Offering good products and services will never be enough for local businesses. They need to establish their brand online through effective digital marketing campaigns. One of the best strategies to include in your initiative is search engine optimization (SEO).
While SEO is composed of different moving parts, there are two ranking factors you should focus on: content and links. And in this article, we'll look at how developing a local link building strategy from the start is a great way to build search engine visibility. Let's go!
What Is Local Link Building?
Local link building is the practice of local businesses acquiring inbound links from authoritative websites to increase their search engine rankings for local keywords. This keyword type usually possesses the search phrase (normally a commercial intent keyword) and location, e.g., "personal injury lawyer Miami."
So, instead of building links for sites with a broad audience, local links are those from websites that cater to a crowd in a specific location. As ranking factors, building links from local websites relevant to your service areas helps the site rank for its geo-specific search terms.
Why Is Local Link Building Important?
Aside from ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) for local keywords, employing the correct local link building strategies for your store can help show your business listing on the local 3-pack on SERPs. This search feature lists the top three businesses relevant to the search phrase. Each business shows additional information to help users decide which one to contact.
For this to happen, you must claim or sign up for your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). Fill out the information on your profile with your name, address, and phone (NAP). Also, include your keywords in your business description and regularly post updates there. Doing these should help increase its chance of showing up on the local 3-pack on top of the links you'll build.
How to Find Local SEO Link Building Opportunities
The easiest way to spot local link building opportunities is to spy on your competitor backlinks. If you don't know who your competitors are, use an SEO tool like Ahrefs.
Enter your website URL on its Site Explorer feature, then go to Organic search > Organic competitors. It will show you a list of websites that rank for the same keywords that your site does.
From here, focus on sites with the highest Share percentage, as they present the most competition against your website. Choose the competitor site you want to analyze its link profile first by clicking on the drop-down arrow beside the site and selecting Backlink profile > Referring domain.
This opens a page showing the domains with links to your competitor's site. Browse the different link opportunities based on their Domain Rating (DR), Traffic, and dofollow links. The higher the DR and traffic, the more influential the link you'll get from that site.
To make the job much easier for you, filter the results to only show the top opportunities that meet your desired metrics. For instance, you can weed out sites that have less than DR 50 and 100k organic traffic.
Depending on the site, it may show only limited opportunities, so you may want to ease up on the filters. Try lowering the DR and traffic limit to show more results, but don't lower them too much to not compromise your local link building strategy.
Do the same steps as the above for all your competitors and compile all opportunities into a sheet so you can slowly acquire a link to your website from each.
Consider using Ahrefs' Link Intersect feature to make your job much easier. It cross-references your site's link profile against your competitors and identifies which domains you don't have a link back to yet. On the downside, this feature is only available on Ahrefs' higher plans.
7 Easy Local Link Building Tips
Aside from following the steps above, there are other link building tactics you should implement to boost your local search results.
Sign Up for Local Business Directories
Online business directories are sites where you can create listings that show your business name, address, and phone number, as well as your website link.
The most popular one is Yelp and Yellowpages, but there are more specific directories that you want to get listed on. Lawyers can sign up for a profile on Avvo and FindLaw, while home services would want to show up on sites like Angi's. You can even search for online business directories in your location.
Aside from securing backlinks, local directories help establish NAP consistency. Using the same updated NAP across all directories allows search engines to determine what contact details to show its users. This also helps improve your visibility on the local 3-pack.
Sponsor Local Events
Unlike other link building opportunities, local events happen at a certain time--you can't sponsor an event that already happened. So, you must search for upcoming events in your vicinity for these opportunities. Set up alerts to notify you of events with causes that resonate with your business goals and values.
Once you've identified these events, contact the organization for sponsorship packages and rates. Since your goal is to get links, make sure to choose a package where the organizers link back to your site from theirs. Having your brand plastered on the event's marketing materials and mentioned during the event, while not related to your local SEO strategy, won't hurt your cause.
Offer Local Scholarship
Local scholarships allow you to positively impact your community by providing students with financial relief for their ongoing education. Conversely, you can leverage your sponsorship by building local backlinks off it.
But before creating the scholarship page on your site, search for local institutions with many students that align with your brand goals and visions. After developing the scholarship with these institutions in mind, offer it exclusively to them for a backlink. Finalize the agreement by identifying the level of scholarship to offer each institution.
From here, it's all about fulfilling your scholarship obligations. At the same time, you want to monitor the backlink to your sponsorship page from their site until the contract is up.
