Small businesses that rely on getting local customers can get a lot of benefits from working on their local SEO. In fact, if you want to attract leads from a certain niche towards your product/service consistently, local SEO is absolutely necessary. More specifically, you’ll need to employ local link building to allow your business to get traffic and help it launch itself on the local map.
Links leading to your site matter and they will always matter. Luckily, local SEO link building is not that difficult and with discipline, you can increase the number of your backlinks steadily. However, the problem in SEO is that rules change very quickly and those that are out of the loop can’t find the right strategies for performing local SEO link building.
This is why we’ve decided to share with you the five most effective strategies for local link building in 2018.
1. Creating pages with local resources within your site
If you’ve visited a fair number of business websites, chances are that you’ve seen pages that went by the name “additional resources” or something along those lines. These kinds of pages give you an opportunity to build backlinks towards similar local websites and provide useful information to your visitors.
You can base your resource page around anything general or specific that you prefer. If you have a website for your gift shop in a tourist location, you can offer information about the hotels located near you. Before creating such a page, carefully consider your target audience and your niche and figure out what kind of information would suit your audience, as well as your website.
Apart from offering a relevant and useful resource page with a lot of links, you also need to contact the websites that you mentioned and try to get social mentions or backlinks in return. This is yet another secret to how to build links and we will get to it in the next paragraph.
2. Write/talk about local organizations in a similar niche
All business owners and especially those on the local level like when others talk about them in a positive way. Telling your audience about who these business owners are and what they do can help them get more exposure and ultimately, more sales. This is a principle that can be used for building local links as well.
Use your blog to do this and write posts about the best local companies in a certain niche that your audience might be interested in. Still, you need to make sure that these people aren’t your competitors, as you don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot. If you are running a dental office, you could talk about the best pediatricians in your area, or about your favorite general practitioners.
When you publish these kinds of posts, you should mention the organizations that you talked about so that they can see that you’ve talked about them in a positive way and share social mentions. Try to get a social mention or a backlink from them and in the future maybe they will write about you as well.
3. Offer sponsorships or donations
“Local SEO is a segment of SEO. All rules apply here – with the caveat that you can leverage certain channels limited to your own region. Think of newspapers, restaurants, your town’s Chamber of Commerce, sponsoring local events. And expand from there.” – Mario Peshev, CEO of Devrix.
If your business has the potential to provide free services to organizations or give donations to nonprofits, then you should go for it. Look for organizations where you can offer one of the two without setting yourself back, while at the same time suggesting a trade in the form of additional exposure.
We mentioned dentists earlier and for that same example, you can offer free examinations through an organization that helps the poor or to large companies in your area. This is how you will passively get exposure through word of mouth, as well as through social media and you can also ask for links in return.
4. Reach out to local influencers
No matter where you are, there are always some local influencers that you can find to work with. The best bet is to go for bloggers who produce quality content on a regular basis. Find bloggers who are in a similar niche and get in touch with them and propose a content exchange. One of the simplest ways of this kind of cooperation is for you to guest post on their blog and let them post their content on yours.
On the other hand, you can ask an influencer to review your products, services, or your whole business if they have a fan base that might be interested in what you have to offer. This is how you can get valuable citations where your business name, contact information, and address will get mentioned on another site.
These kinds of citation are called unstructured citations and they are common. However, a lot of local businesses forget about the importance of structured citations on local listing sites, where you can get a lot of valuable juice and boost your traffic and online presence.
5. Find online mentions of your business
It’s a regular practice for companies and individuals to talk about other companies on their blogs or social media while not including social mentions or backlinks. There are various free social media monitoring tools you can use to see mentions and other important factors of your online presence.
You can also create a Google Alert so that you get notifications when someone is talking about your business online. This is how you can stay on top of everything related to your business and contact people to give you mentions and links while creating better business relationships.
In the end, remember to go to Google My Business and create a local business listing for your organization. This is how you can further localize your business and the links and information associated with it. Enforce these strategies on regular basis and you will start to see good results in the near future.
The post 5 Ways to Build Links for Local SEO appeared first on Local SEO Checklist.