Link Building For Local Sites

As is the case with organic SEO, links are a huge ranking signal for local search.

Let’s take a closer look at ways you can build links for your local website.

Local Citations

Local Citations are essentially just online mentions of your business. They usually display your business name, address, and phone number aka NAP (Name, Address, Phone).

Although GMB is the most important business citation for local SEO there are lots of other important ones that you should look at getting too such as:

A structured citation contains NAP information that is presented in a visually-structured manner like a business directory.

An unstructured citation contains the same or similar information about your business, but in an unstructured format like a blog post or article.

Building local citations is incredibly easy – to start you off, here’s 50 of the core U.S. citations courtesy of Whitespark.

If you aren’t based in the United States, don’t worry – you can find the top citation sources for your country here.

Later on in this module, we’ll show how you can find and audit your local citations.

Guest Posts on Local Blogs

Guest blogging is and always has been one of the most common and effective ways to build high-quality links.

That being said, the purpose with this method is to build exposure by creating content for blogs that have the potential to send referral traffic to your website.

In this case, you should look for local blogs and publications that (ideally) are specific to your niche or industry.

Google search operators are great for doing this!

Here’s an example of location based search:

Here’s an example of an industry based search:

Steal From Your Competitors

It goes without saying that one of the most effective ways to quickly find linking opportunities, is to look at your competitors.

Ahrefs has a useful feature for this called Link Intersect.

To identify your top competitors, simply do a search on Google for your core keywords like “plumbers surrey” or “wedding photographer leicester”.

All you have to do then, is enter the competing domains into the Link Intersect tool (and your domain too).

Ahrefs will show you all of the links that your competitors have, but your website doesn’t.

Simple!

Needless to say, there are countless other link building tactics you can use, but it’s impossible for us to go through each and every one of them in detail here – especially when there’s lots of brilliant articles on link building, like this article from BrightLocal.