Local Link Building: Strategies, Examples & Step-by-Step Guide

Do you find it hard to get local links for your business?

We know local link building can be as challenging as any other kind of link building.

The truth is that link building is still one of the most important ranking factors.

Rest assured that it can make a big difference to your local rankings.

Getting high quality backlinks from other local businesses and local organizations can help you improve your site’s domain authority and, ultimately, get higher rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for local terms.

That’s why we’ve created a local link building guide with everything you need to know when it comes to building links locally.

To be more precise, in this guide we’re going to discuss:

• What’s local link building?
• Why are local links important?
• The most prominent local linking tactics for improving your local SEO

As well as take you through a step-by-step process for doing local link building right.

We’ve got lots to cover so let’s get started.

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What is Local Link Building?

Local link building is the process of getting backlinks from relevant local websites.

Local link building can help you improve your organic positions for terms that indicate search on a local level – AKA local searches – and thus help you reach a wider local audience of potential customers.

To put it simply, local link building refers to the process of getting links, brand mentions, and references from other local businesses.

Overall, local links are links from sources that are location-specific.

What does this mean?

It means that you might be a small business based in New York that gets high-quality links from local directories.

We’ll have more on the benefits of local backlinks a little further down in this post.

We need to highlight that, when it comes to local SEO link building, it’s essential to do it as part of your overall local search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

The following definition of local SEO says it all:

As we can see, local SEO is basically the process of boosting your online presence on a location-specific basis in order to get your business to attract more visitors from organic search and, ultimately, get more leads and generate revenue on a local level.

Since link building is an integral part of every SEO strategy, getting link equity from other local web pages can have a significant impact on your local SEO effort.

Of course, other things like having a Google My Business page and a listing on the Google Map with testimonials and local citations from your local customers can help as well.

Local link building can work as an amplifier for your website and thus can help in getting more visitors to your local website.

I believe that you now have an idea of what local backlink building and local SEO is.

Let’s move on with our guide, where we’ll talk about the significance of local backlinks and also check out a few great examples.

Why Are Local Backlinks Important?

Before we get any deeper into how you could use local linking, let’s start by answering the burning question.

Why are local backlinks important?

As we mentioned earlier, local link building can be important because it helps our website on an SEO level, which, by extension, can lead to getting more organic traffic and generating more leads and revenue for our business.

This can be truly beneficial as a link building tactic because getting backlinks from local websites with high Domain Authority (DA) works as proof to the search engines that your website is a valuable resource in terms of local searches.

Consequently, the search engines are very likely to favor your resources over others that might not be as popular, geographically speaking.

According to a 2018 Local Search Ranking Factors survey by Moz, backlinks – as well as the number of referring domains and the linked text – is an important localized ranking factor.

Have a look:

As we can see, link signals, such as inbound anchor text, linking domain authority, linking domain quantity, etc., take up the biggest part of the pie chart of the localized organic ranking factors, with over 27%.

The following example will help us illustrate the importance of local backlinks.

To show you how this works we’re using a search operator that will give us location-specific results.

Our search operator is as simple as this:

Needless to say that we could have used alternative search operators that would work in a similar way.

Here’re a few examples of alternative search operators for that same local search:

• storage in London
• self storage London
• storage near me
• storage London center
• storage units London

And so on and so forth.

What we see on the screenshot above are the top results we got from our simple Google search.

How about having a closer look at these three pages, so that we understand what drives rankings in this local search engine results page (SERP)?

First up is the Self Storage Units London page.

As we can see, the page has 93 referring domains linking back to it.

The same applies to the second page we got from our Google search, with an even higher number of referring domains – over 1,000 referring domains and over 16,000 backlinks.

Last but not least, the third result also gets a number of referring domains pointing back to it.

We therefore understand that the top Google results are pages that get high numbers – some higher than others – backlinks from local directories and other local businesses.

That might be only one of Google’s ranking factors, but it’s certainly a rather important one. 

Here’s an overview of all pages that rank at the top of the results for that particular term.

All these have high numbers of referring domains, probably domains from local businesses that have helped place these businesses high in local search results.

To be clear, we’re not saying that a page can’t rank for local searches without backlinks. We’re just saying that backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites can help a lot when it comes to getting higher positions on the SERPs.

So, in order to track improvement in your Google rankings (after getting backlinks), you can use a tool like SERP API which gives real-time updated of SERP data.

We’re just saying that backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites can help a lot when it comes to getting higher positions on the SERPs.

We’ve now established why focusing on getting local backlinks seems like a wise thing to do.

Let’s get into some general local link building strategies that can help you improve your local SEO and rank higher in local searches.

4 Local Link Building Strategies for Improving Your Local SEO

Wondering what some local link building strategies for getting local backlinks and improving your local SEO might be?

We’ve already seen that, when it comes to local backlinks and local SEO, it’s essential to focus on your online presence in terms of local businesses, local business owners, and the local community, such as local influencers and bloggers.

Without further ado, we’re jumping right into the first strategy we want to share with you.

Strategy #1: Local business directories

The first local link building idea for acquiring local backlinks is to make your business present in local business directories.

A local business directory is basically a list of businesses within a specific geographic location or industry.

In our case, we’re interested in online business directories, i.e. prominent ones like Yelp and other more niche ones, that focus on particular locations.

Let’s see an example.

Example: Storage companies in London

Like we did before, we’re using storage companies in a specific location to see how this local link building strategy works.

We want to find directories for storage companies in London so that we can get featured on those same location- and industry-specific directories as well.

We go looking for:

These are the results our search got us:

How about having a closer look at the first result, which comes from whatstorage.co.uk?

We click on the page and we can see that the first page is indeed a self-storage directory with several storage companies from London as business listings.

You can find some more details on how well this page does in terms of its organic visibility right below:

As we can see, this page gets – according to Ahrefs – more than 3.7K organic visits per month and has a traffic value of $45.4K per month, which means that the keywords that the page is ranking for have commercial value.

At the same time, the DR of the page is very good, which means that we’ll benefit from a listing in this local directory both in terms of getting link equity, as well as through getting relevant referral traffic.

Author’s Note: To get link equity from another website, you’ll have to get a dofollow rather than a nofollow backlink. 

Given this directory’s high ranking, we can only assume that the majority of location specific storage businesses would be delighted to be included in it and boost their backlink profile.

Keep reading to find yet another strategy to acquire local backlinks and improve your local SEO.

Strategy #2: Local press – local newspapers, news sites, etc.

Similar to getting your business included in local business directories, another local link building tactic is to get local press, like local newspapers and local news sites, to write about your business.

Doing so can help you achieve a double goal:

• Raise local awareness on your business
• Establish your business as a go-to resource in your niche and location

Let’s see an example.

Example: Nesta self-storage

Our example comes from one of the biggest self-storage businesses in Dublin, Nesta.

The company noted an upwards trend in the use of self-storage in Ireland during the COVID-19 pandemic and passed this to their SEO team.  

More specifically, they were able to see the trend because their business grew significantly during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Based on identifying that trend, they got the opportunity to get some press coverage from the local media.

The result?

A popular local publication, Dublin Live, did an interview with the company’s CEO, Brian Hefferon for their Made in Dublin series.  

Pretty interesting, right?

Let’s get to the next local link building strategy we have for you.  

Strategy #3: Local sponsorships and scholarships

Offering local sponsorships and scholarships can also help your business in terms of building local links and enhancing your local link profile.

The way this works is that you offer a sponsorship for a local event or scholarship for students that come from or might want to move to your local area to study.

Then, colleges and universities will naturally want to promote these opportunities to their students and keep them up to date in terms of scholarships that are available in the area.

In doing so they’re very likely to link back to your scholarship landing pages or other local content, thus helping your business’ website and SEO.

The example that follows will make this a bit more clear.

Example: OZ Moving & Storage

OZ Moving & Storage is a storage business with locations in:

• New York
• New Jersey
• Connecticut
• California

As you can see in the screenshot below, the company offers a scholarship program for college students.

Having a scholarship program like that increases the company’s chances of getting backlinks from local press that might want to promote these opportunities to students from a specific area.

Additionally,  the company is very likely to gain backlinks from universities that want to include the opportunity in their newsletter or homepage in order to provide their students with relevant information.

The numbers of referring domains and backlinks for the OZ site show that their SEO strategy seems to be working well:

As we can see, there are forty four backlinks from eighteen referring domains.

Not bad for a storage company, right?

Let’s get to our final strategy.

Strategy #4: Get mentioned by local influencers and bloggers

The final strategy we totally think can help you establish your brand on a local level and gain local backlinks and mentions is to put your brand in front of local influencers and bloggers.

That’s pretty straightforward, right?

This is as easy as reaching out to influencers and showing them that your products and services are worth mentioning.

You could do the same thing with finding local bloggers and simply present your product’s qualities.

These might seem like baby steps, but they can truly increase your chances of getting mentioned in local pieces of content and social media content, thus engaging your local community and widening your local reach.

We’ve talked quite a bit about what local link building is, what some of the most prominent strategies might be, and how they can help your business grow locally.

Let’s now get our hands in the step-by-step process of actually starting a local link building campaign.

Are you excited?

Let’s get started.

Step-by-Step Process for Effective Local Link Building

In this section we’re going to take you through four easy steps to show you how you can efficiently start building your local backlinks through Respona.

To illustrate the whole process and make it easier for you to follow, we’re using  a hypothetical scenario.

For the sake of this scenario, let’s say we’re a storage company in London.

We’re looking for blog posts from local blogs that include the term ‘storage solution’ as an exact match, but don’t include the terms ‘storage’ or ‘london’ in their title.

The reason for this is that we want to avoid as much as we can to find local blogs from our competitors.

We also need to mention that, in terms of finding pieces of content from local bloggers, marketers, and local sites, we’ll be looking for local blogs that include .co.uk and blog in their URL.

We’ve got loads to cover so let’s get right into the find step of creating our local link building campaign and finding our prospects.

Step #1: Create your Campaign and Prepare your Outreach Email

Respona comes with a set of pre-made campaign templates but for local link building, we’ll be creating an advanced campaign using the button in the top left corner.

For a great link building campaign you need a great outreach email.

And the first step of every Respona campaign is all about creating one.

No matter if you’re a good writer who loves crafting thoughtful emails or you’re always struggling to say the right thing via email, your link building campaigns can still be seamless.

Respona offers a wide range of email templates you can use and customize according to your needs and target audience.

But let’s stop for a second, and craft a new email sequence just for our campaign.

Author’s Note: In case you wish to include follow-up emails, they will appear in your email sequence, right under your initial email.

Have a look at the email we’re planning to send our prospects:

Let’s dissect it a little bit.

First up, the subject line is all in lowercase.

This is a neat little trick to make our emails seem more “humans” as if we forgot to capitalize – which is something automated emails don’t do.

Next, you may have noticed that we’re not directly asking for anything in this pitch and rather offering our prospect a link from one of our upcoming posts.

Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, right?

Cold emails are all about what you can offer to the person. Since they don’t know you, for what reason would they consider linking to you?

If you aren’t writing guest posts and are unable to offer indirect links back, you may need to consider another incentive – but if you’re thinking of doing link building, we recommend starting with a few guest posts to start your link machine.

Next, we checked our email for spam words:

Looks like we’re good to go, and our email is just the perfect length.

This reply chance calculator is based on data from over a million emails sent through our platform.

Next, we added a few variables, including “website_title”, “first_name”, and “Icebreaker”.

The first two are simple variables that are pulled from information about your prospects – their URLs and email addresses.

The Icebreaker, however, is an AI-powered variable that will “read” your prospects’ content and come up with unique personalizations for every single opportunity in your campaign.

All you’ll have to do is review them later.

Next, we added an unsubscribe link to give our prospect an easy way to opt out from further communications from us if they’re not insterested.

These are great for saving you from negative replies, manual spam complaints, and are in fact, a requirement in some countries.

Last but not least, we added a single follow-up, 5 days later in case the first email goes without a response.

Once the sequence is complete, we can move on to the next step.

Step #2: Find Opportunities

Respona comes with its own search engine for finding link building opportunities.

It has three modes (not counting CSV import):

• Google search
• Backlinks (powered by Moz)
• Podcasts (powered by Listen Notes)

For local link building, we’ll be using the good old Google search.

As we mentioned a little further up, our scenario is to find local blog posts from sites that include .co.uk in the URLs and also include the term storage solution as an exact match in the text, thus allowing us to request a link to our homepage or dedicated landing page.

For that reason, we’re using an advanced search operator that’ll help us refine our search and get the most relevant results for our campaign.

