Backlinks vs Reviews

Today’s newsletter will be a quick one — I want to explain the difference between reviews and link building and how they affect your website. When you are running an SEO campaign you ideally will have 2 different entities in the search engine results page. The first will be your Google Business Profile, the second will be your actual website.

Your Google Business Profile is what will populate in the map pack:

Your website is what will populate in the organic rankings:

Like I mentioned previously, the ideal scenario for small business owners is to optimize both of these. Both of them are types of digital real estate that will help get eyeballs on your website.

In recent months I have seen a lot of people confuse the purpose of backlinks and the purpose of reviews on your GBP. To put it as simple as possible:

Backlinks grow the authority of your website, while reviews grow the authority of your Google Business Profile.

There isn’t a lot of overlap between the two. Map Pack rankings and organic search rankings operate on completely different algorithms. All of SEO is simply giving these two algos what they want.

The quickest way to get reviews is really just asking for them. My pest control companies go door to door and offer free home sprays in exchange for a review. A client of mine who owns a dumpster rental company went door to door and offered to haul away trash or old items in their garage for free in exchange for a review. Get creative. Call all your old customers. Text your friends.

The quickest way to build backlinks is to buy them. Every SEO guru buys their links, whether they admit it or not. Our link-building service, Vineyard Links, has been killing it for dozens of clients so far. Learn more about our offer here:

We get lots of questions about our link-building packages so we recently opened up some time on our calendar to answer as many of these as possible. Book some time with us here: