Let’s be honest, building links for local clients can be hard – especially as you ideally want local links within your geo-specific area to really benefit the site.
Fortunately, with a little creativity and effort, it’s possible to ramp up your efforts and make the whole process a lot easier. We racked our brains at Serp Logic and have come up with 16 awesome ways to start creating those links that will get your clients ranking organically and in turn will help you or your client win more business.
Local Citations
Citation is one of the critical components of local SEO. They give search engine valuable information about the location of your business within the local context. To this end, you should take some time to claim and populate valuable citations for your business if you are interested in establishing a commanding presence in local SERPs.
Typically, the name, address, and phone numbers (NAP) within the citation structure is the most valuable information for search engines, trusted online directories also provide a valuable link back to your website. The value of these links should not be overlooked with regards to your overall ranking performance.
There are plenty of resources online that help to identify and claim all the important citations within your region or niche. Importantly, there are plenty of free or inexpensive citation tools that allow you to access the local directory and find new citation opportunities. For instance, you can simply Google your competitors. Their local listing will be right there for you to see.
Create Content Focused On Your Locality
If you want to make search engines know that you are a highly relevant business in your locality, you need to provide relevant content for your locality. An added benefit is that this content will give you prominence among your audience as people share your content.
How do you do this?
The best way to go about this is to make use of your blog to charge content that focuses on what is happening in your locality. This is especially important if you are involved in the latest developments. This approach to content development and blogging is critical to solving the common issue if writer’s block and having little content to write about.
While writing about your business is important, you do not have to write exclusively about your business. You can also write about the latest happenings in your surroundings. In fact, you can make your blog a destination for your local news. Keep your locals up to date. In doing this, you inherently get to naturally use a lot of local terms. Importantly, you get a continuous source of local content to write about.
Create a Local Interest Site
For this kind of approach, you can use anything from a small blog site to a huge website, especially if you intend to cover everything happening in your area. That said, you should note that the bigger the website the more full-time staff you will needs, especially if you are located in a major urban environment.
A good work around this issue is to narrow down the focus of the website in relation to the size of the town. This is to mean, if you live in a small city, you can a wider range of topics on the account that there isn’t a lot going on. As the city gets larger, you need to cover a narrower focus accounting for your budgetary capacity.
As such, you can create a hyperlocal sports coverage, nightlife, or even news site. With high-quality content, you should easily gain natural traffic and links from your area and even beyond as more people find and interact with your website.
You can use localized Facebook ads to speed up the discovery process.
Get Local Coverage
To get to the top of the local SERPs, you can also go after local coverage. To this end, forge and nurture business relationships with local journalists. Tell them whenever you have something new to offer. Discuss with them about your brand, your goals, and your mission.
Local media coverage will increase backlinks your website gets, which bodes well for your ranking.
Support Your Local Community
Nonprofits and charitable organizations are always interested in sponsors. Many of those sponsorships will include backlinks to the sponsor’s site. As such, think about charitable organizations that you can sponsor in your town. In the same light, you can think about sponsoring for-profit organizations and schools. Any organization in needs of sponsors is a potential source of backlinks.
That said, you should look for sponsorships that make sense for your particular brand. It should make sense for your physical location and or your industry. For better results, you should consider sponsoring something that you actually care about, rather than going for any organization that will give you a backlink. Link building is not just a matter of building backlinks but getting traffic to your website as well.
Obviously, this link building strategy needs an upfront monetary investment. It, however, takes less effort to get the links compared to other link building strategies. For instance, you do not have to build a strong relationship with the organization. You do not have to convince them that you are worthy of their links. Simply sponsor them and you accrue all the benefits that come with sponsorships, including getting a link.
Giveaways And Contests
Everyone loves free giveaways. Everyone loves a good contest. You can use this technique to accrue high-quality traffic, improve your branding, and increase your lead generation efforts. Additionally, it can generate high-quality links from the local bloggers and some times the media.
For the best results from your efforts, announce your contest, giveaway, or event via a press release. Ideally, the contest should be something related to your business. However, even something unrelated might still work. For instance, a dentist might giveaway concert tickets as the main prize and a cleaning package for the two runner ups.
You obviously have to get creative with what submissions have to do to successfully enter the giveaway and how you market the contest or giveaway, but it has the potential to generate high-quality links. A little blogger outreach and press releases about your giveaway will also help you accrue additional links.
Give A Testimonial
Testimonial link building should be a priority link building method. The vast majority of businesses allow their customers to leave a comment about the user experience of their products. Doing so allows such businesses to build customer trust. As for the customers, they get an opportunity to build a high-quality backlink and potentially accrue ample traffic from the site. Additionally, it has a much approval rate than the typical link building email requests.
