When most people think about conversion rate optimisation, they quickly think of improvements for site engagement, signup and sales conversions. What most people fail to take into account is the site’s conversion rate for acquiring links. It’s amazing to see the amount of websites that engage in link building activities losing out on the opportunity to acquire links because their site’s content doesn’t compel the web user to link back to them.

In this post, I want you to consider the following factors which should improve the success rate of your link acquisitions.

Improve the site’s aesthetics

The way the website looks and feels should compel the person to have confidence in sharing your website’s content. This means ensuring that things like the site’s color scheme is appealing, that the site makes good use of high-resolution photos and that the typography suits your brand style.

Additionally, the website theme should come across professional. If there are pixels or coding errors that makes the content display incorrectly, this can trigger doubt in the mind of a person that would be prepared to share the content, thus making your site lose a valuable link opportunity.

Invest in publishing content that is valuable to your audience.

The value that your site’s content will turn the site into a link magnet. You will need to identify niche topics that your site can provide solutions for and promote the content to the relevant audience. Improve the quality of the content by providing information that they can take away in the form of:

  • Cheat sheets
  • Summary
  • Whitepapers
  • Videos
  • Audio playlists
  • Ebooks

Tell people to link to your website.

In an ideal world, people that like your web content will link to your content without even thinking. However, by telling people to share the content on their website and social media platforms, you will increase the likelihood of acquiring natural links to your site.

You can consider using plugins such as SumoMe, who’s pop-up widgets can be used to tell people to share the content across different web platforms.

Demonstrate credibility on your website.

The best thing that you can do to improve the credibility of your website is to demonstrate proof. People are prepared to follow the actions of other people. For example:

  • Demonstrate social proof by showing the amount of social likes and shares that your content receives.
  • Encourage people to comment on your content.
  • Tell people where your content has been featured. (I.e. As seen on example.com)

Minimize your site’s bounce rate.

The last thing you want is for people to bounce from your site without even giving it a chance. So it’s crucial that you optimise the site and the content to minimize the bounce rate as much as possible. Consider improving:

  • Your website’s loading time
  • Reducing image file sizes
  • Implementing Google AMP
  • Adding recommended viewing sources to keep people on the website.

You can click the following resource to learn more about reducing bounce rate.

What should you do next?

It’s important that your review the current link acquisition success of your site to see how improvements can be made. You can watch the video below that shows a CRO audit for link building.

Be honest during the audit. Boosting the success of your link acquisition rate from 2-10% can have a dramatic effect on your site’s SEO performance. Take a look and see how you can make improvements today!