Local Link Building & Citations
People often ignore the importance of link building within local SEO campaign, but it is extremely important for local businesses. In comparison to standard SEO campaigns, a local SEO campaign depends on the links from other local websites. Instead of getting links from authority sites, local SEO is all about getting links from relevant local websites. This is why local directories are considered as a useful resource for link building.
“A citation is an online reference to your business’s name, address and phone number (NAP).” (Source)
You can utilize tools such as Bright Local to check existing citations. Also, you can update them to maintain consistency. Also, you can track and measure the competitiveness of the competitor’s citations. Here are a few ways to achieve local citations –
- Take the help of a service like WhiteSpark and find and them to find and upload local citations for you.
- Run through the extensive list of citations on the Moz website and submit your citations manually.
- Utilize tools such as – Ahrefs, Majestic or Open Site Explorer to run competitive link research. Also, try to find citations that your competitors have earned.
- Organize different alerts with the help of Mention or Google Alerts for tracking new mentions of your competitors
Local Link Building Strategies
For link building strategies, there are lots of tricks and tips. However, the below ones are the most effective when it comes to acquiring links for local businesses –
- Firstly, you can go to Meetup.com and look out for a list of local events consistent with your industry. Y0u can search for relevant websites and contact for sponsorships. If any of the companies accept your request, you will earn a link from their websites. And also from the Meetup.com page (a highly authoritative and local link).
- You can run or arrange a local meet-up or event. In this way, you can achieve local links from the event page.
- There is also an opportunity for signing up press request services. It will allow you to be quoted in local publications (massive potential for high authority and local links).
- Next up, you can run an AMA on Reddit (within a pertinent subreddit to your industry) and within other local communities.
- Apart from the above strategies, you can offer a discount to local companies for your product or services in return for a linked mention on the website.
- Lastly, you can offer scholarships or offer jobs to students. You can easily get local links from the universities and their respective career pages.
SERP Click through Rate
CTR from the SERP is another significant ranking signal. This factor is one of most talked topics in SEO. Usually, CTR is one of the strongest ranking signals as it is used as a core ‘Quality Score’ within the Adwords Platform of Google. Google will measure user experiences of potential searchers. The co-founder of Moz (Rand Fishkin) has conducted an interesting experiment with his Twitter followers. He did this experiment just to observe the influence of a big improvement of SERP CTR in search rankings. The results were astonishing as he oversaw a huge jump ranking with several positions within an hour. However, you must remind that CTR has to be high regularly to make sure that the rankings are stabilized. You should do the following to maximize your SERP CTR –
- Make sure that you have Schema.org markup set up, of course with relevant reviews.
- Keep the title tag readable and consistent as much as possible.
- Make a detailed Meta description and keep it relevant to what users are looking for.
- Utilize different social media sites such as Twitter/Facebook/Google+/Reddit for testing titles. It will allow you to measure CTR from social and then take action from the findings to acclimatize your SERP snippet.
Here is a good resource that talks about increasing SERP CTR.
- Get your Google My Business page set up.
- Optimize all the landing pages with local keyword data.
- Make sure that the NAP listings stay consistently across the web.
- Only genuine reviews
- Optimize your search engine snippets and focus on localized link building.