If you want to rank yours or your client's
local business higher in Google, then you're going to need backlinks. In fact, a 2018 study by Moz showed that backlinks
are an important ranking factor for both Map Pack and localized organic rankings. But unlike general link building tactics where
location isn't always hugely important, links from local sites seem to have more impact
when it comes to link building for local SEO. So in this tutorial, I'm going to show you
6 ways to find solid local link prospects that'll help you rank your local business
higher in Google. Stay tuned. [music] Now, before we get into the actual tactics,
it's important we differentiate between local link building and just link building in general. Link building is the process of getting contextually
relevant websites to link to a page on your website. And local link building is basically the same thing,
but with one additional but very important layer. Ideally, you want to get backlinks from pages
that are both contextually and locally relevant to your website. For example, let's say you're a photographer in
Toronto and want to get backlinks to your site. Getting a link from a page on how to take
good pictures would certainly be contextually relevant, but this site lacks locational relevance. It's a blog that targets a global audience. Now, there's nothing wrong with these links but
it's ideal if you can get a link from a page like this where there's contextual relevance
and it's on a locally relevant website. And if we add in authority to our venn diagram
which is authority, then the ideal backlink would land somewhere in this sweet spot. But finding "ideal" links isn't always possible
so it's perfectly fine to get contextual or locally relevant links too. Now, while the difference doesn't sound that
big, your approach to finding, qualifying and pitching link prospects will be different from
most link building tactics that are usually talked about in a global context. Now, the good thing about local SEO when it
comes to backlinks is that there won't be as much competition because you're
competing with local players. But the downside is that you may need to get
more creative in finding link prospects because there will likely be fewer targets compared
to a site doing global SEO. So let's talk about some easy
local link building tactics. The first way is to join your local
chamber of commerce. A chamber of commerce is simply a business
network for local organizations. And most major cities and even smaller suburban
towns will have a chamber of commerce. And these kinds of links would fall right
into this section in our venn diagram. Chamber of commerce websites often have
high authority and local relevance, but aren't the strongest in terms of contextual relevance
because they're usually just directory links. Nevertheless, they're easy to get
and not bad at all. So to get started, just search for "chamber
of commerce" and your city. Then go to one of those sites and you should
be able to easily sign up for a membership. After you've paid for your membership, you
should be added to their directory with your business's name, address, phone number,
and website URL. Now, in addition to becoming a member at your
local chamber of commerce, you may want to consider providing member discounts as it
can lead to new business as well as a link back to your site. The next way is to join niche-relevant
business associations. These types of links are much like chamber
of commerce links. For legitimate business associations, authority
will be high and local relevance will be there too. So to find niche-relevant business associations,
you can search in Google for any of these search queries. Take a screenshot and let's run
through an example. With Ahrefs' SEO Toolbar enabled, I'll search
for "toronto photographers association," which is my city + my hypothetical niche + association. And right within the SERP, you'll see SEO
metrics for each domain and page. Now, if we visit this page, and go to their
member directory, you'll see that indeed, they do have indexed URLs with outbound
links to their members' websites. Now, you might consider the two types of links
that we've discussed so far as glorified citations because they don't carry much weight in terms
of topical or contextual relevance. So it's important that we also talk about
getting backlinks within content. These are typically harder to get, but generally
speaking, the tougher it is to acquire a link, the more valuable it'll be. So let's move on to the next tactic which
is local resource page link building. Resource page link building is where you get
backlinks from web pages that curate and link out to useful industry resources. And it works really well because the purpose
of the pages are to literally link out to relevant and helpful resources. Now, in our venn diagram, resource page links
will usually fall around here, where contextual and locational relevance are decent. But on occasion, you'll be able to find some
websites that have decent domain-level authority. So let's assume that we're building resource
page links for a plumber in the UK. To get started, I'll go to Google and search for
something like inurl:resources.html site:co.uk, and then I'll add a word like "plumbing"
since it's relevant to my niche. And now you can see sites that contain resources.html
in the URL, are on a co.uk domain and include the word "plumbing" on the page. Again, you can enable Ahrefs SEO toolbar to
get domain and page level metrics for each of these results. From here, you'll want to do two things. #1. Visit the pages to see if they actually
link out to external websites. If they don't, then it's probably not worth
your time to ask for one. And #2. Use some common sense. If you're a plumber and you're asking another
plumbing company down the road to link to you, then it's probably not going to happen. Now, you can alter your search a bit because
there could be tons of locally relevant websites using a generic top-level domain like .com. So let's search for inurl:resources, your city and
