Are you wondering about ways you can grow a local business? Are you prepared to adapt new ways to attract quality leads and close profitable clients? Are you ready to learn more about link building and how it can open doors to a business? If you are, then you’re in the right place. The challenge for most local businesses today is finding ways to reach a broader audience in the local scene and converting them to actual sales.
Here, you’ll read about outreach, building links, how to connect with local audiences effectively, and link building services that are available to you. Even if you’re already familiar with some of the methods, you might discover opportunities you may have missed to build awareness and grow a business. Right now is the best time to learn and apply these local link building outreach tips.
Before we dive into how you can connect with local audiences, let’s take a brief refresher on the basics.
What is Outreach Marketing?
Outreach marketing is a method that focuses on reaching out to other establishments or individuals and collaborating with them. This will enable a business to tap into its network or audience. One of the main goals is to create more business for a company by tapping into a variety of audiences from different channels in order to create buzz and awareness.
What is Link Building?
Link building is a powerful strategy in increasing site authority, increasing site traffic and lead generation. It’s a valuable component of SEO that every business should practice. However, how effective your link building strategy is depends on the quality of backlinks. Backlinks are the links that connect to your site. Essentially, you should aim to get links from websites that already have a good reputation, that will immediately cast a big vote of ‘YES’ in the eyes of search engines and users which will boost the site’s rank higher. What you don’t want to happen is to get linked from dubious or bad sites. These can range from adult-centered websites, gambling sites or firearms sites — to name a few. Getting backlinks from these websites will lower your ranking score and that’s why you want to avoid those.
Google uses the Webmaster Guidelines to find, index and rank a website. At the base of it all, Google prefers websites that exhibit expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Link building is a method that increases points of all three categories. Keep in mind that this applies to every site.
This means that links you’re linking to should be of good quality as well. Google looks at a list of factors in order to determine the quality of a website, however here are three ranking factors that you should keep in mind.
Three Important Ranking Factors:
- Links. Quality of links that are pointed and connected to your website. Whether it’s industry authorities, magazine websites, influencers, or bloggers, make sure that the links connecting to a website are related to the business. There are important aspects like DA points to consider but the most important part is to check the nature of the link. Double-check if the website is a good website or a suspicious one. Avoid bad links at all costs. These are links coming from adult-centered sites, gambling sites, and firearms websites just to name a few. They don’t only hurt your search rankings and score, but they have a negative effect on your overall online reputation.
- Content. High-quality content is essential to boost up your digital marketing strategy as well as elevate the value of your website. Content remains to be the fuel that starts the engine. In order for any digital marketing campaign to work, the content strategy must be formulated and planned in a way that it’s aligned with the audience and with the goal. This includes optimizing it so that it’s both relevant to the users and to search engines as well.
- RankBrain and BERT. RankBrain is Google’s machine learning algorithm that prioritizes SEO and high-quality content optimization. Machine learning is now used to understand or assume what a user really means when they conduct a Google search. Following RankBrain, Google released ‘Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers’ or BERT. Google stated that BERT has the capacity of near-human understanding and can help computers understand language closer to how humans do.
Why is it important to follow these standards? Well, it’s a guide to make sure that a website is performing at its best. You should ace these three and find similar links that also take these factors into consideration in order to appear at the top of Google search results.
Popular Link Building Strategies
Link building is essentially having outside sources link back to your website. These are some popular link building strategies you can implement:
- Guest Blogging
- Outreach
- Link Exchange
- Reaching out to unlinked mentions
- Competitive Backlinks
- Share or Repurpose Content
Why is Link Building Outreach Important in Business?
There are a number of marketing strategies out there. Outreach marketing is no different in the sense that it’s a method that will create demand, increase relevance, and help you get ahead of the competition.
Here are some of the reasons that make outreach marketing a necessity:
- Increases brand reputation
- Promotes a brand as a thought leader.
- Helps a growing business create buzz.
- A powerful way to increase traffic and sales of products or services that might have stagnated.
- Long-lasting benefits.
- Better conversion rate
- It lets you discover new channels or opportunities you might have missed.
How to Effectively Do Local Link Building Outreach
Local marketing is crucial for local businesses. However, many don’t know the principles of local outreach or many fail because of inconsistency and lack of resources. This is why more local businesses who are not too familiar with local outreach or digital marketing, in general, should turn to a reputable digital marketing agency for assistance or do the task for them. Here are ways on how to do local link building outreach effectively.
1. Google My Business (GMB) Outreach Method
Optimizing a business’ GMB page is a powerful way to attract visitors to a website or to a business, especially if it’s a physical store. What most businesses don’t know is that it can be used as a tool for local outreach as well. Think about it. With access to information like websites, street addresses, contact information, and with its location proximity feature, it’s easier for you to find industries that you can partner with locally – and contact them.
2. Search Engines
Search engines like Google can be used as tools to look for websites or blogs that you can collaborate with or could outreach to. You can do it like how you would normally search for information. Enter the location and your target keyword in the search bar, then choose the best result. Another way to do it is by putting in the location ‘+’ keyword.
