Link building is obviously one of the most important steps in your journey towards achieving that perfect SEO score.
Based on the kind of business that you are involved with and based on your target customer, it is true that your SEO measures, as well as your Link building techniques, are going to differ. The practice of link building and the art of creating a great link profile can immensely help your business meet its end goals. Again, this end goal is going to differ from business to business, whether it is a B2B business or a B2C business.
Over the surface, we all know that building links helps in building relationships. These relationships are an important pursuit for the growth of any kind of business. Regardless of the fact of you being a B2B business or a B2C business, strong links will always help you earn a referral, which will stabilize or increase the traffic to your website; hence, more leads and more sales. Lastly, when you take care of your link building activities seriously, either as a B2B business or a B2C business, you help promote your brand.
Now that we have briefly discussed the relevance of link building for B2B business as well as a B2C business, it is time to ponder over the next obvious question: What is the difference between B2B and B2C link building tactics? Or is there is a wide difference between the tactics followed for the two? Can tactics for the two be interchangeably used? We will know as we move ahead in this blog post. However, before we jump into the meat of the blog post, here is a brief explanation about B2B business and B2C business.
B2B business vs B2C business
Here is the major difference between the two modes of business operation:
B2B business
B2B business stands for business-to-business. Under this kind of business, the transactions are being done between two businesses, that is, the sale of products and services between two or more businesses.
B2C business
B2C stands for business-to-consumer that is when a business is dealing directly with end-consumers to sell its products or services.
Understanding this key difference is important because as we mentioned earlier, based on the kind of business and your target customer, your SEO measures, as well as your link building techniques, will differ. So, now let’s talk about the key differences between B2B and B2C link building tactics.
Differences between B2B and B2C link building tactics
We all know that no business can thrive solely on the act of randomly asking other entities for backlinks. Based on their audience and the likes/dislikes of their respective audiences, these B2B and B2C businesses will have to pick up relevant tactics and trade them with relevant sites so that they can eventually create a very strong link profile.
So, let’s talk about the different approaches between the two.
B2B Link Building Tactics
- Based on the audience, a B2B audience is mainly composed of vendors, board members, and stakeholders. Now, these members from the audience will browse through B2B websites. Setting up a blog is a compulsion for B2B websites because they serve as the point of high-value information/solution source. Choosing a website/domain name from sources such as namefresh.com helps these businesses get the right address for their business offerings. In a B2B business, the audience is mainly looking for other businesses to trade in intangible technology, software, and services.
- Also, the lead count on B2B link campaigns will always drive a low volume over a definite period of time. This is mostly because of the fact that an average B2B transaction takes a lot of decision-making time. In that case, the completion of a transaction can take anywhere between 3-24 months. The long sales cycle has a huge effect on the link building tactics employed here.
- Link building for B2B business is primarily about doing the solid groundwork for putting together educational prospects for the B2B audience. This means that more emphasis is put on relevant sites that will educate prospects about the product or service offering.
- Link building in B2B business is comparatively more hard work. Hence, they are required to incorporate keywords from all levels of the buyer’s journey. Its primary motive is to reduce the time taken for decision making and complete the buyer’s cycle at the earliest.
- Influencer outreach, Infographics, White papers, eBooks, and guest posting in industry publications is a major link building tactic for B2B businesses. Most of the other content that B2B companies want to push through link building is about the product pages and our solutions pages. ‘Partners’ is also a great real estate for link building for B2B companies.
- Other popular B2B link building tactics include Wikipedia links, affiliate link building, forum posting, expert round-up articles, guest blogging, conference sponsorships, and HARO (Help a Reporter Out) among others.
- Forum posting is a great way to build your links as a B2B business. This is also a great way to provide insights to your target audience. However, the true motive here should be to help your forum audience and not plug your own site every time because this is going to create issues. Forums like Quora and Reddit are a great place to expand your link profile. Becoming a helpful contributor will help you scale your link profile to a great extent.
- LinkedIn, as a social platform, is the largest network of professionals on a single social media platform. B2B companies can effectively use it as a medium to target their audience and deliver relevant, informative content apart from link building.
B2C link building tactics
B2C link building is for the purpose of garnering everybody’s attention. This link building activity is done for the audience which is active on multiple social media channels. This audience has a lot of content to consume and as a result of this super tough competition among B2C marketers, garnering all the attention for the brand is the primary purpose.
In a B2C company, to be actually able to leverage the content on your website through a strategic yet personalized link building campaign is all the deal. The overall aim is to drive backlinks and increase rankings as the main goal. Since there is so much content to give out and so many resources to exchange links with, B2C links tend to grow at a faster rate.
- For B2C, the best link building tactic is to optimize links for all the primary social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. As a platform, Facebook holds a more significant value to B2C companies. B2C companies have been using Facebook to move the focus of the target customers on the company culture in order to represent your company’s brand and image.
- Link building strategy for B2C often tends to have a click-bait approach. Again, this is because of the unending competition and the duration of transactions that happen within minutes. Hence, there is no time to lose.
- Most successful link building strategy in B2C business is through brand affiliation which happens to be a huge part of successful link building. The brand affiliation tactic has come across as the ultimate conversion strategy. Brand affiliation > Link building > Strong SEO > Lead formation > Conversion > Sale > Brand loyalty
- In a B2C setup, product reviews work like a charm and can help a business garner a lot of authentic backlinks from sources that either put up genuine product reviews or paid ones. In this process, the name of the brand gets validated as well.
- Guest blogging can be a savior when you are looking to accomplish link building as a B2C business. Strategic guest blogging can work wonders for your business as blogs generate an average of 97% more inbound links and 55% more site visitors. Imagine the number of links that you can build with strategic guest blogging when done the right way.
Endnote
To be honest, there are a lot more B2B and B2C Link Building tactics that are widely used by marketers from around the world. However, in this blog post, our approach was to help you figure out the core idea behind the reason as to why there is a difference between B2B and B2C link building tactics and strategies. Also, the ones mentioned above are permissible by Google Algo and they won’t end up getting your website penalized. By this point in the article, we hope that you have managed to grasp the differences between B2B and B2C link building tactics and strategies.
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