As more and more brick-and-mortar businesses come online, ranking on the first page of Google is becoming harder. However, with the right link-building strategy, your business can position itself for success in your local geography. Learn about some tactics that professional backlink-building services incorporate into their client’s link-building plan that yields phenomenal results.
Proving Yourself as a Local Expert
Business location is one of the core factors that Google algorithms use to determine where to show your business in the search engines. To win a local search engine ranking, you need to prove to Google that you are an expert in your industry and locality.
Consider this analogy. Imagine you are a tourist going on a vacation to Columbia and want to go sightseeing. So you go to a travel agency and ask for a tour guide. They recommend you an expert who specializes in the particular area you will be visiting. To prove his credentials, the guide also shows numerous photos of him with tourists that assure the tourist that he is perfect for the job and would be able to guide them perfectly about the local culture and show them the best places to visit. This is exactly how search engines work. They want to create the best experiences for their users and will only recommend a business that their algorithms evaluate as credible and relevant.
Get Local Citations
Search engines look at citations to judge the credibility of a website. A citation is a reference to your business’ name, phone number, and address on popular websites in your area. These websites can include local news sites, price comparison sites, local business directories, and more. If you manage to get a positive citation from a local newspaper, it can do wonders for getting your name out there. When more cite your business, you start getting backlinks from them. Local citations are also important to your overall rankings because they help prove to search engines like Yahoo, Google, and Bing that you are a credible business located in a particular geography.
Craft Compelling Content that is Relevant
As the volume of content in search engines continues to grow, you need to ensure that you create content that is relevant to the local markets in which you do business. Make sure that the content is informative and helps solve problems for the user inserts their query in a search engine in the first place. Include well-researched statistics in the content pieces.
This will encourage websites in your industry to link to it. Write content in a native tone as this will encourage the local citizens to purchase from a local company. Include geo-specific keywords in your content piece. However, don’t resort to keyword stuffing, as this can lead to Google penalizing your site. Lastly, you need to build a community around your content. Utilize social media to do marketing. The easiest way is to make a group on Facebook and regularly share content on it to keep your audience engaged.
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Get Links from High Domain Authority Sites
If you want to get the results you are looking for, you need to focus on quality and not quantity. Having hundreds of links from low-quality sites won’t do much for your business. Instead, try to focus on building quality links from sites with high domain authority. Hire a professional backlink building service if you are not clear on how to do so.
Discover Other Local Link Opportunities
Try to pitch partnership opportunities to key local institutions such as churches, local schools, and universities in your area. You can do this by giving office space for them to host their events, offering company scholarships, mentoring students, doing CSR activities for local non-profit organizations, and participating in job fairs to get your brand name out in front of locals. Have a meet and greet with local bloggers to build networks with them.
Another way to get publicity is to identify popular personalities in your community and get interviews with them. Then try to pitch local newspapers to publish the interview. Reputable link-building services can help you find these local link-building opportunities.
Avoid Bad Practices
Google wants businesses to rank organically in their search engine results pages which is why they penalize companies that use shortcuts. Don’t resort to link spamming with the help of automated software to post links of your content piece in the comment sections of random blogs. Also, don’t take the risk of buying or selling links, as it could lead to your site being temporarily banned.
Fixing Broken Links
Broken links in a website can be a source of embarrassment for your site as well as the site you guest blog on. If your website has a lot of broken links, then search engine crawlers will not be able to index your website well and penalize your website. This is why it’s important to find these errors and fix them regularly.
Use Backlink Analysis Tools
You need to use tools to do backlink analysis, track keyword performance, do link prospecting, and audit content. You can also analyze backlink profiles and select relevant local profiles based on things like anchor text, usage of keywords, and location. Using the tools, you can correct issues with your backlinks and avoid Google penalties. Experienced backlink building services have great software at their disposal to help entrepreneurs build links. They can help optimization of keywords as well as anchor links.