For example, you want a list of websites in Chicago, the search would look like this:
It should show results containing websites you can find in Chicago. You can also use it when searching for a particular niche in the area. In this case, we’re trying to look for anything that has to do with ‘Dentists in Washington’. The more specific the niche, the better. The search would typically look like this:
The results will all contain content relating to your keywords set in that particular location. This will give you the opportunity to do an outreach and guest post on a local website or if it fits their content, you can share a link to a valuable content that’s related to their post so that they can insert it and it will link back to your site.
3. Check Current Backlinks and Sources
Checking your existing backlink history will give you insight into where you’re standing at the moment. It will also give you an idea of what websites and industries are interested in linking to you, and what topics or landing pages they’re interested in.
Go over these websites and find out which ones are from the location you’re targeting and study them. Look for new opportunities whether it’s targeting similar businesses or doing another collaboration with the same website.
You can download your backlink history using Google Search Console or by using SEOReseller’s SEO Audit Tool.
4. Lead Generation Tool
One way you can scour the web for potential link building opportunities is by using a lead generator. It is indeed a handy tool for generating SEO leads, but you can also use the information from the list to quickly find contacts from any area you plan to target. If they have an active website, you will find it included in the information.
For example, your services are targeting lawyers or law firms based in New York. All you have to do is access the lead finder tool. Type in the location you want, and the niche that you’re targeting.
Let it process and find all the contacts. Remember, the goal is to look for active websites that can link to yours.
Once it’s done, you’ll see the list and the contact information of all lawyers in New York with an online presence.
Take their website information, do a bit of research and see if there’s any website on the list you want to reach out to.
5. Scholarships for Local Schools
Linking to educational sites is a powerful way to amp up your links. It’s also a great way to support the local community and to build a good reputation in the community. One way to do this is by offering scholarships to local schools or if you’re already offering scholarships then you will be linked in their scholarship pages.
Scholarship link building rose in popularity back in 2015, but it’s still as effective today. Not only does it help young people achieve their dreams but scholarship programs also help produce the next wave of professionals who will be contributing to the local community in the future.
This will also aid your Local SEO campaign because educational institutions provide a link on their website and that’s a huge local website, which translates to a huge ‘YES’ in the eyes of search engines like Google.
6.Local Email Outreach
One of the most common ways to do outreach is through email. However, this method may take a while to generate success but it’s one of the most effective ways to get in touch with people. What you want to do is promote a piece of content, product page, or landing page and relay the message tastefully through email.
Depending on the popularity of the website, they can get dozens to hundreds of emails a day from people who also want to collaborate with them. What you want to do is stand out and establish your authoritativeness. They have to know point-blank, that what you’re offering brings value not just to you, but also to their content as well.
How to Choose the Right Link Building Agency?
You have to know your goals and why you need link building first. After you have that down pat, you can now properly assess prospects. The right link building agency should understand your goals, your needs, and should know how link building can help you with them. With this in mind they also should possess the following.
- DA Guaranteed Links. Domain authority is a website ranking score that gauges how a website will rank on search engine results. Partnering with an agency that has already built relationships with relevant and highly regarded publishers and website owners from different fields will guarantee that you get only the best backlinks.
- Dedicated Experts. In order to pull off a successful link building campaign, you need SEO experts, link building specialists and content marketing experts. They will work together in order to create and execute the best link building strategy for your business. A consultant should be able to help you align your needs with the proper link building services.
- Content Writing Services. Link building and content work hand-in-hand. Quality links need quality content since that will differentiate your business from others. You need an agency that can both provide you with quality content and quality sites to link to those content.
- Best Practices in SEO and Link Building. Best practices refers to the quality and long-term value of the initiatives taken. There are potentially dangerous and dubious practices that are being applied in the business that can lead to penalties causing your website to no longer appear on results. Reliable companies know to avoid these tactics and only offer the best white hat services to you.
Wrapping it Up
When done right, local link building outreach will amplify your Local SEO campaigns. It is a valuable asset for any e-commerce business for three main reasons:
- It promotes a business to a wider range of audiences.
- It’s a major ranking factor for search engines and a successful link building campaign will rank your site on top of search results.
- It helps build authority in your industry,
Although it’s not complicated, link building requires hard work. It requires time, research, and strategy. You also need a developed eye to determine which local links will bring value to your site and which won’t help at all. There are good links and there are really good links, similarly, there are bad links and really bad links. This is why you should check your link directory regularly to see if all the links you have are legitimate as there can be heavy repercussions if you stay blind to bad links that will eventually eat up your ranking score. However, if you find that your hands are already full or you’re not yet too savvy with the process, you can delegate your local SEO, outreach process as well as link building services to professionals. The goal here is to dominate the local scene as efficiently and effectively as possible. That way, there’s no time wasted in generating local traffic, increasing revenue, and growing that local business.
