Link Building is Relationship Building

If you're not using social media to promote your firm, you're missing out on a fair bit of business. Even if you aren't personally using social media, you could be building links online without knowing it. If you want those links to reveal positive things about your business, you're going to have to put in some work.

Julie Joyce, writing for Search Engine Journal, offered a couple of scenarios to illustrate this point. Say you're going on vacation and looking for a bed-and-breakfast in which to stay. If you're as sophisticated as most searchers today, you've learned that the first listing you hit didn't necessarily get there because it's the best of the lot. So you click around for some reviews, perhaps at sites such as Yelp. You find a place with mostly positive reviews and relatively few negative reviews, so you book your stay.

In our example, you thoroughly enjoy yourself. The food is yummy, your room is comfortable and home-like, the service is friendly and efficient, and the owner points you to some sightseeing gems you might have missed otherwise. You're so delighted that you write a glowing review in your blog, and link to the bed-and-breakfast's web page from your post.

What just happened? The business certainly didn't ask you for a link, but you gave it one anyway. As Joyce puts it, “They’ve done nothing but provide good service in order to get positive mentions, which led me to them, which led them to a link.”

There's a deeper message here. You will probably get links of one kind or another whether you want them or not, based on the kinds of relationships you have with your customers. You want those links to reflect positive relationships. After all, when was the last time you decided to patronize a business because you saw that it had more NEGATIVE reviews than positive ones?

But what can you do if you get negative reviews? Well, if you hear about them, you can actually become proactive and fix whatever problems the customer raised. You'll be surprised at how effective this can be. I'll talk about that more in a bit, but first, let's look at how you can get more active online.