Local Link Building Strategies

Why Local Links Matter for a Local Business

Google’s guide to local ranking names three factors for local results: relevance, distance and prominence. It describes prominence as “how well-known a business is”, based partly on “how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have.” Links from local organizations are one of the ways a business shows that it is known where it operates.

They are also hard for a business from elsewhere to copy, because they come from real membership, real coverage and real involvement in the community. That is their value, and it is why the methods below all start with something the business actually does.

Third-party authority scores are useful for comparing prospects inside one tool, but they are not Google measures, and a range like “chambers are DA 30-50” says nothing about the specific page that would link to you. Judge a local link by whether the page is real, relevant and seen by people you want to reach.

Chambers, Business Associations and Professional Bodies

Chambers of commerce, industry associations and professional bodies can publish member directories, and a directory entry may include each member’s website. Membership is a business decision first; the directory link is a side effect.

What raises the value of a membership beyond the directory entry is participation: member news, event programs that list speakers and hosts, committee pages and association publications that take articles from members. Each of those is a page about something you did, which is the kind of link that holds up.

A membership fee buys the membership. If an organization sells link placements separately, for example a paid “featured member” link on its homepage, that is a paid link and should be qualified as one.

Local News and Media

Local outlets cover openings and expansions, awards, community projects and local experts’ views on local issues. Coverage starts with something the outlet considers news, so the work is to do newsworthy things and to make them easy to report: a short announcement with the facts, a named contact who answers, and images the outlet can use.

Being a reliable local source is the longer game. Reporters covering a local topic need people who can explain it accurately and on deadline. Offer that expertise where you have it, and be ready for mentions that come without a link; a mention you can later ask to have linked is covered in the unlinked brand mentions guide. For outreach method, see digital PR and link earning.

Schools, Colleges and Universities

Educational institutions link out for their own reasons: career services pages list employers that hire students, departments list industry partners and guest speakers, and programs credit the organizations that host internships or support projects. The link follows the relationship.

Practical openings for a local business:

• hiring interns or graduates and being listed on the career office’s employer pages;
• speaking to a class or student group, which appears on event listings;
• supporting a capstone or applied project, credited on the program’s pages;
• funding a scholarship, which the institution may list among its donors or scholarships.

Treat scholarship programs with care. A scholarship created only to collect links from .edu pages is a link tactic, not a scholarship, and it fits Google’s description of link spam as “creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings.” A real scholarship with real recipients is community support that may also be acknowledged online.

Sponsorships and Events

Sponsoring a youth team, a festival, a charity event or a community program is a legitimate way to support your community and reach a local audience. It is also a purchase, which is why Google’s spam policies apply. They list “Buying or selling links for ranking purposes” as link spam, including “Exchanging money for links,” and then add the qualifier that matters for sponsors: “Google does understand that buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web for advertising and sponsorship purposes. It’s not a violation of our policies to have such links as long as they are qualified with a rel=”nofollow” or rel=”sponsored” attribute value.”

Google’s guide to qualifying outbound links says to “Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links) with the sponsored value”, and notes that nofollow “is still an acceptable way to flag them, though sponsored is preferred”.

That changes how to evaluate a sponsorship:

If an organization you sponsor publishes a followed link to you, you can ask it to add rel="sponsored". Making a followed link a condition of the sponsorship is listed in the same policy as link spam: “Requiring a link as part of a Terms of Service, contract, or similar arrangement without allowing a third-party content owner the choice of qualifying the outbound link”.

Community Involvement and Local Partnerships

Volunteering, pro bono work, board service and hosting community events create mentions in nonprofit newsletters, event pages and local coverage. These links come from what the business does, and they follow it naturally.

Partnerships with complementary local businesses can be genuine, such as a joint event, a shared customer program or a referral arrangement described on both sites. The limit is set by the same policy: “Excessive link exchanges (‘Link to me and I’ll link to you’) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking” are listed as link spam. A partner page that exists only to trade links is that pattern.

Useful local content, such as a guide to a local permit process written by a business that deals with it every week, can earn links from other local organizations that want to point their audience to it. Planning that kind of content is covered in local content strategy.

Local Directories

Directories serve customers and keep your business information consistent across the web; local citations covers that work. As a link source they need a stricter filter. Google’s spam policy lists “Low-quality directory or bookmark site links” among its link spam examples, and a directory that sells followed links to paying members is selling paid links.

Choose a directory because customers in your area or industry use it. Don’t choose one, or pay for an upgrade, because the listing link is followed.

A Workable Local Link Plan

1. List the relationships you already have. Memberships, suppliers, partners, schools you hire from, causes you support. Some of these organizations may already mention you; check whether the mention links and whether the details are right.
2. Fix the existing mentions first. Correct wrong websites, add missing links where the organization is willing, and ask for rel="sponsored" on paid placements that are still followed links.
3. Add one or two new relationships each quarter that the business would value without any link: a membership, a speaking slot, a community project.
4. Make news when you have it, with a short, factual announcement to the outlets that cover your area.
5. Track what you earn, including mentions without links, in a simple sheet with the page, the date and the reason the link exists.

The quarterly volume will depend on the business, the market and how active the owners are in the community; a plan that promises a fixed number of new links per quarter is guessing. The test for every local link is the same: would this page mention you if search engines did not exist? If yes, earn it. If the link is the only reason, skip it or, when you are paying, make sure it is marked as paid. For the broader rules on what counts as a link scheme, see link schemes and Google’s guidelines.