It’s one thing to boost your company’s SEO rankings on a national scale using keyword targeting, but working to boost web visibility in your own locality can be a whole other kettle of fish. In fact, limiting your content’s intended audience to just people in your vicinity tends to be a lot more difficult than outlining a target audience using more personable and defined demographics, which is what prompts a lot of local businesses to invest in paid search marketing strategies over SEO.
Investing in paid search isn’t a viable option for a lot of SMEs with limited marketing budgets, however. Even companies who can afford to run Google ads on the regular should still absolutely be using the local SEO link-building opportunities available to them.
But what local SEO link-building opportunities are available to your business? We’ll be outlining five of the most low-cost and high-reward local SEO link-building strategies below.
Top 5 Local SEO Link-Building Strategies
Designed with Desygner
#1 Flesh out your Google Maps listing
If you operate in the retail or hospitality industries, optimising your company’s Google Maps listing to include your business location, basic visitor information, and customer reviews, is by far the most vital local SEO opportunity at your disposal. Having a well-optimised and fully fleshed-out Google Maps listing for your business will allow you to take full advantage of all transactional search queries.
Transactional search intent has a reputation for being perhaps the most notoriously difficult style of search intent to rank for, primarily because these search queries are made right before the conversion phase of the customer journey map. All of your competitors will be targeting keywords that reflect a transactional search intent (i.e. ‘where to buy…’) because ensuring that you rank #1 for these high-converting keywords will naturally result in more sales for your business.
Not everybody can rank first for these highly valuable keywords, however, which is where the importance of fine-tuning your company’s location starts to make itself known. Even if you’re not first on SERPs, you can still be featured on Google’s map suggestions for transactional search queries that use locations. Doing so will help boost your organic search traffic from the get-go, providing your business with a strong foundation upon which you can continue to work on your web SEO and on further link building.
#2 Stay active on social media
Another vital method for ensuring that your company location can be easily recognised by device users is simply by adding your location to social media platforms. Using social media to help promote your business locally is another incredibly low-cost and high-reward marketing strategy that will ensure your business rapidly develops its own loyal and local customer base.
Not only will social media platforms allow you to make promotional posts for free, but you will be able to do so in conjunction with particular events, topical hashtags, and other trending phenomena. Creating social profiles for your organisation will also allow your customer base to ‘check in’ geographically to your company offices, cafe, or storefront, an action which will also naturally expand your business’ potential customer base as well as strengthen your brand’s visibility within your local community.
Providing your customers with incentives to share their experiences with you on social media will naturally help build your company’s community presence at an increased pace as well, so it’s well worth considering implementing your own customer incentive initiatives alongside any similar existing loyalty programs.
The more you engage with your customers and understand what they like as well as what they want, the more likely you are to experience higher conversion rates across the board.
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#3 Form local partnerships
Moving on to more traditional forms of link building, it’s in your best interests to continuously seek out opportunities for you to promote your business on other platforms, digital channels, and social media profiles that aren’t managed by your company. Ensuring that your organisation is recognised by a number of other independently managed profiles and sites will communicate to search engines that your business is a reputable figure both in your wider industry as well as in your local community.
Other platforms, profiles, and channels may include neighbouring businesses, local bloggers or influencers, and even charities that your organisation avidly supports. If you’re a local restaurant, for instance, you can partner up with a neighbouring cinema or theatre space to offer meal discounts for theatre ticket holders and vice versa, creating symbiotic relationships between you and other local businesses around you.
Bloggers and influencers can receive special offers if they pen reviews about your organisation, allowing your business to build local SEO links at virtually no cost. Donating to local charities and social organisations will yield similar results here too, and demonstrate to your existing customer base that your company holds strong community values as well.
#4 List your company on local business directories
Another highly valuable link-building opportunity takes the form of local business directories or even industry directories. It’s well worth taking the time to do some quick Google searches for directories that may be relevant to your business and writing up short foundational content for your business to receive its own listing on these directories. You may even opt to monitor your competitors’ backlinks to find directories and other platforms that may be relevant to your business as well.
Is your storefront one of many that can be found on a busy main street? If the answer here is yes, then you and your wider community of small business owners may be able to benefit from establishing your own local directory too. This can be established by all businesses operating on your targeted strip pitching in for the cost of a domain that will then act as a directory that links back to all of your separate businesses.
A good example of a local directory done well is the Traders of Northcote directory, which lists all the businesses occupying a highly eclectic section of High Street that spans from the suburbs of Thornbury to Northcote in the city of Melbourne’s inner north. The vibrant design of this directory appeals to the region’s strong local demographic and encourages patrons to view your business as a valued presence in their wider ecosystem of local makers and merchants.
#5 Get involved in community events
Finally, there’s no better way of boosting your company’s visibility than by being physically present at community events and in three-dimensional community spaces as well as in digital channels. You can gain a lot of organic traffic by taking full advantage of community events like festivals and seasonal celebrations like Christmas, Easter, and retail calendar events.
Being present at community events will help consolidate your business as a beloved fixture of your locality rather than just another storefront. If you’re able to reach this level of customer trust and loyalty, your local link building can really start to take care of itself!
Be sure to take full advantage of the promotional opportunities that these community events provide to your company by getting creative with the value that you can offer to your customers. You can do so by making special edition products, releasing limited-time offers, or just simply by sharing high-value posts on social media platforms to generate customer engagement both in the digital sphere as well as in the real world.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, local SEO link building can take on many forms and in this way, it’s in great contrast to pay-per-click advertising. Local SEO link-building strategies can be just as unidimensional as Google advertising, but they can also be easily dynamic and enriching, not just for your business, but for your customer base too.
Be sure to implement both local and larger-scale SEO link-building strategies to ensure that your business is able to take any and all opportunities for growth that may appear on the horizon.
Rue Wijetunga
Content Strategist, Editor
Rue Wijetunga is a content strategist and editor at Digital Next Australia. She has created and implemented SEO content strategies and penned high-value content for a diverse array of businesses, ranging from tourism to healthcare. More than anything, Rue has a passion for building up small businesses and cultivating local economies, the backbone of Australian industry.
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