Do you have a good network of business contacts and colleagues from a variety of industries? Most company owners and CEOs do. These networks are built up over time as a result of partnerships, mutually beneficial business deals, and supplier/customer relationships. A rolodex full of good business contacts is not a new concept.

Surprisingly however, many businesses fail to realise the importance of their business networks to SEO. So, now you are asking how on earth a list of business contacts could possibly give your search engine rankings a boost. We’ll show you how…

LinkedIn statistics released recently indicate that the majority of people will click through from a connection’s profile page and look at their website. So, if you have 500 world-wide business connections n LinkedIn, you can expect the majority of them to have looked at your website. Are you on LinkedIn?

Personal recommendations and genuine connections have been proven to be the biggest reason a person would choose a company over another. Rightly or wrongly, there is no getting away from it, who you know makes a huge difference, especially in business. And this is particularly true online where people are looking for companies they know they can trust.

The largest percentage of our business comes from personal recommendation or word of mouth from previous corporate clients.

Customers who come to you as a result of personal and commercial recommendations are far more likely to be good customers, after all, they have already decided, based upon an opinion they trust, that you are the best source for what they are looking for.

Now, form an SEO perspective, this means that you will see a marked increase in hits on your website form a diverse range of geographic locations and types of industry every time your company is recommended by one of your contacts. This is good news because from a search engines perspective, the broader your appeal, the more attractive you are as a prospect to appear everyone else’s search results.

Here’s a real example to illustrate this point inaction:

A printer has an excellent relationship with a paper mill. The paper mill has an excellent relationship with a number of publishers. The publishers are looking for a new printer so they ask the paper mill. The paper mill recommends their printer. That is exactly how business works. Now consider this – at each step of this scenario, someone needed to check one of these company’s websites!

Building your business network, maintaining it, and keeping it healthy will create a number of opportunities for you, not least of which is increased traffic to your site.