What is Link Building?
Within the world of search engine optimization or SEO, link building is an integral marketing tool. You might be surprised to know that for Google or any other search engine to find a post; it needs links from other websites. Thus, even after creating the perfect post with strategized keywords and valuable content, if the search engine cannot follow at least one ‘referral’ link to the post, it will most likely fade into obscurity. It is in such a context that link building comes to the rescue. Simply put, link building can be defined as the mechanism of creating your website hyperlinks on other business sites, culminating in increased referral traffic to your website. It is a powerful mechanism that can considerably elevate the SERP ranking of a site. For instance, a study shows that the first-ranking site on Google SERP has 3.8x more backlinks compared to those between positions 2 and 10.
Hence, if multiple high-quality links lead to a specific page, search engines will deem it a popular, valuable, and meaningful article, automatically ranking it higher. Thus, the higher the number of links, the greater the perquisites. Therefore, link building is indispensable for businesses of all scales and types as it results in a more credibility and trust rate, better brand value, increased visibility, and so forth. However, it is essential to remember that although the magnitude of links is substantial, it is always quality over quantity. Furthermore, not every link has a similar worth; some links could even negatively affect your site. Therefore, robust and mindful link-building strategies become pivotal, precisely what we will cover in this article.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO means optimizing your website for a specific local area and ranking higher in that particular area. For example, if you own a local business, such as a restaurant or a convenience store, you would want your web pages to rank for specific queries by the local audience. Thus, local search engine optimization is all about ensuring that local people can find your business online and offline. In addition, it is a great way to be more visible to local consumers online. For instance, the fact that 46 percent of all Google searches are done by individuals looking for products, services, or data in their local area illustrates the importance of local SEO services in staying afloat in today’s cutthroat business world. Now that we have touched upon the basics of local SEO, let us examine how it works, and what are its mediums and benefits.
How Does Local SEO Work?
When you optimize your website for local searches, you focus on letting Google or any other search engine know, through all kinds of signals, that your business caters to customers in a specific area. The ground rule, nowadays, is that it becomes very convenient to hop onto local SEO services if your business has a specific address in the city or region. Thus, you can create local landing pages and enable local customers to find your business with a store locator on your website. However, local SEO service requires more than just optimizing your site; we will cover it in the section below.
How to Improve Local SEO
You can follow the strategies mentioned below to improve your local SEO strategy –
• Claiming your Google Business Profile with all the relevant details
• Reputation Management
• Website Optimization
• Citation Building
• Local Link Building
• Spam Fighting
• Adapting to local Google searches
When done right, local SEO services can help your business shine bright and appear more prominently in the Local Pack, the Local Finder, the localized organic results, and Google Maps. Let us understand four of these platforms in greater detail.
Local Pack – We can find it at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) for a local search. Listings appear along with a map that has pins marking the location of each business. Being featured in Google’s Local Pack provides any local business with a much-needed edge. The top three ranking results naturally enjoy more clicks, culminating in higher sales, conversations, and profits. It would help if you remembered that how your website fares on the Google Local Pack is premised on the quality of your Google Business Profile, not on your website. Thus, it is crucial to set and optimize your Business Profile in a suitable fashion.
Local Finder – It is an extended list of Business Profiles for local businesses relevant to a specific search query. When you click on the ‘more places’ option at the bottom of the Local Pack, you are taken to the Local Finder section.
Localized Organic Results – They appear immediately below the Local Pack. The local listing for organic search results is based on the local search algorithm. Many ranking factors, such as on-page optimization, reviews, inbound backlinks, etc., determine the localized organic results.
Google Maps – It is common to witness a long list of local businesses on Google Maps. Results usually appear in a list on the left of the page, with the business locations displayed on the map to the right.
After a crisp overview of Local SEO services, let us tour through its benefits.
Benefits of Local SEO Services
Local search engine optimization comes with a hoard of benefits, which include the following:
Increased Online Visibility – Better online visibility in local search queries means more people are likely to discover your business. A survey shows that 97 percent of netizens learn about a local business online, thereby making the unrivaled prominence of local SEO obvious. Simply put, the correct local SEO practices, such as backlinks, citations, etc., will divert attention to your business, facilitating its growth.
Higher Conversion Rates – Organic visibility over local search queries will lead to more people visiting your website, culminating in better conversations, such as sales, subscriptions, service inquiries, and so forth. For example, a study shows that 18 percent of local smartphones result in a purchase within 24 hours. However, the interesting part is that the traffic you gain is not limited to digital mediums only. For instance, over 50 percent of ‘near me’ searches result in a physical store visit. Thus, local SEO will help attract more foot traffic even if you own a brick-and-mortar store.
