Going Beyond Backlinks: Harnessing the Power of Shallow Link Building
When you think of link building, you might think of it as a way to build bridges between web pages for easy access and connectivity. It’s like trap doors and secret alleyways in the mansion of your SEO strategy, connecting your website to other reputable and influential destinations on the internet. These connections—also called backlinks—drive more visitors to your site to boost its credibility and visibility in search engines.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? That’s you and 58% of businesses that believe backlinks directly impact their SERP rankings for the better.
But while focusing on outbound links and backlinks from high-domain platforms is key, it’s also important to keep an eye out for the little guy: shallow links.
Recommended Read: The Impact of Link Building Services on Domain Authority and Trustworthiness
What’s the Down-low on Shallow Link Building?
Now we know the name sounds like it’s doing more harm than good, but shallow links are actually the cherry on top of all your efforts and link building services.
They allow you to link to deeper pages on your website—kind of ironic, right? Let us explain.
A shallow link is a hyperlink or URL that directly navigates to a specific page or content within an app or website, bypassing the homepage. This allows users to access specific information or perform actions without going through the main entry point.
Since Google ranks individual web pages, not the whole website, it’s crucial to have optimized inbound links that direct to each specific page to boost it.
If you don’t use shallow links effectively, your individual web pages will lack key SEO elements and fail to perform well or generate traffic, thus hurting your overall efforts.
Shallow links work by creating strategic inbound links within and to your own website, promoting the specific product, service, or content you want to highlight.
Simple enough, right?
Let’s get into how shallow links can work in your favor and how you can hire our link building services to get ahead.
Utilizing the Potential of Shallow Links—Here’s How You Go About It
In order to truly leverage the value and potential of shallow links listed above, you’ll need a comprehensive strategy in place.
That means you should aim to diversify your link-building approach to:
- Include different types of inbound and outbound links
- Add backlinks from high quality domain sources
- Optimize and embed them efficiently.
1. Digging Deep to Find Shallow Links
Based on insights from Databox, 42% of marketers spend the same amount of time on developing both internal and external links.
Our link building services start with a backlink audit and detailed evaluation of all the outbound and inbound links connected to your website. We use that to identify and filter out all shallow links connected to your home page so we can work on optimizing them for maximum benefit
Recommended Read: A Quick 8-Step Backlink Audit Guide
Once you’ve got all your shallow links identified and narrowed down, what comes next?
We move on to fixing them.
2. Upgrading Your Shallow Links
The main goal is to make your shallow links work for your website rather than letting them exist as they are.
You should be upgrading them to increase your home page’s domain authority. Go link by link, targeting the most significant and valuable leads to update their inbound links for your site.
You may need to engage in extensive outreach for already published content or double down on your content creation strategy and organically add internal links for various pages on your website.
It’s time-consuming and arduous, but definitely worth it to reach out to directories, guest post sites, and other platforms. Take, for instance, Delaughter Bail Bonds, which experienced incredibly flat website traffic. That’s until they hired our link building services.
Despite having high-quality content published to third-party websites like Quora, their strategy fell short.
Why? Shallow links are, in part, to blame.
Source: Quora Article https://blog-delaughterbailbonds.quora.com/An-Essential-Guide-to-Understanding-Bail-Bonds
You can see the internal links for their website in multiple places, including the anchor text ‘bail bonds agency’ and ‘affordable bail bonds service,’—yet both links connect to their homepage at https://delaughterbailbonds.com/.
So what did our professional link building service do? We upgraded their strategy to diversify it and doubled down on shallow links leading to a 736% increase in website traffic.
3. Focusing on the Quality of Shallow Links
It can be challenging to draw the line when it comes to how many shallow links you should be using because you want to avoid the pitfalls of over optimization—a mistake that hurts more businesses than we realize.
Don’t mistake shallow links for spammy links.
The goal isn’t just to increase the number of inbound internal links; it’s to focus on the quality of those links. You want to redirect readers to web pages where they will find more information, specific products, or service information related to the topic at hand.
The trick is to balance the presence of shallow links and specific, purposeful, and value-adding pages on your website for a deeper dive into the content available. Each link that you embed into the text should expand on what readers are searching for, and an added bonus is to pair it with effective anchor text.
For instance, you’ve published a Guest Blog about your hottest-selling product to a high-domain website, but all internal links point toward the home page. It’s actually limiting the effectiveness of the guest blog in driving traffic and conversions for your hottest-selling product. Without specific shallow links to the product page or relevant content, visitors may find it difficult to navigate directly to the desired information. And, of course, that leads to missed opportunities for showcasing and promoting your product to potential customers.
To optimize the impact of your guest blog, you should include relevant internal links that direct readers to specific product pages or related content, enhancing the chances of driving engagement and conversions. This will complement your overall link-building strategy and help you leverage the advantages of shallow links simultaneously.
4. Quick Tips to Improve Shallow Links
Like we said before, you need to know how to use shallow links effectively as part of your backlink building services. Identify which sub-pages you want to focus on most, and request your writers and content services to add it to the on- and off-site content.
This will help create a sense of direction for the type of content our team will generate, and we can also provide recommendations for doing so.
Using high-ranking keywords as anchor text that leads to your inner pages is another great tip, and it’s important to understand the limitation that they pose too. Shallow links, while integral to your link building strategy, must be relevant, context-specific, and eye-catching.
Overall, your website will require a unique shallow link strategy that our professional link building experts can help you identify.
Recommended Read: Top 3 Link Building Mistakes To Avoid in 2023
Sink Your Shallow Links Deeper with Our Help
Improve your strategy when you hire our link building services.
At Search Berg, our SEO experts have access to the best audit tools, link building strategies, and the most extensive, comprehensive, and well-rounded techniques to improve your business’s presence.
Not only will we help you identify common mistakes in your strategy, but we will upgrade and enhance all of your backlinks to direct more high-value, organic traffic and leads. Reach out to us to set up a consultation and get started with a free website audit!
For more interesting link building strategies, here’s a video you can check out:
