Link Building for Local Businesses — Whiteboard Friday

Learn about link building for your local business in this Whiteboard Friday with Amanda Jordan.

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Hey. Today we're talking about link building for local. So we all know that quality is more important for links than quantity. We see that time and time and again, and I'm gonna tell you that again later on.

But what does quality even mean for links? That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. And the snippet winner right now in Google, so this is what Google says is the best answer, is that a quality link comes from a high-quality website that is topically relevant, the link is in the body of the content, and it has a keyword in the anchor text. Those are things that meet the definition of a quality link.

Well, if you're in local SEO, part of your topic is your location. Because without your location, Google does not know where you want to rank. Without that information, it's just them thinking that you wanna rank nationally. If you have a website about plumbing, and you do not mention your city, state, area, in any way, you don't have any Google Business Profiles, you don't have any citations or listings on other sites, Google guesses that you're trying to rank nationally, all over the country.

So that means that your location is part of your topic because it's some of the information that tells Google where you should be ranking, what terms you should show up for. The good news, though, is that it also means that you have more opportunities to rank. There's more websites that you can go to to build links because you have another topic. It's not just plumbing, it's plumbing in your city, in your county, in your state, in your region.

All of those things are areas where you can find ways to build links for your website.

So I wanted to test this hypothesis that your location is a topic. And what I did was I took the top 10 ranking pages for HVAC keywords across the top 50 cities by population in the US. And my findings are this table right here. As far as the first page rankings, these are the sites that had the most rankings on the first page. I looked at word count to see if that was a factor, and there was only a 40-word difference between the best-ranking and the worst-ranking pages on average. So it didn't really become such a huge factor, the number of words on the page. So what really ended up being the biggest difference was how these links were categorized. What was the topic of these sites? That ended up being the big differentiator. Because as you can see, number of links didn't really factor in that much.

This site has seven links, but it has 118 first page rankings. This site has 32, has 121. So there is no real differentiation in their results despite the pretty big difference in the number of links that they've built.

So using that information, I wanted to figure out how are they built. What type of links are they building? What are the topics they're using?

So one of the topics that is a big one, this is the finding, is that the top five, so the businesses that had the most first page rankings, they focus a lot on local and topical links. They're not going and building a ton of citations and saying like, "Oh, our link building is done." In fact, they don't really focus on citations as much. The bottom five, which are still sites that rank on the first page of Google, but did not rank for as many keywords, they had a huge focus on citations. And this is with their word count being similar and their number of links not really being a factor. What we saw was the biggest difference in what type of links they focused on.

And those who focus more on local and topical outpaced, outran the ones that just focused on citations. And so we took this information and wanted to test it out because that's great. Like, we can see how that applies to things that are already in motion that has existed, where they may have other things going on that may be contributing to this as well. So we took one of our clients, and we used this strategy to build links in the areas that there was the most disparity between them and their competitors.

And in the pages where we built links, there was a 38% increase in clicks year over year. In the control where we did not do anything, there's a 14% increase. Which, I mean, 14%, I didn't do anything, that's still great, but not as good as 38% for just building like, three to four local and topical links. So this is extremely impactful. This is not like, we improved rankings, but this is non-branded traffic coming to their website just for building a few links.

So I encourage you to look at the categorization, the type of links your competitors are building, and learn from that to create your own new backlink strategy where you can diversify your links and build a better profile for your business.