Most Local Businesses Struggle To Get Backlinks
Plumbers, mechanics, local gyms, dry cleaners, and countless other local businesses rely entirely on ranking locally for their niche, but most struggle to do so successfully. Countless articles have been written about the basics of local SEO, such as the importance of local citations and guesswork on the factors that drive local results, but local SEO continues to be a mystery for most of our clients.
We get asked questions like the following: “so, once you’ve claimed our local citations, optimized the site for mobile, and created a social media presence, what do we do then? Do we spend hours scouring the internet for blogs to guest post on? Do we send out hundreds of emails asking businesses throughout the country to exchange links? Do we answer one of those spam emails promising to make us #1 on Google for $99? You say I need links, but how do I get them?”
How to Boost Your Local SEO With Offline Activities
Many are already doing plenty to get these links, but they don’t realize it. What they don’t realize is that there is much that can be done offline to drive their online presence. Most of the businesses that we work with tend to see the two as separate entities that cannot help one another, but nothing can be further from the truth. Our local clients must begin to see their online and offline activities as complementary and work on developing offline activities to drive their local SEO.
Here are some tips that can get links for most local businesses:
1. Get links from local organizations. If your business is active in a local organization, you should look for opportunities to get links from these organizations. If you are sponsoring a local event, speaking at a local event, or partnering with another local business, you should be asking them to link to your site. They could be linking to a bio page about the person that is speaking, and about us page to share basic info on your business, or a blog topic that is related to the event. Sponsoring a local little league team? Get a link to your website. Talking about important estate planning topics at a local seniors organization? Get a link to your bio on your website. Even though these links are unlikely to carry much SEO weight, they are clear signals to search engines that you are a real local organization and you are active in your local community.
2. Do something for the community. At the risk of sounding a bit self-serving, holding local events can be great drivers of your online presence. Holding a food drive, blood drive, fundraiser, or some other worthwhile cause can not only help the people that you aim to serve; it can also boost your local online presence. Asking a local business to share a blog post with info on a fundraiser is much more likely to result in getting you the local backlinks that you want. Sending an annoying email suggesting that the two of your exchange links is likely to end up in the junk bin. Holding a worthwhile event can earn you local press (such as Philadelphia’s WMMR Campout for Hunger, which gets tons of press) and even get you backlinks (this particular event got this page over 100 backlinks from authoritative sites)
3. Offer something to another business or organization for free. There are plenty of local organizations and businesses that would love to have you host them and vice-versa. A local massage therapist could partner with a local gym to offer free massages for the day. This could result not only in new business leads, but a link from the partner’s website and/or social media page. The key is to offer something of value and encourage the partner to include a link to your site while he or she promotes what you are offering.
Offline Needs To Be Online
So many businesses are already involved in these sorts of offline activities, but they are missing out on the opportunity to drive their local SEO. They are already offering free advice to organizations, hosting fundraisers and drives, partnering with other businesses; the problem is that they aren’t creating an online trail of it. Local businesses can strengthen their local SEO presence by using these activities as a way to earn links from other sites, sending signals to Google that they are trustworthy businesses that should be ranking highly for the services and products that they provide. It is our job to make them realize it.