Businesses that rely principally on local sales understand all too well the importance of building strong local SEO traffic. For many small businesses, local SEO optimization could be the sole factor that will decide whether their business will thrive online or go unnoticed in the vast sea of digital information. But with the global scale of the internet, how can a small town plumbing business compete online with something like a major hardware chain?
Tips and Tricks for Local SEO
As anyone who is familiar with SEO knows, building strong link profiles can make the difference between ranking in the first page of search results and getting buried on page four or more. Link profiles help Google and other search engines to characterize the authority and value of your site by weighing not only how many sites across the internet link to your content, but how authoritative those sites are. Fortunately this principle can be applied directly to gain SEO ground locally as well.
Links from Local Sources
Anytime you’re able to obtain links from local blogs, review websites, schools, and other local fixtures, your site gains local ground from simply being associated with local organizations near your business.
But how do you get these types of links?
One place to begin is to create a list of targeted keywords combined with your physical location. For instance, if you were a plumber in Tucson, you might include “plumbing Tucson,” “pipe repair Tucson,” and similar phrases on your list. You can then use these keywords to find existing URLs to blogs and websites that contain information relevant to your services and would make a good link prospect.
Once you’ve found relevant pages, look for anywhere that you can drop a link to your domain or social media profiles. This includes writing a guest blog post, blog commenting, reviews, resource pages and so on. If the availability of sources is low, you can create your own by creating reviews for local business that you like. Not only will your favored business appreciate the positive review you provide them, but signing your review with your own business information can be used to tie their locality to your business.
One thing to note, however, is that while getting links from relevant local sources is ideal, the truth is most links from any type of quality local site will boost your local rankings.
Above and Beyond
Depending on what resources you have available to you, another powerful local SEO solution is to create a local scholarship. High schools and colleges would be glad to add you to their list of benefactors who provide scholarships for which students can apply.
For your efforts, you’ll earn access to a high quality local link from the institutions through which you offer the scholarship. Similarly, there’s no shortage of student organizations that could use a little extra funding, and these organizations almost always have either personal domains or subdomains through a university. Finally, if you’re drawn in by the appeal of doing good deeds within your community while improving your website’s rankings, it’s worthwhile to note that you don’t have to be a regional business to benefit from local SEO.
As a consequence of having less competition, local SEO traffic is usually easier to attract versus global traffic. And what many people do not realize is that a business’s SEO strength within a global niche can be drastically influenced by the strength within the business’s local region. Regional businesses don’t have a monopoly on the power of developing their local SEO, and the benefits of community outreach are available to anyone willing to try.
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I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
