What are the Best Backlinks for Local SEO?

If you ever considered boosting your local SEO organic traffic, then you might have already heard about the importance of local link building. And to rank your local business higher in search engine results, you need to focus on acquiring the best backlinks for local SEO. Let’s help you take a deep dive into different local link building strategies that one can choose from to boost their online business.

But first, what do you mean by link building?

The process of building contextually, as well as niche-relevant across business websites, is referred to as link building. By doing so, you can expect increased online traffic to your website, which will gradually lead to higher ranks across different search engines in your targeted areas.

Link building plays a crucial role in drawing attention to organic traffic with the means of visualizing you more on search engine result pages. To build the best backlinks for local SEO, link building can be combined with strong technical SEO strategies, great on-page SEO, niche-relevant content and a good user experience, and hence can be super effective in driving more organic traffic to your website. Link building is thus an important part of the digital marketing process, with the correct strategies and implementation, businesses can generate great benefits from this practice in the long run.

What are the Advantages of Link Building

According to recent research, more than 46% of Google searches have local intent in them. This clearly outlines the value of SEO for any local business out there, and building the best backlinks for local SEO just takes your business listing to newer heights.

• It allows you to maintain your SEO rankings
• It helps you save both your time and effort in attracting a newer audience
• Link building helps you identify more websites from your domain that can be directly linked with yours.
• The link building process is known to induce more control over the acquiescence of organic traffic.
• It helps in boosting your online visibility across different other websites and online channels

How many local links do I require for my website?

Most local businesses don’t actually need loads of links to rank in local search engines. Check the SERP or (search engine result pages) summary for any local question in Keywords Explorer and you’ll seldom see businesses with a high number of employers referring to domains ranking on the first page.

You can use various keyword explorer tools available to acquire the best backlinks for local SEO. For this, simply look at the SERP summary to examine what percentage of links the ranking pages have. Upon analyzing the reports, you might get an idea about the number of links and domains other similar businesses have to rank in top results and plan your local link building strategies accordingly.

How to build the Best Backlinks for Local SEO?

Just like the normal link building process, local link building also needs various steps and planning to deliver the expected results. Right from research and analysis to implementation and monitoring, the complete process of generating the best backlinks for local SEO needs hard work, perseverance, and skills.

Let’s look at a few of the proven local link building tactics suggested by our experts at White Label SEO Lab to help you get started with the process of acquiring the best backlinks for local SEO.

1. Get links from directories and other ranking sites:

One of the primary things to count when using a backlinking strategy for local SEO is acquiring links from different websites. You just search for targeted keywords focused on your business niche and identify the possible websites from the results that can give you backlinks. Most of these might be business directories or information aggregators that can serve as a quick yet effective method of link building for local SEO. As a pro tip, try to reach out to only relevant and niche-specific websites that will offer better chances of generating traffic in the long run.

2. Competitor link building analysis can be helpful:

This is also a crucial part of local link building for SEO. To start with, you simply need to enter your competitor’s website in various link analyzers and link intersection identifiers out there, and you will get different websites that your competitors are using to build links for their local SEO. Several of those directories are considered local citations and embrace business details like your name, address, and contact number in the process of building the best backlinks for local SEO. The next step is to simply take note of all the missing opportunities, and start planning your strategies to reach out to those websites and acquire quality local backlinks to your business too.

3. Produce relevant content:

Content creation is an important part of the local link building process. Well-written content can not only attract more audience but also help set up your brand as a trusted source of information over time. You can write about certain trending and highly searched topics that are relevant to your targeted areas and also related to your business offerings. Here are some common suggestions to plan your content around:

• What are the different types of [specific services] available in your area
• What are the price ranges of [services] in specific areas
• Current [service] trends in your area

This will attract wider audiences and can boost your overall SEO score. You can use such content to plan email outreach processes to generate links directly to your web pages.

4. Acquire Local Citations:

You can choose from several local citation websites such as Google My Business, Yelp, Bing, Apple Maps, Facebook, and Yellowpages to perform local SEO link building. These websites not only offer direct links to your website but also feed their database to various other websites which can in turn increase your local backlinks counts and traffic. Depending upon where your business is focused, you can also try registering in various local aggregators such as Localeze and Foursquare.

5. Reclaim lost and inactive links:

In the digital world, changes in websites can be seen every few years to keep up with new technologies and trends. And in the process of revamping websites, most of the time the URLs of your web pages change, leading to backlinks from different sources ending up in 404s. Chances are you might have forgotten about those backlinks and thus lost out on your earlier efforts. To get those links back and active, you can:

• Do a quick lookup on any relevant tools such as Site Explorer
• Look at the various 404 links
• Add a response filter and redirect those to your new web links.

That’s it, you have successfully revived those valuable links from the past.

6. Claim unlinked mentions:

If you are running a business that offers value and information to the world in some or the other way, chances are you are being mentioned on a lot of other business websites, directories, digital magazines, and other such spaces. And most of these mentions go without any backlink. So it’s time to find all such mentions and claims for backlinks from every possible website.

7. Add internal links:

Basically, an internal link is a link acquired from one page on your website that is eventually connected to another page of the same website. Web crawlers and users make use of internal links to find different content available on your website and navigate across different pages to find the information they have been looking for.

Your website is already a local site on its own, and you have complete control over it. So why not make use of this opportunity to link your pages within the contents across different web pages and blogs? To your surprise, internal links are a robust link-building method.

8. Sponsor local events:

There is a high chance that a local event near you is looking for sponsors to successfully manage and conduct their event. And they might already have a dedicated website set up with all the information. You can identify and reach out to such events to offer sponsorships, and in turn, your business details and the website link are put up on their event page. It’s a win-win for both of you.

9. Other ways of local link building:

Apart from the obvious ways, there are certain slightly unpopular tactics of local link building as well. These might be the links from different websites that are targeted toward your website content. These are:

• Faculties or Universities (e.g., job postings, scholarships, club sponsorships, discounts, alumni links).
• City-specific sites and directories.
• Local news, magazines, and podcasts.
• Some sites specialize in the specific business in nearby states or areas.
• Local social media network teams (e.g., Reddit, Facebook teams, Nextdoor, etc.)
• Leveraging existing relationships to acquire local SEO backlinks (connections through churches, business teams, or perhaps personal individuals)

Final thoughts:

According to the experts at White Label SEO Lab, the above process might appear to be challenging and time taking, but the results it reaps are tremendous. That is why it is suggested to consult an expert local link building agency that specializes in such processes and services. This will not only save you time and resources but also ensure promising results towards the end of the local SEO links campaign.

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