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Local SEO helps businesses stay in front of their customers, and one strategy is through link building. Learn how to build the right links for your local SEO campaign.
Online visibility is no longer an option—it’s the ticket to how businesses stay in front of their customers and get more sales.
With Google being one of the most visited platforms for those researching local products or services, it's no brainer how being on the first page is an important feat. So, if you’re not online, you’re giving the competition a free pass to your customers.
But, how do you reach the first page and be relevant to your customers? It’s certainly not as easy as getting and hoping it will get attention from customers. There’s a formula to it, and one of the steps in this formula involves link building.
If you’re planning to use this as a strategy for your local SEO efforts, you need to be more granular on finding websites to link to. That’s what we’ll talk about in this blog.
First Things First, Let’s Dive into Local SEO
The common knowledge about professional SEO services is it involves keyword research to align with what users type in search engines when looking for information. With local SEO, you go a little deeper.
When using keywords for local search engine optimization, it includes the location for which you want to be relevant. For example, instead of just using “clothes online”, you use “clothes online in New York”. This is ideal if you have a physical store that you want customers to visit.
Local SEO doesn’t just involve using location-specific keywords. Some local SEO services providers also optimize websites by registering the business on listing sites. Google My Business, YellowPages, and Yelp are just some of the known listing websites.
But why is this relevant? Getting on listing sites makes it easier for the business to appear on results when customers type “keyword + nearby” or “keywords + near me”. This is a highly effective strategy of staying present, especially now that most users are looking for businesses with a mobile device.
By continuously optimizing your site with the right keywords and getting more visibility on online directories or listings, you’re giving your business more arsenal to appear on Google’s local pack – one of the most prominent positions on search results.
How Do You Build Links for Local SEO?
Is there a difference between building links for a national SEO and local SEO? The concept is the same – you get quality links to point back to your website to improve your authority. This involves providing good content on authoritative websites and getting a dofollow link from them. The more quality links you get, the more Google will recognize the authority and relevance of your site.
However, with local SEO as the core of your strategy, you need to tweak your strategy a bit. There are a few criteria you should consider, and locality is one of the most important factors.
For instance, if you’re a restaurant in Chicago and want to get more online traction, ideally, you’d reach out to authority websites that are serving your locale.
1. Leverage the Power of Influencer Marketing
The social media hype brought influencers to the forefront of digital marketing. Think of this as a strategy to leverage authority bias—you get a person of high credibility in your industry to talk about your brand on their website. This allows you to tap into their followers and expand your audience.
Find an industry personality, pitch a collaboration (a guest post, a podcast, or a webinar appearance), and ask if they can mention and link back to your website.
2. Participate in Community Events
Joining local events allow you to be more visible to your audience. But what does this have to do with local SEO? For one, you can use local events pages to link back to your website. Most local communities have an event page where they can put up the name and logo of businesses participating in an event. Think of this as a winning strategy to be present online and offline.
3. Join Local Business Associations and Communities
Most cities or local communities have a chamber of commerce that allow businesses in their area to register. This helps in promoting local businesses and encouraging customers to buy or transact with them. If you’re registered with a chamber of commerce, you’ll find your business on their website with a link back to yours.
So, when customers look for your business on local search results, your business can appear on the chamber of commerce site and – even better – on the local snack pack.
4. Get Listed on Relevant Business Directories with Accurate Information
Accurate, consistent information about your business is important. Imagine a customer found your business’ contact number on Yelp, but it was outdated. That’s one customer lost. Now think of the other customers you’re potentially losing because of having an inaccurate contact detail.
Business directories not only help you be more visible; this also reinforces your reputation. As most listings show reviews or ratings from customers, it presents an opportunity to strengthen your credibility. However, make extra effort in monitoring the reviews on these sites and address any negative feedback.
5. Make Local Visibility Happen for Your Brand
Like any SEO strategy, being on the first page and appearing on local results will require grit and wit. It’s most certainly not an overnight thing. You need the continuous hygiene and optimization to make your brand within your customer’s reach.
Develop your local SEO link building strategy with the pointers above – or if you have other ideas, experiment and add to the strategy! Remember that there’s always more things to try for your local SEO efforts.
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