How to get inbound links to your Audiology Website

Getting Your Votes

The Web is essentially a giant voting system, i.e. the sites with the most "votes" get to the top of the search engine results. There are of course many other factors that affect where a webpage shows up in search results but underpinning everything is the idea of votes, or as they are more commonly known: links.

A webpage with many links to it is seen by Google as being as page that contains good and reliable information, after all, people are linking to it so they all think it is worth looking at. 

Getting Links To Your Site

Obtaining links to your website and its webpages can be tough. Google has strict guidelines about links, you can't, for example, go out and purchase a thousand links to your site and expect it to shoot to the top of the search results. Even though there are many shady services that will sell you links I don't recommend you go down that route - it might work for a week or a month but eventually Google's bots will see you've cheated the game and penalise you heavily, either downvoting your website/webpage so it doesn't appear anywhere near the top or removing you from Google entirely. 

Fortunately, audiology practices are local businesses, they are attracting custom from people in the local area, which means that in Google they are only competing at the local level as well - in other words, they don't need to get more votes/links than all the other hearing aid related sites on the Web, they just need to get more than the others in their local area. Which makes things considerably easier.

Here's a few ideas about how you can generate some legitimate links to your practice's website.

Local Newspaper

Your local newspaper is always on the look out for interesting storys, if you've got an event coming up, are doing some charity work or something else newsworthy then you may be able to get an article in the paper's website that includes a link back to yours. 

Local Directories

There are many directory websites around the Web, which are basically lists of local services and amenities. An example of a local directory site in my area is http://www.touchoxford.com/. These sites often have strict rules around submissions as they don't want to be spammed by people looking for free links anywhere they can get them - having said that, it is worth creating submissions for your business in your local directories that includes your full business address and website details, the more places your details are found locally the better and if a link is made available by the directory then it is another vote for you.

Writing about hearing loss on other websites

You are blogging on your own website, right? Of course you are, but links can be obtained by writing and submitting articles to other websites that include a links back to yours. This is commonly known as guest posting and is something that has become so prevalent that Google has started to frown upon it, Google's attitude these days is that guest posting has become too easy a way to get links for free - even so, if you write the occasional guest article for a website that is relevant to yours it is still a winning strategy for a locally-focused website. 

Exchange links with other local businesses

If you know other business owners in your local area you could possibly agree to exchange links - in other words, they add a link to your website from theirs and you and one to theirs. This is not a great strategy and I would use it as a last resort if no links can be obtained from other means - a link from, say, the local butcher's website it not really relevant to hearing loss so the link does not really carry much weight in Google's view. Even so, if you can get one or two links this way it is still worth doing. 

Getting links can be really hard, fortunately as a local business you do not need to get many, often as little as three or four links to a website can be enough to make a real difference in search engine rankings.