Beginner’s Guide to Master Local Link Building

Why Local Links Are the Key to Beating Your Competition

Local link building is one of the most challenging parts of SEO. Getting other sites linking to your domain requires time, consistency, and a creative approach. This strategy is crucial to generating referral traffic and increasing your website’s ranking and authority.

We recently met with our local SEO specialists and went over their top three link-building strategies. These techniques, combined with the right keywords and a fast, mobile-friendly website, have helped our clients rank first on the Google Search Engine Results Pages.

To illustrate, Dawson Law, LLP, a full-service estate planning and probate law firm based in Austin, Texas, increased its website traffic and its Google My Business’ searches through a holistic SEO approach that included link building.

Before explaining how to successfully do link building, we’ll go over the fundamental concepts to give some context to anyone with beginner SEO knowledge.

Local SEO: The Ace Up Your Sleeve For Online Success

Local SEO is great for brick and mortar stores and service area businesses. As explained by Google, “when someone searches for a business or place near their location, they’ll find local results across Google, in places like Maps and Search.”  

Let’s assume you’re a roofer located in Virginia, and your SEO strategy targets users searching for contractors in your service area, guaranteeing your website traffic is relevant to your business. Why would you want people from Texas to visit your website? Unless you’re willing to travel halfway across the country, you won’t be able to service them.

How Local Links Build Your Site’s Authority

Either you own a nationwide enterprise or a local business, your SEO strategy should always include link building.

The difference between a nationwide link-building campaign and a local link-building campaign is that instead of getting backlinks from national brands such as Entrepreneur or Forbes, you get links from local websites, including local listings or your local newspaper.

A Quick Warning: Not All Links Are Good Links

The quality of your backlinks impact your website’s ranking. The businesses you reach for link building should have a high domain authority and be relevant to your industry. In other words, you will have to research and determine if a potential backlink will improve your website’s health score and authority.

Let’s continue with the roofing example. If you wanted backlinks from other businesses in Virginia, you would need to contact local architects, constructors, real estate agents, and directories. These would all be relevant as they target homeowners in Virginia.

3 Actionable Link Building Strategies You Can Use Today

Strategy 1: Master Your Local Citations (NAPs)

Citations or local listings are online directories with your Business Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP). Some of the most known directories include Yelp, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Facebook, HomeAdvisor, TrustPilot, and Better Business Bureau. 

Google’s algorithm considers the quality and amount of local citations to determine if your business exists.

Strategy 2: Address Your Site Backlink Gap

Once you’ve covered the primary citations, we recommend comparing your local listings with the directories linking to your competitors’ websites. This process requires using a backlink analysis tool such as Ahrefs, SEMRush, or Ubersuggest. 

As you discover new directories in your competitors’ backlink report, you should revise these sites’ domain authority and determine if creating a new account in these directories is worth your time.

Strategy 3: Leverage Your Local Community & Partners

Backlinks from local organizations/businesses are highly influential. You can reach out to local companies you’ve worked with and request a backlink. A brief article that explains how you’ve been partners for years and links to your site should do the trick.

Why Go Pro? The Value of a Link Building Agency

Link building is time-consuming. It involves searching for relevant and authoritative local directories, reaching out to business owners, following up on your local peers, and verifying they link to your site. That’s quite a lot for an entrepreneur with enough on their plate!

Hiring an agency that offers link-building services will free up time for you. They have the resources, experience, and knowledge to determine which local sites are best for link building. They will handle all communication with local businesses and can ensure that your backlinks are high-quality.

What To Expect When Hiring Link Building Services

Local link building is one of the many moving parts of SEO. Increasing online traffic and leads requires an extensive approach, including the following:

• A fast, and responsive website. 
• A local keyword strategy for your website content.
• An on-page SEO strategy that includes optimizing your site’s headlines, meta titles, meta descriptions, images, and more.
• An off-site SEO strategy that includes link building, Google My Business, social media management, building local citations, and more.
• Monitoring and optimizing your campaign to improve results.
• Tweaking your strategy as consumer behavior, marketing trends, and the Google Search algorithm and ranking system evolve.

We highly recommend looking for an agency with a comprehensive SEO package. A partner specialized in local SEO should provide the following:

• SEO audit
• Keyword research
• Optimized custom content
• Local & niche listing analysis and updates
• Backlink gap report & plan of action to stay ahead of competitors
• In-depth link building strategy to target local organizations
• Monthly SEO reports
• Ongoing maintenance and monitoring
• Availability to answer questions, go over your strategy, and more.

Start Building Your Authority Today

The best piece of advice we can give you is to start working on your link-building strategy. We know it can be a time-consuming process. However, the results it generates make it worthwhile.

If you’re ready to build your local authority but don’t have time for the heavy lifting, the Olly Olly team has the expertise. We can build a high-quality backlink strategy that gets you ahead of the competition. Give our team a call today to get started.