How Local Businesses Can Get More Links
Developing relevant, informative and engaging content for your site can, over time, help your local business achieve strong search rankings. When readers share your page or other sites link to your content, both your traffic and rankings will grow.
Building Links With Orlando Businesses
But if you really want to dominate your niche in the search rankings, you need to consider ways you can build additional high-quality links to your site. Links not only drive traffic, they are also “the single most credible metric used by Google and other search engines to determine a site’s ranking,” according to link building veteran Eric Ward (from Success Secrets of the Online Marketing Superstars, p. 156).
Before discussing specific link building tactics local businesses can use, we should stress the importance of quality over quantity. It’s much better to have 10 links from very reputable sites than 100 links from low-quality sites. Most businesses don’t learn this until it’s too late, but Google will penalize your site if they feel any inbound links are from low-quality or spam-related websites.
There are plenty of ways businesses and marketers can build inbound links. However, before you pursue a particular link opportunity, you should first determine if the link will drive referral traffic, build visibility with your target audience, or help your brand reputation. If you can’t answer yes to at least one of these points, the particular link in question isn’t worth your time, explains Eric Enge, a content marketing author with Stone Temple Consulting.
Links can be obtained through two primary means — content and outreach
If you’ve been researching link building for very long, no doubt you’ve read about the importance of content in building search rankings. One way content helps build search rankings is through attracting high-quality links. According to Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko, content that attracts links tend to have the following four traits according to internationally-recognized entrepreneur:
- Content is targeted to a very specific audience.
- Content has a visual component (like images, screenshots, infographics, diagrams, videos).
- Content is featured on a clean, professionally designed site.
- Content is “awe-inspiring.”
All-in-one guides are one type of content that attracts high-quality links because they curate all important information on a given topic in one place. If you’re a bike shop in Orlando for example, you could develop an all-encompassing guide on where to enjoy your bike in Central Florida, how to enjoy it safely, and practical advice for keeping your bicycle in good working condition.
Outreach is the second primary means of building high-quality links to your local business website. You can sponsor a community event for instance and obtain a link from your city government or a local newspaper like the Orlando Sentinel.
Another source is manufacturers and wholesalers.
Take our bike shop example — perhaps you can reach out to manufacturers of the bikes you sell in your shop or reach out to your parts wholesaler. Most businesses are willing to oblige to link requests since they are eager to promote places people can find their products.
Casey Meraz, founder of Ethical SEO Consulting, has some really interesting ideas he discusses in a blog at Moz.com. Tactics like sponsoring an event or reaching out to manufacturers are relatively easy, while others like building relationships with local influencers take a bit more time and planning. Meraz also provides some helpful search queries you can use to identify potential link opportunities.
Moving Forward With Links
Link building through outreach is really more like public relations than SEO since it oftentimes requires you to engage in relationships offline.
In the end, solid link building requires patience and a little bit of planning, but the benefits to your local business’ search rankings will boost your bottom line through more site traffic and leads.