Solicit Backlinks From Some Of The Non-Competing Local Businesses
You should endeavor to get backlinks from other local businesses that you are not competing with. There are many businesses in your locality and more often than not, you might with them or for them. Those businesses will most likely also have a website.
Approach the business owners of the website you do not compete with a proposition to exchange links.
Get On The Phone
The vast majority of SEO agency and businesses will not consider this strategy owing to their introverted nature. However, contacting someone over the phone and speaking to them about what you want in relation to your link building strategy is very effective. Confidence and tonality are very apparent over the phone. However, this is lost over an email.
Business Associations
This is one of the fastest methods you can use to accrue backlinks since you will be making use of the relationships you have built with the business community in your location. Since the relationship has already been established, getting a link can be as easy as simply asking.
There are several ways you can go about it. You could:
- Provide testimonial to your clients
- Participate in local events
- Request a link from their resource page
Local Meetups
Local meetups are a goldmine for local links. Go to Meetup.com find the local groups in your area. Focus on groups that are in your niche first. Later on, you can use other local groups.
An obvious strategy to getting links is to offer your business space for groups looking for a meeting space. Offer your space and in return, you get local links. If there are no groups looking for space, you can engage groups looking for sponsors. For just $50 to $100, you can sponsors the group’s refreshment. You get also get a link this way.
Recover Dead Backlinks
You might get a broken link in your website. In some cases, it is caused by changes made by a webmaster. In other cases, it might the case that a webmaster misspelled your link. However, in all of these cases, you will get a 404 error.
Broken link issues are also common when a site is migrated to another domain or re-launched. To remedy these situations and recover these backlinks, consider redirecting the backlinks to other pages.
Local Resource Pages
For this strategy to work, you should create useful resources by drawing from the expert knowledge of the subject matter. Moreover, you should focus on subject matters that people will genuinely find useful, and, therefore, share.
For instance, if you are a real estate agent, you could build a resource page with plenty of information about your local area, including subject matter such as schools, amenities, and social activities. When done right, a resources page has the potential of becoming an asset for many businesses and people, resulting in shares and backlinks.
Sponsorship Opportunities
Sponsorships are not renowned for yielding a great return on investments. However, it does build a great deal of goodwill, which you can leverage to get high-quality local links.
Schools: Schools at all levels from primary to college institutions have plenty of inexpensive sponsorship opportunities that will get you listed on the schools’ sites as a sponsor. Keep in mind that links from a .Edu domain will boost your local ranking quite significantly.
Municipalities organize a lot of events all through the year. These include festivals, parades, runs, and many other events that provide you with sponsorship opportunities that give you a chance of getting a domain from a .gov domain.
Animals Shelters: Animal rescuer shelters are always on the look for donations. They will gladly link to your website in turn.
Alumni: If your alma mater has a listing for alumni in the directory, you can get another valuable .edu link.
Become ‘The’ Local Expert
For this strategy, you should identify a subject related to your industry that also overlaps another field. For example, this would be a marketing company discussing copyright issues by asking IP experts to contribute. Another example is a personal injury lawyer discussing grief and asking professional counselors to contribute their insights.
You can solicit expert contributions, adding expert views and insights to your topics, thereby making your content valuable while adding authority to your post and website as a whole. You will end linking to their website next to their contribution.
However, more often than not, they will mention your article on their website or other websites. Additionally, they will likely share your content on social media, giving you more links and social references. This will increase the chances of getting additional natural links in the future.
You can make this strategy even more effective by reaching out to more experts for their insights to further improve the authority of the website, increase the attention you get and get more links. Doing this will create a domino effect where you improve the authority of the website while also increasing the chances of accruing natural links.
Local Figures
You can get high-quality links by interviewing local figures. Explore the relationships you already have for this strategy. Do you play golf with a city council member? Are you friends with the mayor?
Even if you are not close with many prominent local figures or any, you can leverage your close friends’ network to get such interviews. Just network until you get the interview you need. After interviewing and publishing the content, you can rest assured you will get plenty of local links.
Create Controversy
As a business owner, you probably strive to please people. Many of the decisions you make are pegged on trying to please people and it’s a reasonable feeling. You want people to like your brand. Naturally, however, you cannot please 100% of people 100% of the time. In many regards, it’s even beneficial to not please everyone, especially with regards to link building.
For instance, you can find topics or issues your market cares about and get involved. When you get involved long enough, people will notice you. At some point, this will get you into the local stories or you might be given an audience with the local media. When your story is published in the local publication, you can up the ante by pitching your idea to the larger media outlet. At every step, you will get natural links.
All of these will help you score those local links that will help your local site rise to the top in a sustainable fashion that works for the long term.
