The importance of being present online
Everyone wants to be confident they’re making the right decision. In the life sciences, decision-making often begins with talking with your lab mates, principal investigator, or your collaborators on what you should do next. In fact, as our past interviewee (check out our interview here) notes on his website, over 60% of the buyer’s journey happens before a prospect ever talks to a sales team.
Where does that 60% come from? Think back to your time at the lab. Your lab colleagues said something about a technology that helped you decide in favour of buying a specific piece of equipment. Or perhaps you found out a company was exhibiting at a conference and you chatted with them there. Your literature review may have also used new approaches to answer a research question.
If I’m on the ball with this, you probably learned all that through an internet search. And on the internet, we could call each of the links you clicked on during your search a backlink.
And so, we begin with this one fact:
ONLINE AUTHORITY IS BUILT ON THE BACKS OF BACKLINKS
It’s the website’s version of word-of-mouth put on a global scale. Whereas in-person chatter can spread within a neighbourhood or a city, online chatter spreads worldwide.Â
The ease with which the internet can spread an idea — just consider the spread of online misinformation — means that you have a massive opportunity to address important buyer questions and filter out any misconceptions about your technology in one fell swoop.Â
And you can get started by integrating backlinks into your content strataegy.
This blog will introduce backlinks in the context of life sciences research. We’ll discuss what backlinks are, how you can use backlinks to build authority worldwide, and how you can start adding backlinks to your website.
What are backlinks?
Backlinks are any links from another website that point back to your site. By links, I’m referring to something like this. Note that internal links are not backlinks. The one I shared of our interview with Harrison Waid of Succession.bio is an internal link.Â
The distinction between the two is important because their goals are different. When you add internal links, your goal is to keep viewers surfing through your website for longer periods of time. With backlinks, you’re aiming to draw people onto your website. We’ll talk more about internal links in another blog post.
Types of backlinks in the life sciences industry
In the life sciences industry, not all backlinks are created equal. Each backlink holds unique functions that facilitate conversations in the life sciences. Which backlink you use will depend on what goals you’re seeking to accomplish. Whether it’s for external recognition, sharing major announcements, or answering user-specific inquiries about your research, backlinks help you build authority to your various stakeholders.
Before you scan through the types of backlinks, remember one thing:
HOW YOUR BACKLINKS SERVE YOUR GOALS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN HOW MANY YOU OBTAIN
Here are the most common places where you can find backlinks:
- Editorials and academic publications: these are arguably the best kind of backlink. High-quality and reputable publications quoting you without prompting shows that your content answers important questions that your customers are asking. For a technology provider, this would manifest as a manuscript that acknowledged using their instruments with a backlink to the company’s website.
- Guest posts: backlinks by featuring on another content platform can also boost authority, especially if it provides you with access to your target audience. Paper and digital publications such as Drug Discovery World, Biocompare, and Fierce Biotech are great platforms for life science teams to discuss the future of drug development, for example.Â
- Press releases: several websites (e.g. Businesswire) also distribute press releases to bolster investor relations. These offer opportunities for companies to announce their latest breakthroughs. By publishing major news, you can also include more backlinks to your website are part of publishing a press release.
- Social media: whenever you create a social media post, you can direct viewers to your website, whether in the comments section (for LinkedIn), the video description (YouTube, podcasts), or the original post (Instagram). These posts are now searchable on search engines, enhancing the reach of any shared backlinks. Backlinks produced this way are more useful when posted by others recommending your content.Â
- Online forums:Â websites that contain message boards have been adopted as a separate search tab on Google since 2022. Forums enriched with your target audience and who provide backlinks to your website provide additional authority to your products and services, especially if their feedback is positive and unprovoked.Â
- Webinars: live, online events that are searchable online also offer additional opportunities to add backlinks. They can be placed during the webinar or on the video description if done on YouTube.
How to obtain backlinks the right way
Contrary to popular belief, there is a right way to produce backlinks. Using dubious methods, such as link farms, private blog networks (PBNs), or low-quality directories to artificially boost backlink counts will only hurt your chances of getting ranked. These approaches typically harness spam comments, paid links, and automated link building efforts, all of which Google and other search engines penalize.
The more sustainable approach involves considering the following principles when building backlinks for your website:
- Secure the scientific merits of your research: Obtaining backlinks organically requires time. More importantly, it also requires your work to be scientifically rigorous and valuable to your customers. To speak with scientists, get published in high-impact journals such as Nature and Cell. If possible, consider making your research open access. Supplement any other content you produce with testimonials and case studies that relate your product’s technical capabilities with their .
- Don’t waste your major achievements:Â Any major news, milestones, or awards you have are goldmines of content that build your authority. Use it to be mentioned in press release platforms such as BusinessWire, or become featured in news reports from major news outlets. Also combine it with the Content Fuel Framework (learn more here) to discuss their significance and how it will help your business goals.Â
- Consistently publish useful content: A single spark can easily flicker and fade when a consistent fire can’t be produced or maintained. The same applies to content. The internet is all about trends, and you’ll want to get mentioned as much as possible online. Consider hosting webinars that your colleagues will share, getting featured on trade publications, or connecting with science journalists in need of a big scoop to start. You can also engage with agencies such as GenoWrite to plan and create enough content to stay relevant online and offline.
Build your backlinks!
Backlinks are the internet’s currency of choice for authority and experience. The more references you receive for your content, the more authority you’ll build. You can obtain backlinks in many ways, but the ones that grow your business best will be those obtained through word of mouth and organic leads.
Regardless of the backlinks you develop, none of them will shorten your sales cycles like having content tailored to address your customers’ biggest concerns. If many of your leads are outside your target audience or still asking questions that you believe you already addressed, consider examining whether your backlinks do the job you expected.Â
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This article will be the first in a series that introduces the strategic value that backlinks have towards building a targeted lead generation approach. In the next article, we’ll delve deeper into best practices for harnessing these backlinks to steer your sales conversations towards adoption rather than restating basic facts of your value proposition.
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