Reverse Engineering the Local SEO Algo to Steal #1

[Linda Buquet]

I don't deal with or even look at backlinks much. Unless it's an uber competitive market, I have found I can usually get clients in the top 3 with good solid G+L optimization and advanced on-site Local SEO techniques.

However in tough markets, sometimes you can have the ultimate on-page and G+L optimization and it boils down to backlinks, since the blended algo is so dependent on organic ranking factors.

I admit I'm short on time and only scanned the following and I also admitted above I don't really focus on backlinks. But this article seems to be well done, has a lot of meat and the example happens to be a LOCAL business so is highly relevant.

Reverse Engineering Guide: Steal SEO Competition?s #1 Google Rank

Building backlinks and trying to rank in Google is like an enigma wrapped in a riddle.

What works one day does not necessarily work the next, and more importantly ? what works for one niche will definitely not apply to other niches. So what do you do?

Reverse Engineering is the answer to this conundrum because it goes well beyond the concept of ?finding good places to get backlinks from? and takes your high search engine ranking optimization to an entirely new level.

The example I will be using today comes from an offline friend who owns a Printing Shop in Romford and is having trouble stealing that no. 1 spot in Google from another local printing shop located just down the road.

The author uses Ahrefs and OpenSiteExplorer as tools for this example and includes lots of screenshots.

Learn anything new or have any related tips or tools to share?

 

[sergiuliano]

Reverse Engineering on backlinks dose not for Local SEO. The author doesn't refer to Local SEO strategy in his article.

On Local SEO, Reverse Engineering is done as you mentioned by Social Media + Citations, there is o need for thousands of backlinks to rank on top.

Check "pizza delivery" on top10 US cities and you'll see that websites ranking on top have only few backlinks but very good local citations.

Brands as PizzaHut ranks not in TOP10 google results on some locations and they have plenty of backlinks but a good Local SEO strategy is missing

 

[Travis Van Slooten]

I respectively disagree Local SEO is getting more and more competitive. Most of my clients are in major metropolitan cities and without heavy backlinking, they wouldn't rank at all. How do I know? Because we tried just getting away with great on-page optimization and G+ optimization but to no avail. After a few months of backlinking, they are #1 or #2 for just about every keyword in all of their cities.

With Google, it's still all about backlinks and will be for at least a few more years (imho).

If you reverse engineer backlinks when doing local SEO, you'll crush the competition because nobody else does this stuff.

Travis Van Slooten

Reverse Engineering on backlinks dose not for Local SEO. The author doesn't refer to Local SEO strategy in his article.

On Local SEO, Reverse Engineering is done as you mentioned by Social Media + Citations, there is o need for thousands of backlinks to rank on top.

Check "pizza delivery" on top10 US cities and you'll see that websites ranking on top have only few backlinks but very good local citations.

Brands as PizzaHut ranks not in TOP10 google results on some locations and they have plenty of backlinks but a good Local SEO strategy is missing

 

[sergiuliano]

Hi @Travis,

I agree reverse engineering must be done, but not on backlinks but on Citations

I have thousands of examples to show in this direction, where websites with max 10 backlinks + up to 50 local citations, PR 0,1,2 are ranking on TOP Local Rankings ( on Google Organic Results, not in Google Places ) against competitors with tens of thousands of backlinks PR 4,5,6 , for keywords as "pizza delivery", "web design" etc...

On my analysis all keywords are "implicit keywords" without using location name in the search query. For explicit keywords backlinks can still be important as Google rank them usually on the same position regardless the user location, but don't forget, over 80% of the Local Searches are on implicit keywords according to Google Trends.

Even so I have seen many articles referring to Local SEO optimization only as optimization for explicit keywords which include also location name.

Backlinks with anchor texts on implicit keywords can not send Local Signals - this is the reason why Citations works better for increasing the Local SEO Authority Level.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@sergiulano

I'm with you. Citations are the make-or-break part. Backlinks can help a little. Reviews are far more important, in my experience.