Local links for local people! (Image - League Of Gentleman BBC)
A quality link for me is an editorial link on a real site – a site that’s been around for years. The site in question is well linked to itself, and dooesn’t sell links – and is careful who they link to. These sites are kind of hard to get links from – but that’s the point…
Strategy? Well you live somewhere. You live in a town or a city, in a region, in a wider region. Just type these 3 regions – one at a time – into Google, and Google will return a list of potential link partners. Hundreds of them. Live in the wilderness? Look at your nearest city.
Deployment? Offer a discount, or give away free stuff (Google does this) for a mention on their site IF they don’t have any real reason to link to you.
Other sites will link to your site if you give them a reason to:
- Your local Council – a lot of council sites have local business directories
- Your local College or University – offer a student discount
- Your local Chamber of Commerce – join, or offer a discount to members
- Your local Newspaper – you should always be trying to get a mention in the local press – consider a competition
- Local football club & supporters club – discount = mention on their site
- Local sports clubs – there’s a ton of them in every town usually with crusty old sites – offer them a discount, donate or sponsor them for a mention on their site.
- Local Business Directories – More often than not, somebody has built a local biz directory covering your local area. Get in there.
- Local faith groups or other local community groups – When it comes to business, I ain’t got no denomination. Discount anybody?
- Local charities – a link you can probably buy! Sponsor a charity site for a mention – Google would be REALLY MEAN to penalise this sort of link buying on a small scale – and anyway, their attention is probably on bigger sites.
- Local businesses – offer a discount to staff
These links aren’t all easy to get and will take time to get (if your comparing them to how fast you can buy or get links on sites these days that offer no value to your site in the long term). See what I did there.
The EASIER a link is to get, generally speaking, the more USELESS it is in terms of Google ranking your site higher – unless you know what you are doing…..
So while your competiors are off buying links on crap third world domain hosting companies, submiting to 100,000 useless search engines, submitting to 100 useless directories, spamming dofollow blogs and forums or hiring a social media consultant to get 10,000 non-paying visitors from Digg etc etc you are picking up nice little, quality long term links on trusted sitess that probably are not being abused, and will fly right under any Google manipulation-radar, and all will help to build your domain authority and trust in Google results pages.
And all these kind of links above can be mixed and match to a national campaign if you know how to scale your efforts in a sensible manner.
Wahey! I’ve been giving this some welly of late what with me, surely, being the only SEO and Town Crier (here in Plymouth at least) So now I have my own blog on thisisplymouth.co.uk and my uniques have sky rocketed since I announced the new Lord Mayor last Saturday then put all the pics on my blog via a paid Picasa account which is tied with my paid Google Apps account. Everyone wants to take my picture or blog about the funny Town Crier in Plymouth. I’m seriously getting my next regalia tailored in Google colours with “Find Me On Google Places” sign written onto my scroll. I rank number three with my Twitter account and am now seriously getting tired of SEO etc….. Another bonus is getting rat arsed free and at almost anytime of the day >>>> http://www.plymouthbell.co.uk ;)
Thanks Hobo. Good solid advice on getting local links. Now all we need to do is educate local business owners on the importance of getting those links :) Richard
[...] Local Links For Local People, Hobo [...]
Shaun, Great thought on local quality links for the website owner. These are easily manageable by anyone with free of cost!. Thanks Shaun!
wait till you see …scot-saver.com on June 1st :)
I’ll let you of with that link drop as it is Scottish :) Looks interesting….
