There is a big difference between a local link and regular link building. Local links originate from nearby sources and particularly from sites that belong to a particular town, city, or regional area.
For instance, a Website Designer from Dallas could be having local links from local Dallas newspaper, a local university, and a few other businesses within the DFW area.
Links originating from local sources and particularly from sites that belong to a particular town, city, or regional area are important. For instance, an attorney from Dallas, TX could be having local links from the local newspaper, a university or a few other businesses within the DFW area.
Traditionally, the only sites targeted by link builders were websites with high Domain Authority. However, the approach is not always the best when it comes to local link building campaigns.
Local link building often prefers the location of the business or website versus merely just the domain authority.
A local site link is very relevant even without a high domain authority. When you get links that are of high-quality from a local website, they will bring authority, ultimately increasing the visibility of your brand online.
The following are the six simple local link SEO building tactics that every website should make use of.
Local SEO Link Building Strategies
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Website citations
In simple terms, a citation is the mention of the name, phone number (NAP), and address of your business on any site
. By mentioning those details, you may at times also get to include a link to your website. However, indicating the phone number (NAP) is paramount in local SEO link building. This is critical as the information adds more value to the algorithm of local search.
Many of the links are no follow links, especially from business listing sites. However, the ease of getting these links and the relevancy signal sent makes them an essential pillar of the established local businesses’ Foundation links.
Although site citations have many similarities with directory link building, there are distinctive features that separate the two.
Business listings are heavily indexed, crawled. Google uses them to build their city based database. As with any tactic used in link building, you have to be extremely careful not to overdo it. Create these links at an organic, natural pace.
Continued reckless mass citation building can result in Diminishing returns. After you have attained the status where you are listed in the quality websites, any additional building of citations will not be beneficial.
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Business Associations
If you can afford the membership fees, links from your industry’s business associations are straightforward to get.
They will also prove to be very valuable. Most industries have professional associations that you can join at the city, state or even country level. These associations can offer your local SEO link building a perfect boost.
As the pricing for different organizations has tremendous variation, it is important to sort them from the most valuable to the least so you can spend your money wisely. You will want to become a member of an association that ranks highly on Google as one of your link building tactics.
You will also need to have link metrics that are good looking and can avail a link from their membership database to you.
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Sponsorships and Donation Link Building
If your business can offer services to non-profit organizations and local charities, then go for it. For instance, you can provide some of the local organizations in your neighborhoods web hosting services for free and get links in exchange.
It is very likely that those local SEO link building requests will give you 100% success rate.
You can start by giving your offer then have an email follow up where you can mention your request for exposure. Moreover, you can always donate money if you are devoid of any services to offer. There are opportunities in every city to sponsor local association, charity, club or any other event.
Examples of such organizations include farmers markets, local sports teams, homeless shelters, trade shows and even academic events in schools.
These sponsorships will ultimately get you a link to your business website. They will also expose your brand to the audience that is present locally. You can also make up a request to have your address, name and phone number to include the link citations.
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Leveraging your current relationships
This strategy is very fruitful, especially for local businesses. All over the world, every business works with some other business in one way or another. You can utilize those relationships and turn them into links for your SEO link building for your website.
For example, if you are working with a mortgage broker, you can arrange a sit down where you can lobby for a link to your real estate business.
You can also ask businesses that you interact with to give you a contact of a company that will link to yours and increase your SEO rankings. These strategies and link building tactics will result in very lucrative opportunities.
If your website does not have partners or a vendors page, you can always write your business partners a testimonial. If they do not have a section of testimonials on their website, don’t give up. In many cases, they will lack that section because they do not receive any testimonials. Be happy to write them one and request that they have it added to their homepage.
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Event-Based SEO Link Generation
Service-based businesses can still generate links in other locations whenever they are hosting events outside their home office area.
One of the benefits that come with building links that are based on events is that you will get a citation from a local website that will have your address, business name and phone number on it. When brainstorming for an event topic, strive to connect it to your city’s major event.
You will also need to create a page on your site after you have decided on the topic of the event. This page will have all the details, the event’s schema markup, and some pictures.
The page will also have an Eventbrite form that is embedded on the page. If you are working on a limited budget, you can utilize Facebook advertising which is a vital link building tactic for events.
Go ahead and create a post which has the details which you can, later on, boost to expand your reach. Although hosting events can sometimes seem like too much work, they go on a long way to build connections in your local community.
Although building links is the primary objective for hosting these events, the relationships you create will prove to be of more value than the links acquired.
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Leveraging your jobs page
Ensure that you have a jobs page on your website that you can use to get some quick citations and links just by promoting it. You can have this page submitted to national and local job directories. Make sure that there as many details as possible for any job position you are offering.
The links that emanate from this page are not always of a high-quality, but they are super easy to get. These links will have your business boosted by the local SEO link building that they offer. You can also diversify your links by accessing your job openings to colleges and universities in your area. This will ensure that students can send in their applications. This tactic can also be beneficial for businesses that have internship programs.
Conclusion on link building tips
There are many more tactics that can be used to build local links.
However, the ones we have listed above have proven to be the most effective and straightforward local SEO link building tactics for previous clients.
Because most businesses have spammy links or even no links at all, investing some of your time on the above-listed strategies in link building will have a good return.
We hope that you will make an informed decision on the local link building tactics. We want to be your Dallas SEO Company.
