Local Link Building

In this awesome edition of Moz Academy and Local University Mike Ramsey, President of Nifty Marketing, tells us about local outreach!

Local Link Building Video Transcript

So to start out, let's talk about local link building and local outreach just in general. Right now, the industry standard is to get industry-specific links and not too much of a focus on local links. Let's talk about that.

Where Should You Get Links?

Say you’re from Idaho. Let's say we have a divorce lawyer in Boise. So they're in Idaho; how good is it for them to get a link in Austin, Texas, from another divorce attorney? Of course, it's industry-specific and it's going to pass a certain amount of link equity. But the question is: Are you going to get business from Austin all the way up into Boise, Idaho, from people reading a site based in Austin, if it's a local audience? And the answer is no.

The most important thing to realize is that when you're doing outreach, when you're trying to create content for a given market, keep it in your local market. That's something that we haven't seen enough of in the local search link acquisition space.

Your Link Profile

What are some ways to understand where you're currently at and what your link profile is already, especially to your local landing pages? The best thing that you can do is go into Google Search Console and download your entire link history (that they're at least willing to show you). Then, start sifting through those links and find out which ones are from your market compared to which ones are spread outside of your market, which isn’t generating too much relevant traffic.

If you can't get Google Search Console, you can put your link into Link Explorer and pull out that information according to the index that they have. It's a great way to at least understand where you currently are at with your link building efforts and where you need to put your focus on.

Finding Opportunities

Let’s move on to finding different types of opportunities in a local market. There are a few good ways to do this.

Custom Searches

The first thing that you can do is look for custom opportunities on Google using custom searches. The best way to do that would be to put in "location +." Let's say you're looking for blogs in your market, you put "blogs."

By doing this, you're getting a returned list of results that could have a potential opportunity for you on a local blog that you could outreach to for an opportunity to either guest post, or if you've created great content that you think fits with them, then maybe they can do a follow-up post about something that you've done.

Link Prospector

Next would be a really great tool that I've enjoyed using, and that's called Citation Labs Link Prospector tool. Now it is a paid tool. I think they might give you some free credits initially, but you pay per search credit, and the credits go a really long way. By putting in your information into this program, you can choose whether you're looking for local blogs, local directories. You type a few keywords in for the given market. So, if it was Portland, maybe Portland, Oregon, and then they generate you a list of what they're finding through basically running their own version of custom searches on Google.

Followerwonk

Next would be Followerwonk, which is a great tool to find authorities in a given space. So if you wanted to limit it to finding the top person with the most Twitter followers in, let's say, Portland again, that is an attorney, then you could do that using Followerwonk. As you start to follow them and get to know them, then maybe opportunities arise that you could reach out to.

Sponsorships

Next would be sponsorships. Many local businesses see value in being involved in the local community sponsorship scene. A lot of the sites offer the opportunity to post a logo, and sometimes those logos link back. Now not only can those links be great links, but they can also bring quite a bit of traffic depending on how much site traffic the site's currently getting. Things like local sporting clubs have some of their schedule pages where they list the sponsors, which actually get a ton of traffic. You can bring a lot of local relevant traffic to your site that way.

Scholarships

Next would be scholarships. This is definitely kind of a hidden gem. If you offer local scholarships to high schools in a given market, then potentially you can be linked and mentioned across their scholarship pages on the school site. Now, in one example that we did in Arizona, we found 30 high schools in Phoenix that had pages linking to local scholarship opportunities.

Events

Next would be events. A lot of people link to events. There are great event calendars all over most local government sites, local news sites, etc., and by simply hosting events and having event pages on your site, a lot of times you can find yourself getting mentioned in these event guides.

Outreach

So that's just a few ideas of opportunities that you can use to outreach in the local market. But when it comes to the outreach itself, I want to talk about different ways to be effective.

In Person

This might not be possible for all situations, but if you can outreach in person, you're definitely going to get a lot farther and have a much higher conversion rate. If you know folks from a chamber event, then talking to him or her in person about your idea, you'll probably have a better chance to get either a blog post on the site or get them to mention you in a potential news article.

Phone

Next would be on the phone. This is something that we do a lot. If you're calling from a local number to a local business or a local organization and talking to them about an idea, first, you're going to get to the right person in a lot of cases that you do need to talk to, and second, you can build a relationship that's just going to come off a lot better than an email that's sent to a spam folder.

Email

Then last, but not least, is still email. While it might not be as effective as meeting with people, either in person or talking to them on the phone for these different outreach opportunities, you can still have great success through email. But I would definitely try to go either in person or talk to somebody on the phone first for these opportunities.

From a long-term perspective, with the updates that Google's made such as the Venice update that started rewarding localized content more and more as they understood localized content more and more, we don't think they're far away from understanding the localization of links. As that trend continues to progress we as an industry need to be much more willing to go after the local link building opportunities. We still need to take advantage of good industry opportunities, by just switching and having a priority on building links in the market that you care about.