In this episode, Joy talks about the world of link building as it pertains to local SEO, specifically touching on how links impact local pack rankings.

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Hello, Moz fans. My name is Joy Hawkins, and today, I'm going to be talking about the world of link building as it pertains to local SEO.

Now, in local SEO, we get a lot of small businesses that ask us to build links for them, which is great. We all know that links matter for SEO, but I've always wondered how much links actually matter when it comes to local pack rankings.

Now, before we kinda dive into that, I wanna make sure everybody understands what I'm talking about when I say local pack rankings. So when you do a search on Google, let's say your search is "plumber near me," you would get a search result set that looks kinda like this, and there's two distinct sections that we're going to want to make sure we address.

The first is what I call the local pack. It's at the top, it's full of Google Business profiles, and usually, they have reviews on them, and you can call the business directly, and they act like a page for that business, and then down below, we have all the traditional, organic results that I'll just call organic.

Now, it's important to remember that these two sections run with different algorithms. A lot of the same ranking factors exist, but they are weighted differently, and they work a little differently, so when I see people asking about link building, I really wanted to know, does link building impact this section as much as it impacts this section? Is it equal? Is one more than the other?

So we did a series of tests, and I'm gonna share one of those tests with you for the sake of time. Also, it's kinda repetitive because they all pretty much showed us the exact same thing.

So for this test, I'm going to show here, first of all, to make sure everybody's clear what this link was and where we put it, so sterlingsky.ca is my agency's website, and my colleague Dave allowed me to use one of his websites as a test subject.

So we built a single link, yes, one link, from Sterling Sky's website to his website that had never had SEO done on it. Its home page title was Home. There was really almost no content on this page. It did not deserve to rank, nor did it rank very well for anything, and we specifically made sure to put keyword-rich anchor text in this link, and I will say too, as well, anchor text is really important. That's another kind of takeaway from this test. You'd think it maybe isn't as important these days, but it still matters quite a bit.

This one link, we built this link, and then after a couple weeks, we went back to see what happened to the rankings.

Now, this top here is a grid tracker that's tracking organic rankings, and you will see some very distinct movement. This site went from ranking nowhere, or 10th in some cases, to ranking in the third position on most occasions. That's pretty substantial, and that happened within a couple weeks.

On the other hand, local pack rankings went up one position, so it wasn't very mind-blowing, and again, we repeated the same thing on other businesses and other websites, and we found the same pattern, which is essentially that links matter a lot for this algorithm, but a little bit for this algorithm.

What does that mean for you if you're running a local business? Well, if you're investing in SEO and you get a lot of your leads from this section, then you probably don't need a lot of link building. I would devote a very small piece of your budget to link building. But if you're a business that gets a lot from this section, you wanna double down on link building. Make sure that you are getting that from your SEO agency and that they're doing a good job of it. Hopefully, that was helpful and that you learned something to get your business a better ROI from your SEO spend.