Improve Your Reputation – A positive reputation is a prerequisite for long-term success regardless of the business type or scale. Engaging in robust local SEO practices, such as backlink strategies, citations, website optimization, etc., can help your business cultivate a favorable public profile. In addition, regularly acquiring new reviews is a foolproof way to keep your online reputation intact. For instance, according to Moz, customer reviews and testimonials increase your Google ranking and account for approximately 15.44 percent of SEO ranking credit. In addition, reviews and testimonials are pertinent to build trust and credibility. For instance, customers spend up to 31 percent more time on businesses with excellent reviews, and a whopping 82 percent of shoppers will not buy from a business with less than 3-star ratings.
In a nutshell, the best local SEO practices can improve your business’ performance by leaps and bounds. Truth be told, there is no substitute for local SEO strategies, and commercial ventures of all scales and types must prioritize it. After an overview of the A to Z of local SEO, it is time to dovetail into one of the most crucial Local SEO services – backlink.
Why Local Business Owners Should Demand Link Building
Local businesses should prioritize link building because it helps them stand out, increases credibility, heightens traffic, and boosts the overall SEO strategy. In addition, backlinks inform Google that people can rely on your site. In short, they serve as a vote of confidence. However, before getting into the nitty-gritty of the importance of backlinks for local businesses, let us first glance through the best SEO backlinks techniques.
Top Backlink Building Strategies for Local Businesses
Keyword Research – The tried and tested keyword research works for various aspects of digital marketing, but especially for link building. Keyword research can help you understand your audience’s intent and allow you to cater to their needs. By gauging the requirements of the local target audience, you can create shareable content and also recognize the platforms you should focus on for your business’s growth.
Press Releases – They are an excellent way to accelerate your backling strategy. Press releases are not always cheap, but they are a sure-shot way to receive links from high authority news sites, including Google News. The best advantage of press release is the links you get, which you can add on your Google Map listing, business profile, etc.
Creating Quality Content – We all know that content is king; without it, even link-building strategies will not survive. The key to getting organic shares online is devising valuable, meaningful, and worthwhile content, which adds to a mine of online information. From videos to podcasts and e-books to white papers, the mediums to create the right content for link building are plenty. Furthermore, you should also share quality content from other sites with your audience, which will naturally increase the odds of your posts being shared by others. Simultaneously, it is crucial to know on which platforms your relevant target audience is the most active and pitch your content there.
Go Local – Forming partnerships and collaborations with local businesses and opportunities is an excellent opportunity to get backlinks from their websites. However, remember that such partnerships should be strategic so that you can also refer your customers to other local businesses when they require something you do not provide. Thus, ensuring that you and your local partners are linking and sharing each other’s content is a great way to supplement this link-building strategy.
Get Added to Local Citations and Directories – Make sure your business is added on Google My Business, Yelp, and other local sites, such as the Chamber of Commerce or alumni directories. This simple strategy is crucial in getting more backlinks to your site. However, ensure your name, address, and phone number remain consistent across the board to keep confusion at bay.
Blog Commenting – Blog commenting is another easy method to build backlinks to your site. To partake in this backlink strategy, you have to use the CommentLuv plugin, which is a commenting system for WordPress sites that help you incentivize your commentator by giving a ‘do-follow’ backlink to one of their blog posts.
Importance of Link Building for Local Businesses
Increased Web Traffic – Backlinking is a foolproof technique that can fetch your website more traffic. When the links to your business or articles are on a reputed website, people visiting these websites will be automatically pulled toward you. For instance, a study by Arhrefs illustrates that 43.7 percent of the top-ranking pages on Google have reciprocal links, meaning that the sites they mention in their content also link back to them.
Increased Trust and Credibility – When Google crawlers are ‘crawling’ a trusted website on which they find a link to your article or business, they will also deem you as trustworthy. Thus, if multiple trusted websites have your business’ links in them, then your Google ranking automatically shoots up. For example, an Aira survey shows that 52 percent of digital marketers strongly believe that link building and brand mention directly impact organic search rankings.
Better Brand Value – Links serve as a third-party indicator of the authoritative strength of your domain and, therefore, offer your website maximum business credibility. Google’s objective is to provide users with results that are most relevant to their searches, and to achieve this; Google depends on the ‘authority’ factor. Therefore, the more high-quality links are directed toward your site, the higher its credibility will be. In a nutshell, link building is the backbone for any local business to stand out and compete in the race.
