If you own a local listing for your business that mainly targets traffic from a particular geographic location, then you have to think out of the box to optimize this local listing and have to implement tactics beyond the general ones.
Achieving good ranks in local listings isn’t a simple task. There are a huge number of factors that affects local ranking and if you want to achieve the top ranking then you will need to understand and implement all those factors. Most of the experts boast of having full knowledge of local listing ranking improvement factors but many of them generally under-estimates the importance of link building for local search optimization.
This post will provide you knowledge of these great but mostly overlooked link building opportunities that can boost your local rankings very efficiently and rapidly as well.
What Type of Links We Need to Target for Successful Local Optimization?
As you are going to outsmart your competitors so you need to think beyond them and must pay attention to the links that your competitors will be missing. Secondly the general link building scenario won’t work in case of local listing optimization. You need to get the links basically from the local authority sites within your listing’s geographic location.
Where to Get These Links?
Discover Local Citations from Competitors
As I Told above that you must look for the links that your competitors are missing but it doesn’t mean that you should not utilizing the ones they are getting benefitted from. A smart businessman is one which takes advantage of all opportunities visible and hidden ones as well. So, simply search with your competitor’s phone number and business name and you will get the local citations listings very easily.
Find Relevant Local Businesses
After searching and finding the local citations and getting your business listed there the next basic step for local link building will be to discover the local business relevant to your business but not a competitor.
Suppose you are selling a product and other business is actually selling corresponding services but not a product then you can opt for contacting such business.
Firstly make a bit research if those websites are having some resource page for linking to the other relevant businesses. If yes then you are lucked out by getting an easy to obtain local links from relevant niche adding more value to it.
Commenting on Local Quality Blogs
Stop thinking of spamming a non-relevant blog with garbage comments. Instead do it in a genuine way and instead of choosing a crappy blog opt for a blog having your geo-location in domain name or in title and the theme of the post should be relevant to your business. Then try to get involved in a healthy discussion and make some valuable contribution to the post.
To search such blog use the following query: “location + your keyword”
You can create as many variations of this query by inserting as many keywords as you want to and do a Blog Search on Google.
Using this approach, find a few blogs with highly valuable content and having same theme as that of your business. Now you must leave some valuable comment there and also add genuine looking link to your business domain or Google+ Landing page or Local Listing URL there.
Google Analytics for Link Building Opportunities
You might be wondering how Google Analytics can provide you link building opportunities. But you just have to think a bit different from traditional approach of using Analytics.
Well you can analyze Google Analytics for your website to identify which city is actually driving the most traffic to your website and define the one which you can use for local area optimization.
SO after defining the traffic generating city that comes under your defined area you just have to go to Google and change the geo location for Google to use the one defined by you. Then search for the following query:
“Business directory + Geo modifier”
Here Geo modifier refers to the city identified by you from Analytics data.
This will return you the local directories for that particular city and you can easily get links from those directories for getting some local and quality links plus will also result in more targeted traffic.
Be Sponsor for Local Events
You must keep an eye on the events that are going to take place in your local area like meetings, conferences, exhibitions, Trade Fair, entertainment shows etc.
Go and check the related websites for those events and search out whether they provide a link to the sponsors of the programs. If the answer is yes then immediately apply for being a sponsor for the program and in return you will get authority plus local links that you can use to put links to your website domain, Local Listing Page or Local landing page URLs.
Participate in Local Charities
To get easy links from local businesses and local websites the best way is to be popular in your area. You can do so by frequently participating in all common events plus donating some amount to the Charity programs. You would also be likely to get Link from the Charity websites as most of these websites link backs to their donors without any problem.
Guest Posts on Local Niche Blogs
This is also a very good option as you will be contributing to a local blog and in return will get a Local link to your listing page, Local Landing page or root domain URL of your website.
To find such high quality and niche blogs you can do Google Blog search using the following query:
“keyword + geo-location”
Then search whether the resulted blogs offer guest post facility or not and if yes then go get it at the earliest.
Write Testimonials for Other Local Businesses
As a business you would always love to see a positive testimonial about your business from someone who has used your service, same is the case with other businesses as well. You must have used services of so many other businesses in your daily like dentist, house cleaning services, restaurant etc. So you can write a testimonial for them and ask them for linking to you back. I am sure this option would definitely prove a win-win situation to you and no one would like to reject a positive feedback from its customer.
Getting Links from Local High Schools and Colleges
This part of the article will explain tactics about getting local links for your listing from highly authorized and trusted sites such as schools, colleges, universities etc.
You can make some offers to attract the educational institutes and to make them post those offers and hence your sites’ link to their websites for free. You can do it by making offers like these ones:
- Posting a Job
- Offering a scholarship
- Putting a competition for Students
As almost all of educational institutes will look forward to growing opportunities for their students so such kind of offers will make them automatically link to you.
Coming up to the conclusion I would like to note two important things to take care while implementing these link building tactics:
- Whenever possible use only three URLs for linking your website home page, your Google+ Local Landing page and Your Google+ Local Listing Page.
- Secondly If possible try to use your location and the keyword, suited to your business, in the links you get on local sites.
