Having a good local link-building strategy in place is a good way to promote your website and boost your business’s local search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Despite requiring more outreach and hands-on effort, building local backlines reaps offers benefits that are definitely worth your time and energy.
In this post, we have rounded up the ins and outs of local link building and how you can effectively implement these strategies to keep more relevant referral traffic coming to your website.
What is Local Link Building and Why Does It Matter
Local link-building refers to the process that involves getting other local websites to link back to yours. Building local backlinks can signify trust among search engines. Getting enough links from other high-authority websites can effectively capture highly targeted search engine traffic, as well as stand out from the competition and dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs).
In addition to driving local and relevant referral website traffic, earning more local backlinks helps you establish your business as an authority in your niche market. You may need a lot of manual outreach, taking on a local link-building also requires you to establish new connections in your community, which helps open up a new business and meaningful relationships.
If you are not yet convinced of the importance of local link-building for your business, consider the following facts:
- 46% of the total searches conducted on Google have local intent
- The number of “near me” searches has increased by 150%, as compared to traditional local searches.
- About 74% of the total local searchers walk into the store on the same day of their search.
Think you are ready to incorporate local link building? We have rounded several strategies to help you build local backlinks successfully and how it successfully market your website:
Local Link Building Strategies: How to Get More Website Traffic
- Find local business directories
Major online directories, such as the Better Business Bureau and Google My Business, are great platforms to feature the essential details of your business, like NAP (name of your business, address, and phone number), as well as acquiring a backlink from a high-authority domain. However, these directories are not tailored to local search results. To leverage your local link-building strategies, make sure to look for local online directories in your community often used by locals when searching for a particular product or service.
Using a set of advanced search techniques on Google to return more specific search results can help you find local business directories. Furthermore, the Advanced Search tool helps simplify the whole process by typing in the keyword or phrase relevant to your business. The Advanced Search tool will display all pages containing your target keywords or phrases.
- Get links from other ranking websites
Also referred to as Barnacle SEO, this type of technique helps you search some of your targeted terms in Google so you can get links from sites that appear in the results. While you may not acquire links from your competitors, you can look and take advantage of any aggregators or directory-type websites where you can get listed by signing up and adding your business.
- Reach out to Local Influencers
In recent years, influencer marketing has proved to be an important factor that drives brand exposure and customer trust. Digital marketing experts claimed that reaching out to local influencers to promote your business can yield 11 times more return on investment than any traditional advertisements, including banner ads.
This digital marketing strategy opens up a golden opportunity that allows you to link up with a popular local influencer in your niche. You can reach out to them with a professional offer to curate content like an online review or guest blogs.
Another offer you can make is a content exchange agreement—create a blog for their website in exchange for an authoritative backlink to your website.
- Get local citations
Building local citations helps build your brand so that your target customers can easily find you online. It comes in various forms, from local business directories to national niche directories. Google will pick up your business listings and use them as a signal for ranking your website on search engines. Make sure your business information is consistently accurate across all local citations. Local citation building must be one of your priorities as it helps drives traffic to your website and boost your conversion rate. Here are some of the most people online business directories where you can build local citations for your website:
- Foursquare
- Google My Business
- Bing
- Apple Maps
- Yelp
- Yellowpages
- Write locally relevant content
Content creation involves finding relevant topics for your business to capture your ideal audience, planning, creating, and publishing content. When creating local content, make sure to think of content that answers or provides solutions to the problem of your target audience.
You can come up with content, like “how to deal with bugs in Lisbon during summer?” or “what is the best digital marketing agency in Lisbon?” This type of content can effectively attract tons of links naturally and makes it easier to build links with email outreach.
- Reach out to the local newspapers, forums, communities
Although reaching out to local newspapers and participating in online forums require a bit more manual outreach, it does not only help promote your business in your local community but also earns some quality local backlinks in the process.
After determining some of the popular local newspapers and online forums in your area, use the Advanced Search tool in Google to help you find web pages or domains containing your target keyword or phrase. Among the most common targeted keywords or phrases used by people when searching for businesses online include:
- business feature
- business spotlight
- entrepreneur spotlight
- local business feature
- local business spotlight
- small business spotlight
After locating local newspapers and forums that publish blogs relating to your targeted keywords or phrases, be sure to tailor your content with their publication. If you have successfully aligned your content with theirs, reach out to them and show how your content can also benefit their audience. This will increase your chances of receiving a backlink from them.
The next step is submitting a press release or contacting their website to see if they can feature your post on their website. Before pitching your content, make sure that you and the website’s point of contact have already established a connection. Getting into the connection process allows you to introduce your business, gauge their interest, and determine the possible next steps. If you think the newspaper or forum is the right fit for your content, keep your fingers crossed for a quality backlink.
What You Need to Avoid when Building Local Backlinks
- Using Shady Techniques – When it comes to local link building, tricking search engines can be a risky business. Before Google’s Penguin update, some online marketers resort to bad link-building practices, such as paying for links. If caught, Google will impose hefty penalties on offenders.
- Link Spam – Spamming comments that link to your website does not help boost your rankings on search engines. Comment sections these days are no-follow, which is not worth your time.
- Using Low-Quality Link Directories – Some marketers think that using low-quality link directories can help them easily get links to their website to boost search engine rankings. While you can find thousands of them online, getting links from low-quality directories bears no reward and could lead to a Google penalty. Keep away from directories that openly advertise the SEO value of their links.
- Paying Link Brokers – Link brokers often attract online marketing by selling links on various websites to help increase their Google rankings. However, this practice is a direct violation of Google’s guidelines. If you are caught purchasing links from a link broker, it can lead to a hefty penalty.
- Linking to Irrelevant Websites – If you are running a pest control business but are writing a guest post for a dental health blog about how to keep your teeth cavity-free is not exactly a winning strategy on how to increase website traffic. Search engine bots can easily look into when a link is irrelevant or spammy.
Final Thoughts
Local link building is a crucial part of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. However, when building local links, do get too hung up on the quantity of backlinks you accumulate. Instead, focus on the quality, as it impacts more on your brand affinity, website traffic, and rankings.