This is an absolutely crucial part of your online strategy, no matter what market you’re restaurant is in.

Backlink Basics you Need to Know

A lot of business owners are confused about what backlinks are. If you’re trying to rank your restaurant website, it’s important to know what backlinks are. They really are the secret sauce that Google figured out 20 years ago, which made them Google. It’s still one of the highest ranking factors. So what is a backlink and why do they matter? 

Backlinks are when somebody else’s website links to your website. Meaning on their website they have got a little blue link and when you click it you will go to your website. So let’s take a look at the screen share that I made for you and talk a little bit more about what backlinks are.

(See Video)

Moz Demo

So right here, I’m on a website called Moz and it talks about what backlinks are. A backlink is a link created when one website links to another. Backlinks are also called inbound links or incoming links, and backlinks are important to SEO.

If somebody else has a website and they mention your website on theirs with a link back to your site, thats a backlink. You’ll know if it’s a link if there’s a little blue link and you click on that link, it takes you to your website.

Why do Backlinks Matter?

Now, the reason why backlinks are so important is because Google figured out a long time ago that instead of looking at the target website (your website) and what you say about yourself like: “We’re great. Here’s how to find us. Here’s our location. Here’s all the food that we have.” Instead of ranking you based on what you say about you, they should look at what other people are saying about you. They figured out that that the more people (websites) that are talking about you, the more popular your website is.

It’s kind of a social popularity contest and we think of links like votes. In this way, when you see someone walking down the street, say a rock star and they’ve got a big entourage, the entourage is what makes them the rock star. It’s all the social proof. So the more links you have pointing to your website, the better. 

Backlinks are especially valuable for SEO because they represent the vote of confidence from one site to another. In essence, backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines like Google that other people, or other websites vouch for your content. If many sites link to the same website or webpage, search engines can infer that content is worth linking to, and therefore also worth serving on a search engine result page.

So earning these backlinks can have a positive effect on a site’s ranking position on searches, visibility. Now there’s a lot of different things that help you rank for your type of cuisine in your area. There’s a lot of things that make your website go up to the top of Google. Backlinks is still one of the most important things to do. So let’s take a look at some backlinks on another website and you’ll get a better sense of what these are.

Backlink Examples

So right here in Google, I have typed in the best restaurants in the world, and here is a website called eater.com and it lists the world’s 50 best restaurants 2019, the full list of winners. And if we scroll down here, these actually are all links, the red links that we see. But if we scroll down here we see Mes Amour in France. When you hover over this, you see down there at the bottom left hand side of the screen, their little website coming up, Mes Amour.

And if we click on that, it will actually take us to their website. Okay, let’s go back and take a look at another one. Here, Central in Lima, Peru. So again, if we come and hover over this link right here and we click on it, it’s going to take us to Central. Okay. And so Central has a backlink from eater.com and it is helping Central rank a lot better in the search engines.

How do you get Backlinks?

So how do you get backlinks? Well, Google says that you need to create really great content on your website, but there are ways to go get them. You can go ask other website owners, you can do guest blogging on other websites. Your Facebook page does actually have a link back to your website, YouTube, all of these things. When you put your website in the profile, it has got a backlink to your website and that is how your website starts to rank higher and higher.

All things being the same, if you have a website that’s exactly like somebody else’s, and they’ve got 50 back links and you’ve got 20, they are going to rank higher than you do.

So part of the job with SEO and getting your restaurant website to the top of Google is to get as many backlinks as possible.