Benefits of Backlinks (10 Advantages for SEO & Traffic)

In this article, you’ll learn about the top benefits of backlinks in SEO.

As you’ll discover below, there are many advantages of backlinks that apply both directly and indirectly during a link building campaign.

Although the most common backlink benefits are improved search engine optimization and rankings, there are many other ways inbound links can help with your digital marketing strategy. This guide will cover those backlink advantages as well so you can fully understand how important backlinks are for your business.

Benefits of Backlinks

1. Improved SEO Benefit

The top benefit of backlinks is that your website will have improved off-page SEO metrics. Google’s ranking algorithm measures the quality and number of incoming links in your website’s backlink profile, and the more quality backlinks you can get, the better your overall SEO score will be.

2. Increased Rankings

Increased rankings in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing is another one of the top backlink benefits you can receive when you get high quality links to your website. And for some website owners, this is the most important factor out of all of the other items mentioned on this list.

Google’s ranking algorithm is based on a system called PageRank. And the core element of that algorithm is the incoming links to a web page. The value assigned to a page is measured through its popularity and that’s what helps determine the order in which the URL ranks in the search engine results page (SERP) for relevant queries (or keywords).

3. More Search Engine Visibility

As your keyword rankings increase, the more visibility your content will get on the search engines. Also, higher-ranking web pages tend to rank for more keywords in total. So, another positive benefit of backlinks in SEO is that your content can get discovered by a wider range of search queries that you may have specifically targeted through on-page SEO.

4. Backlink Referral Traffic

The advantage of backlinks doesn’t just apply to getting more direct traffic from search engines. A good backlink can also send referral traffic to your website in an indirect manner. This occurs when people click on links in an article or blog post and land on the web page of another website.

One of the best benefits of referral traffic from backlinks is that it includes visitors who are interested to learn more about your content. A good backlink on a quality website can increase awareness for your brand without you having to compete directly in the SERPs for user clicks.

5. More Revenue

If you combine the first four advantages of backlinks mentioned together, you can quickly understand how inbound links can lead to more revenue for your business. As your website gains higher rankings and visibility in the SERPs, and more people click on the links in other articles to view your content, the total number of visitors who land on your site increases.

That, in turn, can lead to a higher percentage of people who buy your products and services. So backlinks can be a driving force in the top line revenue of your business when you build links effectively during an SEO campaign.

6. Higher Domain Authority

As mentioned in this guide on the benefits of link building, there are a number of SEO metrics that experts take into consideration when measuring the quality of a website. And one of those key factors is called Domain Authority, which is a scoring factor that estimates the strength of the entire website.

An important part of the Domain Authority (or DA) is the quality and number of inbound links. DA was developed by a company called Moz and scores range from 1 to 100, with higher DA scores indicating a better possibility of ranking in the SERPs for a specific website.

7. Higher Page Authority

Another popular SEO scoring metric that’s based on backlinks is called Page Authority (or PA). PA was also created by Moz and it measures the strength of a URL on the page level; not the domain level like Domain Authority. Page Authority scores range from 1 to 100, with higher PA scores indicating a better possibility of a web page ranking in the SERPs for its target search queries.

8. More Brand Awareness

An important benefit of backlinks in SEO for both new and established websites is brand awareness. And branding can be a key element for driving consumers’ decisions when differentiating between competing businesses. In other words, the brand that has the most awareness often wins the attention of consumers and makes more sales.

When your website has backlinks from high authority websites in your niche, and lots of them, you can experience an increase in brand authority for your company. Consumers who find your brand and links showing up over and over again on related websites will typically associate your company with having a larger market share; even if it doesn’t necessarily have that yet.

9. Improved Credibility

Backlinks also have the advantage of creating more credibility for your business. That’s because links on other websites serve as third-party indicators (or votes) for both consumers and search engine algorithms to consider when ranking your web pages.

For example, Google’s mission for Search is to provide users with the most relevant results. And to do that well, it needs to analyze each web page in its index to find out which URLs are the most popular and important for a particular search query. And when Google ranks your content high in the SERPs, it adds credibility to your brand in the eyes of the searchers. See this related guide on the advantages of SEO that expands on this topic.

10. Continous Promotion

A final advantage of backlinks is continuous promotion. Backlinks can help keep the flywheel spinning for SEO campaigns long after the initial link was acquired. A good quality backlink will continue to send referral traffic and help the target web page rank higher in the search engines for its keywords.

You can think of backlinks as a free source of ongoing digital marketing you don’t have to pay for once they’ve been established. And for some websites, after they’ve received a large number of inbound links, they don’t have to do any more active link building. The backlinks that make up their website’s link profile are strong enough to help the content across the entire domain rank in the search engines for its target queries. See this related page with examples of backlinks.

Benefits of Backlinks Summary

I hoped you enjoyed this guide on the benefits of backlinks.

As you discovered, there are numerous backlink benefits you can experience as a website owner. The most obvious advantages are higher search engine rankings and visibility on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. However, another key advantage of backlinks is referral traffic from other websites, which you should take into consideration during an SEO link building campaign. When used properly, backlinks can improve your website’s SEO metrics as well as increase brand awareness and revenue.