Yes it is good that links to yout site are the links of sites in country that you live
Very nice article Shaun. Some peeps underestimate the power of the local websites. Since first of all, you got to conquer the local market before going further, these kinds of sites should attract local customers first. P.S. “The EASIER a link is to get, generally speaking, the more USELESS it is in terms of Google ranking your site higher” – I dont think you could put it in a better way :)
“The EASIER a link is to get, generally speaking, the more USELESS it is in terms of Google ranking your site higher – unless you know what you are doing…..” “submiting to 100,000 useless search engines, submitting to 100 useless directories” “hiring a social media consultant to get 10,000 non-paying visitors from Digg” Have to very strongly disagree mate. Easy links are not useless at all in terms of Google. I know many sites that do extremely well as a result of easy links. Re social media links, submitting to useless SEs & directories – these are most definitely not a bad thing at all. – even in the Google sense. I’m not advocating spamming in huge numbers but quantities of such links are in no way a bad thing at all. A single press release can generate 1000s of social media links, blog comments, forum comments etc – these are clearly “easy links”. The success such a thing can bring on your google rankings can be quite breathtaking. We often get calls and enquiries from companies who find us on the “lesser” search engines, directories and social media sites. In fact a very large firm contacted us on the back of a review from a directory we’d never heard of. Will we remove the link because its considered crappy by SEOs? Not a chance! Every link has some value and its a very very very blinkered view that discounts such links. Site owners should realise that Google is not the be all and end all by any means. They should be thinking about their overall visibility profile and the potential business it can bring them. If your site is about getting business then there’s nowt wrong at all with 10,000 social media links, 10,000 SE links or 10,000 directory links. If google doesn’t like these links then let their algo ignore them in their rankings. If these same links bring you business outside of Google then fantastic. If they give you rankings and business then its a win win. It’s business you would never have had if you didn’t have the links in the first place.
We’ll agree to disagree then Sandy :) Actually, I don’t really disagree with you. This post is sort of aimed at smaller business – who wouldn’t know where or when to start linkbuilding on the scale you mention. AND – I don’t advocate removing links from low quality directories anywhere I don’t think. THis is a time and resource thing for me. It’s the route I choose. I feel better, and get good results, linkbuilding from (what I deem quality sites) rather than article spinning to 1000 article sites or 1000 directories. Maybe I too would have got the odd good contract from a low quality directly listing if I had bothered my arse – but it’s nice getting regular leads per day the way I do it too and you have less chance of a competitor reporting you for paid links. Always good to hear the other side :) I’m currently mining good editorial links from clients on 50 sites all PR6+ trusted sites and I happily spend my time doing that than building 10 times as much crappy links.
A very interesting approach, although the sucess of this approach is definitely niche dependant.
Well I would say a lot of stuff is niche dependant :)
Really good tip! I’ve heard of submitting to Google’s and DMOZ’s local directories, but it is not well known that other local websites could be good link sources. On behalf of everybody; thanks!
DMOZ is an international directory and yes, it’s generally accepted it’s a decent link – well it’s a better place to get a link than a lot of other directories.
What people tend to ignore is that people search geographically for a lot of things. ie Wedding Dresses in St Albans rather than Wedding Dresses UK. Looking at the search phrases I get on my site and I can see they don’t care about the UK they only want the area I’m in. So getting a link on the local chambers of commerce did more for me than all the n00by SEO links I picked up when I first looked at advertising my site. Not only did I get a back link, I got a back link that improved my Geographical SERPs noticeably and I also got local confidence from the customers/ One directed link, and not even one with a massive page rank at that brought in enough custom, that I think anyone serious searching for our product in our locality WILL find our business.
Local SEO is so incredibly important – and it’s only going to get EVEN more important. Even we optimise for local terms on our homepage title for instance).
Does anyone else get the irony that the hobo is talking about something local? Hobos are vagabonds? Local is stationary. mark
Mark I think you are thinking to much lol
For most service based businesses and professional services I really focus on “local” marketing. Luckily I started out as a small business owner with a small demographic…. i had no choice but to learn how to market my business locally. I like to think much of my success is the result of selective linking, marketing consistency, and domain longevity.
Wow, I finally managed to post a comment! Great list. Using local resources to build your links is massively underrated. I agree that it’s beneficial for local businesses who want to rank highly in a very tightly focussed region but I’d recommend it as a perfect starting point for any business that wants to build a brand that ranks highly in say the SERPs for the UK. I have to admit to having been a bit of a bad boy when it comes to building links to my niche site. Recently I’ve moved to a whiter than white approach which is definitely more work but more rewarding and has enabled me to build links from trusted sites. I did this by joining a small business group where many of the companies have their own sites and, if you ask nicely (and buy them a beer) they’ll happily link to you.
Yeah links are commodities around here :) – If you dont comment on an article within a couple of days I close it to keep the comments focused on the most recent articles (and it reduces the amount of spam I get) – and to get a search engine friendly link (as we are kind of a no-follow free blog), you need to comment more than a few times, and that link be editorially approved – by me. Don’t mention buying folks beer for links, and for your info, your comment was spammed – so maybe you have been a bit of a bad boy commenting on blogs up to now because Akismet has spotted you :)