state, and then your niche-relevant keyword. Filter through the list and then send your
link pitches where appropriate. But you shouldn't stop here. You can also search for tangential businesses
in the same location. For example, if you're a wedding photographer
in Toronto, you might want to look for flower shops, event venues, cake shops, etc. So you might search for "inurl:resources.html
toronto wedding venue." Then click on the results and see if there
are any appropriate places for you to ask to be considered as a resource. We have a full video on doing resource page
link building at scale, so I highly recommend watching that if you want to do this efficiently. Alright the next tactic is to guest
post on local websites. Guest posting is when you write content
on someone else's website. And this tactic falls smack dab in the middle
of our venn diagram because when you guest blog, you can handpick the sites you
want to write for. To get started, you can use Ahrefs' Content
Explorer to search through billions of pages of content and filter prospects by
their SEO metrics. So let's say you're a photographer in Australia. I'll search for "title:photography site:au." This will narrow down results to pages that
mention photography in the title and live on a .au domain. Next, let's hit the one page per domain filter
since we don't need to pitch the same site multiple times. I'll also exclude homepages since we're looking
for local websites that have blog posts. And they'd likely be more receptive
to a guest post pitch. Now, since we're searching for guest blogging
opportunities, let's set a word count filter to show pages with at least 500 words in the
content which will exclude gallery, contact, and other thin pages. Finally, we'll set a Domain Rating filter with a
minimum value of 30 and a maximum value of 60. And this will show us websites that have
decent website authority. And now we have a very manageable list of blogs
we could pitch for a guest writing opportunity. Again, you can alter the search and replace
the "site" part of the query with your city name to find potential local opportunities too. Alright, the next tactic is to get
featured on local list posts. For almost any product or service, there's
likely going to be some "best of" lists. For example, "best mexican restaurants
in Seattle," "best helicopter tour nyc," etc. Plus, there's going to be variations like "fun
things to do in london" and "child-friendly activities in chicago." Bottomline: people are always looking for
options and there will almost always be blog posts to serve their needs. You just need to become one of those options. These links are great because not only do they
fall right in the middle of the venn diagram, but they're also a great way to get
customers through your doors. So to get started, just search for a query
that's likely to bring up a list in your area. For example, "best italian restaurant in Toronto." And since I have Ahrefs' SEO toolbar enabled,
we can see both page- and domain-level metrics for the search results. Now, when you're looking through the list,
you'll want to pay attention to pages that are likely blog posts and ignore directories
like Trip Advisor and Yelp. So this one from Toronto Life seems
to make a whole lot of sense. From here, take a look through other restaurants
they've mentioned and if you feel your food or whatever it is that you offer is comparable
or better than the rest, then consider pitching yourself as a potential candidate. For example, you might say: "Hi Benjamin, My name is Sam and I'm the owner at
Sam's Italian Eatery in the Danforth. I saw your post on Toronto's best Italian
restaurants and was heartbroken to see we weren't included. But hey, it's not your fault :) We just opened
up our first restaurant in Toronto and brought in world renowned chef, Samo Ferrari. If you're open, I'd love for you to come try our
restaurant so we might be considered for inclusion in your list. No obligations at all! Here's a preview of our menu: [Link] If interested, please let me know a date
and time that works best for you. We'd love to have you! Cheers,
Sam" Now it's just a matter of rinsing and repeating and
trying to get on every list in the top 10 if possible. Alright, the last tactic is to look at your
top organic competitors' backlinks. The logic behind this tactic is that if your
competitors are ranking at the top of Google, then they likely have backlinks that
are moving the needle. So it's worth finding common backlinks between
your competitors and then reaching out to these sites to try and get them for yourself. To get started, go to Google and search for
something like "your niche + city." So I'll search for "mexican restaurant toronto." From here, you'll want to gather a list of your
competitors' domains using the Map Pack and organic results. And we want to avoid sites like directories
as well as blogs because we're looking for real business competitors here. Alright, so I've made my list of around
eight competing restaurants. Now we need to find common backlinks
between these sites. So I'll go to Ahrefs Link Intersect tool and in the top
section, I'll enter all of my competitors' domains. And in the bottom section, I'll add my
hypothetical Mexican restaurant's domain. Now, let's run the search. And now you can see the websites that are
linking to your competitors, but not you. As a general rule of thumb, the more competitors
that a website links to, the more relevant the referring domain will be to your site. For example, if we click on the link from Narcity
to this competitor, you'll see the link comes from a post on Toronto's best taco restaurants -
a perfectly good page to get a link from. Just make your way through the list and you
should be able to find more than enough link building opportunities for your site. Now, these are just a few ways to get backlinks
to your local business's website. So go and try them out and if you enjoyed
this tutorial, then make sure to like, share and subscribe for more actionable SEO
and marketing tutorials. I'll see you in the next one.
