9 Easy Local Link Building Tactics

Every significant study and evaluation on local SEO's organic and map pack outcomes lists links as one of the most crucial ranking factors.Therefore, you will need backlinks if you want to rank your local business or the business of a client higher on Google.

In this article, I'll teach you nine techniques for creating local backlinks, but let's start with the fundamentals.

What is local link building?

Local link building is the process of creating links to a business website that are contextually and/or locally relevant. The goal is to draw users and traffic to the website in order to raise its position in relevant map packs and for local searches.

How many local links do I need?

The majority of local businesses can rank in local search without a tonne of links. You'll seldom ever find companies with more than 150 referring websites ranking on the first page of the SERPs for any local query in Keywords Explorer:

To gauge the level of competition for the terms you're targeting, you may also use terms Explorer. The number of links the top-ranking pages have can be seen by scrolling to the SERP overview.

1. Begin with Citations 

Citations will assist you in getting started. You can simplify the local link-building procedure by citation building, seeking for general directories, and updating the content. 

Because they allow you to include your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) information somewhere in the search, citations are fantastic. Additionally, include links to other trustworthy websites that don't spam. Some arbitrary individuals may see it as a result of referring them back to your website if the search isn't overly competitive.

Additionally, citation building is aided by the excellent local SEO tools Yext and Moz Local, which improve SEO services for your website.

2. Get links your competitors have

There are certainly several contextually and locally relevant link chances if you examine the overlap of links to your competitors' websites. Using Link Intersect, you can quickly verify this. You can easily identify which websites connect to your competitors (but not to you) by adding both your site and those of your rivals to the programme.

You'll probably find a lot of directories and a lot of links that are relevant to your niche. Local citations, which refer to many of these directories, frequently include company information like your name, address, and phone number.

3. Local Business Directories

There are numerous methods to use Google's advanced search techniques. You may do this using the free Advanced Search feature from Google.

 Entering your intended keyword or phrase into Google's Advanced Search tool. You will see pages with your desired keyword or phrase when using the tool. Only pages with the target word or phrase in their title or URL can be selected to be displayed in the following phase.

As soon as you locate a few local directories, you must determine whether they receive a lot of traffic, are compatible with your company, and price for their SEO services.

4. Create locally relevant content

Finding themes that will interest your target audience, then planning, generating, and publishing content on those topics, is the process of creating content. Consider local content that is both beneficial to your audience and relevant to your company while creating it.

You might think of subjects like what sort of grass grows best in your region, the most frequent bugs, or even just local service costs.

Of course, it's quite improbable that this kind of content will automatically generate a tonne of links. With email outreach, link building is typically more straightforward.

5. Take help of a Link Tool

To get high-quality results, you need to choose the ideal link tool for your brand. 

• Link building can be done with Ahrefs, especially for SEO experts. Rank tracking, content exploration, a robust keyword search engine, and technical audit-based SEO are just a few of the features offered by Ahrefs.
• The most user-friendly backlink tracker is Linkody. Additionally, it has a strong connection index.
• GroupHigh is a link-building tool that will assist you in getting other websites to connect to yours. Finding bloggers for your industry is what GroupHigh does in its initial outreach campaign stage. 

The finest link building resources for your local business are the three listed above.

6. Get local citations

Some of these chances were previously evident when we used Link Intersect. Other than sites that are ranking in your area, there are many different citation services available, but for the US, these are the ones you might wish to start with. These are typically regarded as the most significant citations and many of them provide their data to other websites.

Main US aggregators:

• Data Axle
• Localeze
• Foursquare

Other major players:

• Google My Business
• Bing
• Apple Maps
• Facebook
• Yelp
• Yellowpages
• Dunn & Bradstreet
• TomTom

7. Find Sponsorship Opportunities 

Search for sponsorship possibilities in your neighbourhood as an additional method of developing local links. Make sure the sponsored group has some connection to your company after selecting a suitable group to support. Finally, you can only obtain local links by using sponsorships. 

Your company could support a variety of organisations, including charities, neighbourhood events, and even your suppliers. Due to their low domain authority, the majority of local businesses' websites only receive a little quantity of traffic. 

In other words, relying just on these backlinks won't do anything to help you get effective SEO services.

8. Buy companies, or at least their websites

At the local level, mergers and acquisitions do occur, however they are more sporadic and situational than this. On rare occasions, you may even come across a business that is selling its current website or letting one of its domain names expire. You can either have two ranking sites or one that ranks higher by purchasing these. These opportunities are rather uncommon locally, and I've only had a couple opportunities to do this over my career, but if you do manage to locate one, it's incredibly valuable.

9. Monitor Competitors’ Backlinks 

To see if there are any gaps in your backlink profile compared to those of your rivals, you can examine their backlink profiles. Use a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs to help you in your attempt.

You may examine the backlink profiles of your rivals using tools for search engine marketing like SEMrush. You may use this tool to see how well-listed their websites or pages are on search engines like Google.

Additionally, look for domains that point to your rivals' websites but not your own. You might then fill in the blanks. Following the discovery of the overlap, look for any openings. 

Final thoughts

In my experience, many desire to skip over these fundamental link-building strategies in favour of more cutting-edge or entertaining ones, but doing so is much riskier and rarely profitable. Start with the basics, then as the business expands, move on to the more original and enjoyable strategies.