Surveys and Links

Link building is one of those things that needs to be on every webmaster’s to do list. It is a critical component to any online promotion campaign. The search engines love them and your visitors do too. Most non technical business owners agree with me when I explain linking and its benefits to their website/business.  The problem always comes down to, where do we get links? how much is going to cost?

One of benefits of local search marketing is that is a natural link building tool. A lot of what you can do for local search will create links to your website, thus providing more avenues for local searchers to find your business.

Debra Mastaler, wrote a nice article the other day, Customer Surveys: A Powerful Link Building Tool, which I wanted to point out. The article is not written specifically to local searches but I thought her points were good. It might get a bit technical but the overall message should makes sense.

Debra uses surveys to find places to get links for customers and uses them also to attact links to the business site.

“Surveys are versatile little things. Don’t just think of them as information collectors: they can also be used to make content viral….. Offering valuable giveaways and incentives in exchange for taking a survey increases the chance the survey will be passed and linked to.”

“Survey results are highly desirable to the blogging and business community since they provide verifiable evidence and substantial content”

As I tell clients, set up a survey and/or a customer feedback form. These are great tools to interact with customers, provide insight to customer concerns, trends, etc, and can create traffic and links.