Local link building symbolises building the contextually and locally-relevant links to a business website. This is done to drive the website traffic and rank better for local searches including map results. If you want to get a high ranking on search engines, you must build good quality and relevant backlinks. Surprisingly, you don’t really need too high referring domains.
To start building local links, you need to start researching local business listing sites.
Let’s understand 7 ways to build these:
- Links from high-ranking sites
The best way is to search for your relevant keywords in google and try to get links from them. Just sign up and add your business to get listed. This would ensure that you get visibility on search engines, which improves your chances of getting the intended results.
- Links from competitors
Understand the links your competitors are getting and see if you can get links from them. You would find a lot of directory sites which are also known as local citations that include your business name, address and phone number. You can use Ubersuggest to identify competitor backlinks.
You can also opt for Link Intersect Tool by ahrefs.
- Local citations
Google’s local algorithm prefer the best local businesses for local search queries. Site results are returned based on their relevance and prominence, and citations play a key role in terms of relevance. A lot of citation sites could be of your benefit. We already saw a couple of them earlier. You can consider the below ones, especially for Indian business. These sites are considered the major ones and help improve our ranking. Google crawls a number of such sites where you provide your business information and if the same information is presented, it increases your credibility and likelihood of results being shown in search results.
- Indiamart
- Sulekha
- Justdial
- Yalwa
- Tradeindia
- Grotal
- Internal links
Do not ignore your site as it is one of the important ways to build the links. Internal links are powerful link building tactics and help users to get engaged with your website and keep exploring it. This could go from a blog to a product page or vice-versa. A website with more than one page needs to be interconnected by internal linking. Ex. Look at how this digital marketing institute in Nagpur has implemented this.
While doing this, make sure that the majority of your external links point at deep internal pages, not your home page. This is because the homepage does not necessarily include all the detailed information users ask for. Create a strong internal linking structure to pass on the link juice to internal pages. Anchor text is another factor that can help you improve link value. It considers adding keywords and content to the linking process, thereby making it more relevant.
- Other similar opportunities
- City-specific sites and directories
- Local news sites and magazines
- Local community groups (FB community, Reddit, etc.)
- Local awards
- Content for the local audience
Create content that is targeted towards the local audience. You can utilize blogs to get ranking on topics such as “Which is the best lawn in your area”, “Best wholesale shops” or just the prices of services offered in your area. Google prefers local results for audiences searching for any specific products or services in their preferred location. Local content increases the chances of getting a higher ranking in search results, especially for those searches.
- Broken links
If you find that most of your links are broken, then try to replace them with other high-quality relevant page links. In case that high-value page belongs to you, then you gain additional benefit in seo terms. Broken links can hurt user experience as well as seo, so it becomes necessary to fix them. Use can use Ahrefs broken link checker tool to identify the broken links and fix them.
Final Thoughts
In case you want to boost your local search ranking, the best way is to implement these strategies and get the results. You may incorporate certain challenges like finding more high-quality sites, but spend enough time to identify those including taking help from tools such as ahrefs, ubersuggest and semrush in order to boost your efforts.