Increased Visibility – Link building is a foolproof strategy to increase visibility in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. You can increase a minimum of 20 percent visibility of your site or business through strategic link building.
Lower Bounce Rates – Another veritable advantage of link building for local businesses is the decrease in bounce rates. Google views bounce rates as ‘the number of single-page sessions’ or the ‘proportion of individuals who visited only one page of your website and left before browsing through the rest of the website.’ For this reason, internal links are incredibly important when link building as they make it simpler for Google to navigate your website while encouraging visitors to navigate your site content, as well. Thus, when you make it easier for netizens to find relevant content on your site, they will stick through your site longer, and thus, the bounce rates will minimize automatically.
In a nutshell, the significance of link building for local businesses is paramount. It is one of the top-tier local SEO services that can transform the face of your business. In addition, we can only expect the significance of backlinks to increase in the near future. For instance, a survey by Aira reveals that 92 percent of the surveyed marketers strongly believe that link building will continue to be a vital ranking factor in the next five years.
What are Local Citations?
After a comprehensive overview of one of the most crucial local SEO strategies, that is, backlink, let us gauge another of its essential aspect: location citation.
In a layperson’s language, a local citation can be defined as any online mention of a local business’s partial or complete name, address, and phone number, which is also called NAP data. Citations can occur on local business directories, websites, apps, and social media platforms. Citations veritably help people discover local businesses and can also boost the SERP ranking of a website. It is essential to remember that having high-quality primary local citations can land your business on Google’s local interfaces. However, the key to conquering citations is providing accurate and consistent data. There are different types of local citations, which include –
• Search Engines
• Primary Data Aggregators
• Major Directories and Important Platforms
• Geo/Industry Specific Platforms
• Unstructured Citations
• Owned Properties
How to Check Local Citations
You can check your local citations either manually or automate the entire process. However, there are hundreds of local citation sources, only a few major data aggregators that are worth checking out manually. They include big names like Facebook and Apple Maps. Likewise, to make the process of checking local citations easier, you can also go the automatic route and opt for Local Listing Checking tools available online.
After a brief overview of local citations, let us dabble into another major local SEO strategy: competitor analysis.
Competitor Analysis for Local Links
Simply put, a competitor analysis can be defined as examining similar brands in your industry to gain insight into their offerings, sales, marketing approach, branding, and so forth. You might be surprised to learn that competitor analysis is also a well-established local SEO strategy to go after the links that might be helping your competition rank better in search engine results.
The best to engage in competitor analysis for links is by conducting rudimentary research on the keyword phrases relevant to your business. After you have filtered out a handful of competitors, use tools like Ahrefs to get a list of sites linking back to your competition. You can co-opt this strategy to figure out an angle to get a link of your own. Some of the other benefits of competitor analysis for local links are-
• Fulfilling customers’ desires and solving their problems better than competitors
• Discovering untapped niche markets
• Distinguishing between products and services
• Understanding industry standards and meeting them effectively
• Measuring your growth
• Standing out in terms of marketing
Why Guest Posting/ Blog Posting Is Important For Local Business
Let us wrap up this article by gauging one of the most prominent aspects of local SEO strategies – guest blogging.
Guest blogging is an excellent tool for link building. However, it should be done by networking, not spamming. If, when writing a guest blog, your only intention is to get links directly back to your site, then you will probably not get much value out of it. The simple method by which you can find blogs for guest blogging in your niche is –
Just enter on Google’s search bar ‘your niche’ + ‘write for us’, and you will be automatically directed to all the blogs accepting relevant guest posts pertaining to your niche.
Conclusion
So, there we have it, a comprehensive overview of the importance of link building for local businesses. In today’s day and age, where the world is interconnected, businesses cannot thrive without one another. Backlinking is an SEO strategy based on collaboration, creativity, and thoughtfulness. And its benefits are priceless. With the right backlinking strategy, your local business will vehemently shine bright, and will be able to etch its name in gold.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the difference between local listing and directory submission?
Ans. Local listing is related to regional locations and may include yellow pages of specific locations with business listings for higher traffic. On the other hand, directory submissions pertain to any location, and their benefits are reaped globally by websites from the world over.
2. How to get more local listings?
Ans. The ways to get more local listings are –
• Optimize your Google My Business Profile
• Get added to local citations and ensure that the information provided is consistent and accurate
• Create quality content
3. What are local SEO techniques?
Ans. Some of the local SEO techniques are
• Target local keywords
• Optimize your site with relevant content
• Optimize for mobile
• Create local content
• Manage your reviews
