a cop. A citation in the world of SEO is..
With the ever evolving algorithms for search engines like Google, it is known (or presumed backed by vague research) that citations are no longer holding much weight in helping websites rank.
Read that again... "much weight."
Marketers and even small business owners read that and think, "Oh it's not important anymore, so let's focus on other things instead." While that is logical, especially when time is limited, it can be a costly mistake (in my professional opinion).
Here's the way I look at it — it can't hurt by continuing to do citation efforts; it can only help.
So, why would I NOT continue citation efforts, if it meant it could possibly help my SEO rankings over time? Maybe it's small cakes compared to all other SEO efforts nowadays. But I say, why not do them all if you have the time, resources (including services like The Digital Perch) and desire to actually keep moving the needle over time.
Free Business Directories
It's difficult to find actually FREE website directory listings for small businesses without a catch, but to make it easy, here are a few you can use that are:
Backlink Gap Analysis
Many marketing companies like The Digital Perch have professional software and tools like SEMRush that allow us to run Backlink Gap Analysis reports.
Essentially this allows us to add competitor websites in comparison with the client website, and it will run a spreadsheet that shows all the unique backlinks that each website has backlinked, and where the "gaps" are (i.e. if the client has 0 links from that website, but competitor Joe has 2 links from that website).
This helps us determine which sites we can consider going after to build links on. While some of these links may require payment of some form (i.e. membership, pay for links, backlink service, etc), you may come across some free backlink sites that are worth pursuing.
Need Help Building Backlinks to Boost SEO?
Contact The Digital Perch today!