Reach Out to Local Bloggers and Influencers
Similar to blogger outreach, you must identify bloggers and influencers who share your brand values and reach out to them via email or social media. It's best to use tools for this tactic like Lemlist to automate the sending of emails and follow-ups to your target bloggers to increase the reply rate.
The key to successful blogger and influencer outreach is your pitch. Aside from personalization, you want to leverage your authority in your industry, which should also align with the topics they cover in their content. You can offer to write a guest post for them or grant them an interview to help educate their audience about your expertise.
Not only do they receive valuable content from you, but you get a backlink in return for your efforts. This is just an example of providing value in your outreach efforts. It's never a one-way street where your goal is just to get a link. You have to incentivize your interactions with bloggers and influencers and give them a reason why they should give a backlink to your site.
Create Linkworthy Local Content
Speaking of incentive, nothing sparks "value" more than well-created, carefully crafted content.
Research a topic that people talk about and link to and create a piece of content about it. You can also check out your competitor's pages with the most links to get an idea of what local websites link out to. From here, recreate the content on your site, but make it much better.
This tactic is also known as the "Skyscraper Technique," popularized by Brian Dean years back.
Once the content is published, you can use it as bait to get links from websites. You can even leverage it to connect with local news sites, especially if the content is timely and newsworthy. Also, the content can build local links by itself if it starts ranking on Google search and more people find it.
Engage in Local Forums
Local online communities relevant to your business are abound, and we're not just talking about Facebook Groups and Reddit. Search for them on Google and social media and narrow the forums and discussion boards to those with the most members and active discussions.
However, you can't just sign up for an account and expect to drop a link in an instant. Most forums require you to engage with threads on the site first before you can include a link in your signature or profile.
The idea here is to earn the ability to get the most out of your profile in the discussion board, and the only way to do this is through the value of your contributions and reply.
This could be a time-consuming process, depending on the requirements of the forum site. But when done correctly, not only will you get local backlinks to your site and engage and build relationships with like-minded people online, which you can turn into opportunities later on.
Hire Local Link Building Service Providers
Let's face it--local link building is a time-consuming process. Doing all of the above also doesn't guarantee you can land backlinks at a 100% rate. That means local linking is a trial by error, adding to the time spent on this SEO strategy.
But if you have a marketing budget, allot some of it to hiring freelancers to build the links for you. Legiit has a page on the site that features freelancers offering backlink services, both organic and local.
They may have connections to local publishers who could immediately get you backlinks in an instant or use creative link building strategies to secure the best local links to your site. Either way, hiring someone from Legiit is a great place to start.
Frequently Asked Questions
To help build upon your knowledge of local link building, below are related questions about the topic and a comprehensive answer to each.
What Are the Different Types of Link Building?
Below is a short list of link building types you can use for your website, local or otherwise:
- Guest blogging - Writing and publishing blog posts on websites of other local businesses in exchange for a backlink to your site.
- Broken link building - Finding broken links on other websites and offering a replacement link to your website in exchange.
- Skyscraper technique - Creating high-quality content that is better than existing content on other websites encourages people to link to it during your outreach campaign.
- Infographic outreach - Designing an informative and visually appealing infographic and asking site owners to share and link to it on your website.
- Resource link building - Creating a valuable resource (guide, tool, etc.) and requesting other sites to link to your resource.
As you can see, there is an overlap between organic link building strategies and local ones. For example, you can use guest blogging and the Skyscraper Technique mentioned earlier for your organic link building efforts.
What Is Link Building In Simple Words?
Link building is acquiring high-quality links from authoritative websites to your own to increase keyword rankings on search engines.
What Is Link Building for Local SEO: 7 Simple Strategies?
Here's a quick recap of the seven tips and tactics from above:
- Create a business profile with your link to it on business directories specific to your location.
- Find local events you can sponsor that allow you to include a link from the event's website to yours.
- Create a local sponsorship program tailored to attract educational institutions to link to it and offer it to their students.
- Reach out to local bloggers proposing a guest post or interview with them.
- Create linkworthy content and pitch it to local newspapers.
- Sign up to popular forums and discussion boards in your local community and engage with members before linking back to your site.
- Hire someone to do the local link building for you.
Conclusion
Following the local linking strategies above, you can supercharge your local SEO efforts and generate more eyeballs for your business, resulting in more sales and revenue.
Now, if you're looking to hire a local link building service provider, go with some of the top-rated link buildingvendors at Legiit. Their recommendations, samples, and body of work should help you decide which freelance to hire for building local links to your site.
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