Local SEO: Link Building for Small Businesses

[Linda Buquet]

Just spotted a couple articles about local link building for small businesses and wanted to share.

A couple of the tips I like for small local businesses, in addition to generating a possible link back are also great content generation ideas.

Small Business Link Building In A Post-Panda / Post-Penguin World | Search Engine Journal

Writing reviews of products and services that you and/or your clients use to solve problems is another great way to get links. You?re creating valuable content for your site?s visitors (assuming the review is relevant to the problems your clients want to solve) and link-worthy content as well. Let the company whose product or service you?re going to review know that you?ll be writing a review beforehand and there?s a good chance they?ll promote it via social media.

Interview an industry expert relevant to your business and publish the interview on your site. Once again you?ll be providing quality content to your site?s visitors, and as an added bonus the interviewee will very likely link to the interview.

Here's another one...

How Do Small Businesses Grow Local Inbound Links?

Once all possible on-site SEO was taken care of, I had to create a plan for continued optimization which, naturally, included link building. At the time though, my link building experience was limited to online businesses and national brands. At no point had I focused on optimizing websites for local search and growing local clientele, and I quickly learned that this process is a different beast entirely. If you're a small business looking to grow your local presence, here are some tips from someone who had to build local links for thousands of websites:

(Note: each link below is to an example of a company using one of the tactics to gain inbound links so click thru to see how they did it)

Any other local link building tips or article to share?

 

[Broland]

I do almost all of my small business local seo link building with online business profiles and social interaction. Here is an article I recently wrote geared towards helping small business owners understand and get started with local search marketing

Where To Start With Local Search | DirectoryBug

If you?re a new business not sure where to begin with local search, or a longer standing company whose site isn?t generating the internet traffic you?d hoped for, not all is lost. The aim is to rank for search terms that trigger local specific results and eventually dominate the front page of results with your business or brand; therefore increasing your brand visibility, overall traffic and ultimately sales. This is done by creating multiple high quality online business profiles that are optimized for those search terms.

 

[Fulty22]

Here is a good recent post I found on Moz.

Using The New Adwords Keyword Planner For Local SEO Keyword Research - by Casey Meraz

Let's face it. Local keywords research has never been that easy since the Venice update. While we have always been able to use the Google Keyword Tool to find out search volumes for keywords with Geo Modifiers such as "City Name + Keyword" we have been lacking some reasonable data regarding keywords that do not already have a Geo Modifier.
My frustration has always been this: So what if Google tells me there are 12,100 searches for "Personal Injury Lawyer"? My client is in a local city and I want to know how many people in his city are searching for his services. The good news is that there is now an adequate solution to this problem we have long been plagued by.
Let me introduce you to the Google AdWords Keyword Planner.

 

[Marie Ysais]

In the beginning I worked with small business that were just getting started. You could write great blog material until you were blue in the face and you would rarely receive a link back or back link. In the beginning it is very hard to naturally get back links for small businesses. But a good way to receive back links is to have the small business become more active in the community. A lot of times if you sponsor events or make small donations you will be mentioned on their sponsors page and get a back link. Most of the time the sponsor links had very high authority due to the type of website the back link was coming from. Even reaching out and networking with bloggers or other businesses in your community can lead to back links.

 

[Dave]

Good topic. In afield

 

[Andrew RLM SEO]

Great articles! We recently did an infographic all about the history of our city to create links. We found awesome, unique facts about our city and designed a really creative graphic highlighting these facts.

Since the content was all about the city that we are targeting, it was relatively easy to get shares and links to the content.