Despite the fact that local businesses focus on a smaller market, they also need to utilize modern digital technologies to bring in more leads, potential customers and increase their revenue. One of the best ways to do this as a local business is to focus on the search engine.
Local customers tend to do local searches so that they can find services or products they need, somewhere near their home. As a local business, it is your duty to ensure that your business pops up first for relevant searches and this is how you will have more customers coming down to your store.
This process is called local SEO optimization and one of its major factors are links. Here is how you can build links for a local business.
Build a Blog
The first thing you need to do is to build a blog for your website. A blog opens up many opportunities and can be utilized in various situations. At the same time, a blog is one of the driving forces for improving SEO, as it offers you the opportunity to constantly release new content which is optimized for adequate keywords.
One of the areas where blog posts can also be very useful is link building. The more quality content you offer and the more people read it, the higher the chances are of someone linking to your blog posts as resources for valuable information.
Make sure that your content has quality and that you link to other local businesses.
Write About Businesses That Have a Similar Niche
Businesses like when others talk nicely about them and give them more exposure. Your blog is the perfect place to talk to your audiences about other businesses in the area and other entrepreneurs that might have something interesting to offer to them.
Just make sure that you aren’t talking about your competitors.
When finishing a blog, make sure that you link to a specific business and add social mentions later on, so that they can see that you are talking about them. This will increase the chances of them doing the same for you in the future, and maybe even help you create a better business relationship. The more topics you cover, the higher the chances are of someone linking to one of your blog posts.
Build the Local Resources Page
When you went through different websites, chances are you came across sites which had “Resources page” or “Additional resources”.
This section of your site is reserved for providing direct, short information leading your visitors to other sites that will be useful to them. The resource page can be as specific or general as you like.
For example, if you have a social media marketing company in Brisbane, you can offer SEO Brisbane resources that will lead people to other professionals from different niches whose services they might be interested in. Make sure to carefully think about what kind of information would be useful to your audience.
This is how you will make other businesses do the same thing for you.
Guest Blogging
Find relevant and influential blogs with audiences that come from a similar area as your target audience. Try to contact them and see whether or not you could make a guest post on their blog to link to your business. In most cases, you will be able to swap posts, and this means letting them guest post on your blog as well.
Sometimes you will have to pay for the post, but it won’t cost you that much. Try to get as many links as possible to your site from relevant websites that have great audiences.
Additionally, you can find review sites and ask them to review your business, as this also involves leaving contact information about the reviewed business.
Remember that you need links coming from sites with great SEO and a loyal audience. Don’t try to spam as many links as possible without considering the quality, as this could lead to broken links and poor associations that will actually reduce your search rankings instead of improving them.