What Is Local Link Building? (Plus 5 Local Link Building Tips to Build Your First Link)

What is local link building? Local link building is a strategy to earn relevant links to your business’s website. The goals are to drive local traffic to your website and to help your website rank better for local searches.

Would you invest in services from say a local termite-control company that no one has heard of or recommended? Chances are, you’ll do some research and shortlist companies that people have tried before and left a review on.

In the digital world, having someone in your community vouch for your local business is like having another website link to yours. A link from another website to yours — also known as a backlink — is a vote of confidence that your business provides value.

That said, having backlinks is an important search engine optimization (SEO) important ranking factor. It also helps online users in your area find your business when they come across a link to your site.

If you’re looking for local link building tips for your small to midsized business’s (SMB’s) website, keep reading! We’ll cover these topics:

• What is local link building?
• Why is local link building important?
• How to get local backlinks

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What is local linking?

Local link building is a strategy to earn relevant links to your business’s website. The goals of this link building strategy are to drive local traffic to your website and to help your website rank better for local searches.

For example, you own a bakery shop in Omaha, Nebraska, and you want more people in the city to learn about your business when they search for relevant keywords online. Earning links from local food blogs, influencers, and directories will help boost your local SEO strategy.

These local backlinks show that your business is trust-worthy and relevant to people in the area. Local backlinks also give search engines a signal that your business’s website is helpful for users in your geographic location.

Why is local link building important?

“Near me” searches have increased by more than 500% in the past years, so the location of your business plays an important role for search users. In addition, 50% of users visit a store within a day of local search. That sounds like a great opportunity for your website and business!

As the number of local searches increase, your local SEO strategy should also get a boost. While backlinks from big websites are nice to have, backlinks from local websites have merits, too. Earning backlinks from reputable local websites increases your business’s recognition in your area, gives your brand a vote of confidence, drives referral traffic, and brings more revenue.

Bonus Read: Top Link Building Companies

Local link building tips

Now that we know what local linking is and why it’s important for your business, let’s go through some tips on how to let local backlinks:

1. Claim local citations
2. Use link building tools
3. Create relevant and useful content for your local audience
4. Reach out to other local and relevant sites
5. Collaborate with local brands that are aligned with your business

Now, let’s go through each one:

1. Claim your citations

First off, get your citations in local and relevant directories. Directories are trustworthy websites that can show your brand’s information, including your website, to searchers.

Websites like Yelp, Foursquare, and Yellow Pages are a great place to start. Don’t forget to also update your Google My Business page with your details, including your website URL!

Tools like LocalFX can help you manage your local citations. LocalFX helps you sync data across all your listings, so you provide accurate information across all directories where your business is listed.

2. Use link building tools

Several link building tools are available online. Use these tools to check the health of your backlinks. These tools help you identify the following:

• how many backlinks your website has earned
• the quality of your links
• the number of links you’ve lost
• the number of potential links you can earn.

Use Ahref’s Link Intersect feature to help you identify the websites that link to your competitors but don’t link to you. You can reach out to these sites, as they may give you a backlink, too!

WebFX’s SEO Checker is also a handy tool that analyzes your link profile. Your website gets a link profile score based on the quantity and quality of websites linking to your site. Your initial score is a great benchmark for you as you start your local linking efforts.

Looking for an all-in-one SEO audit tool? You’ve found it.

SEO Checker provides data on key metrics to give you:

• Complete SEO score
• Content Grade
• Site Speed Analysis
• and more.

Check My SEO Now!

Please input a valid URL (ex. webfx.com, www.webfx.com)

3. Create relevant and useful content for your local audience

Gain the trust of your local audience by creating useful content for them. Your content can garner links organically from local websites.

For example, let’s say you own an interior design firm in Los Angeles and get a lot of inquiries from prospects on building treehouses. You can create a blog post about the list of things homeowners should consider before building a treehouse.

The purpose of your content is to provide value to your audience in your community, so make sure it’s not a hard sell. These useful content can earn you backlinks from local websites, local bloggers, and more!

4. Reach out to local and relevant websites

Elevate the value of your content — and website — by sharing it with other local and relevant websites.

If you’re in the business of recreation or entertainment, for example, you can craft an outreach email to journalists, bloggers, and influencers who may be interested in your content. They can repurpose and share your topic, and provide a link back to your site.

We have some tips on writing effective outreach emails, so you don’t have to start from scratch.

5. Collaborate with local brands that are aligned with your business

Cold outreach emails aren’t the only way to reach out to earn backlinks. An excellent way is to team up with other local brands that are aligned with your business.

These collaborations can be in the form of sponsorship, guest blogging, or podcasts. These efforts can help you win backlinks to your site, and reach the audience of your brand partners.

For example, let’s go back to our Omaha-based bakery shop. You can reach out to a community college for a potential partnership or sponsorship related to culinary arts.

Is the school having a culinary competition? It’s an opportunity for you to be a partner, have your brand at the event, and earn a link to your website!

Pumped up to start with your local link building efforts?

If you’re thinking about taking baby steps to local link building with an SEO agency, look no further than WebFX. Our team of 500+ digital marketing experts will be glad to help you in every step of the way.

Contact us online or call 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist. We’ve helped 2,000+ clients reach their digital marketing goals!