Here’s the search operator we’re using:

inurl:co.uk AND inurl:blog AND intext:”storage solution” AND (-intitle:london OR -intitle:storage)

After having added our search operators our screen looks like this:

If you use campaign templates (such as link insertion and guest posting), Respona automatically applies search operators to find relevant opportunities.

You can also run multiple queries at the same time, so you can use this search operator setup with as many keywords as you need – we just used one as an example.

Once your queries are filled out, click “Continue” and set some additional SEO metrics.

By default, Moz metrics are available to all users.

However, if you have an account with Semrush or Ahrefs, you can connect it to Respona and use their proprietary filters.

You’ll also be able to use Semrush and Ahrefs as backlink search sources, and save up on Respona credits.

Click “Continue” one more time.

Here, you can set up a simultaneous contact search for our link prospects.

Again, if you use a campaign template, all of these settings will be pre-set for you.

But, in our advanced campaign, let’s use the “blogs” opportunity type set to find 2 people per opportunity.

In the next two fields, let’s enter all job titles and seniority levels that could be relevant to link building, including SEO and content managers, writers, and other creatives.

Let’s also enable the two advanced options to increase the success rate of our contact search while avoiding unverified catch-all email addresses.

• Skip catch-all domains
• Use generic emails as needed

In the next window, let’s provide some additional instructions for our AI icebreaker variable’s tone and style to better fit our voice.

The last option you have on this screen is to make your search recurring.

When you enable it, Respona will re-run your search automatically at your selected time interval.

Once you click “Run automation”, Respona will search for relevant link building opportunities as well as associated contact information.

Results will start appearing on the screen as they are found in real time.

It’s done entirely in the cloud and you don’t have to wait for the whole automation to finish – Respona will send you an email once it’s done.

Step #3: Reach out to your prospects and manage communications

The final step is to reach out to your prospects by launching your local link building campaign.

On this step, all variables will be populated for your opportunities – including the AI icebreaker.

Here, all you really need to do is review them and make manual edits when needed.

Author’s Tip: Personalization increases your chances of getting a reply and making sure your email won’t end up to spam or trash. 

When it comes to personalizing your emails, you need to choose an outreach tool that will make the whole process easier for you.

When that’s done, we’re ready to launch our campaign with confidence!

How?

Well, by clicking on the Launch Campaign button!

Let’s wrap our guide up and also give answers to some of your most frequently asked questions.  

Link building cheat sheet

Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

Download for free

Now Over to You

That was it.

Creating and launching your own local link building campaign might feel like a challenging process, but with the right tool it’ll be a creative and fun one that fully captures your brand as a whole.

In this guide, we’ve thoroughly talked about what is local link building and why it’s important for businesses to get local backlinks.

We’ve shown you examples of local link building strategies and also gave you a full tour of an effective local link building campaign.

If you’re interested in testing it yourself, don’t hesitate to start a 14-day free trial and take the first step in starting your own local link building efforts that will make your company grow locally.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

We understand that local link building is a quite interesting topic, especially given all the benefits it can bring to businesses.

If you’ve got more questions running through your mind, read the answers that follow.

Q1. How do I find local backlinks?

There are a number of easy things you can do to find local backlinks:

• Create great content and reach out to local websites to ask that they link back to your website
• Connect with local press and local businesses
• Sponsor local events
• Offer scholarships for local university students

Q2. How much does link building cost?

Paid link building can cost quite a lot of money and it’s against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

The best way to acquire links is to focus on getting organic links through organic link building.

Q3. Does link building still work?

Definitely, yes. The reason for that is that Google’s algorithm might have changed over the years but links remain one of its most important local SEO ranking factors.  

Q4. What is the difference between local link building and organic link building?

Local link building is the process of building links with location-specific sites and communities.

Organic link building is about building inbound links that add value to the content naturally, through what’s called passive link building.

Q5. What is the benefit of link building?

Link building is a process that can help a business to rank higher on the SERPs.

Q6. What is local SEO?

Local search engine optimization (SEO) is an SEO and digital marketing tactic that helps businesses acquire visibility in terms of the local search results on the search engines.

Q7. What’s the best link building software?

There are many great link building softwares out there.

However, Respona is the only one that takes the guessing out of link building by introducing a new approach to how you can find, qualify, and reach out to link prospects.