If you own a small local business, you need to find the most affordable options for promoting and marketing your brand. Unfortunately, if you need SEO (search engine optimization), that can put you at risk.
Some SEO companies use black-hat techniques that try to get around the system, such as building a lot of low-quality links on bad websites or publishing pages full of keywords that don’t make much sense.
Not following the rules that search engines have put in place can result in big penalties from those engines. This is an area of business where it is not advisable to try and take shortcuts.
It is wiser to use a few legal link-building methods or hire a professional SEO company than to take on the dangers of illegal SEO.
Definition: What is White Hat Link Building?
The goal of white hat link building is to increase your website’s authority and organic search rankings. This is done by creating high quality content and then conducting outreach to external websites with the goal of getting an inbound link from them.
White hat backlinks are good backlinks that follow Google’s guidelines. Black hat backlinks are bad backlinks that don’t follow Google’s guidelines.
White hat link building is a long-term strategy that focuses on search engine optimization results. The goal is to build a brand that ranks for important organic keywords by adding value with content that matches search intent.
10 Link-Building Ideas for Local Businesses
The most difficult part of search engine optimization is obtaining links from other websites. It can be hard to persuade other sites to link back to yours, as they usually don’t have a reason to do so. Nevertheless, investing time to earn links for your local business can be very beneficial.
In a BrightLocal survey, 63% of local SEO experts said that link building was an effective way to improve rankings.
If you own a local business, it is beneficial to rank highly in local rankings, as they are less competitive than general rankings. Additionally, being a part of a local community gives you unique opportunities to build links. Some legitimate link building techniques for local businesses include :-
1. Partner with other local businesses.
A lot of link building is based on developing relationships. If you have a good relationship with someone, they are much more likely to add a link to your website on theirs.
Building relationships with local businesses and influencers is the number one tactic for successful link building, according to a BrightLocal survey.
Collaborate with other businesses in your locality which have a similar line of work as you. For e.g., if you are in the business of selling dog food, look for pet groomers, dog walkers, vets, and dog trainers in your area. Reach out to the owners of these businesses and see how you can help each other out. You could offer referral discounts for customers you recommend to each other or organise events together. Working together with other businesses will create opportunities for natural linking, along with any other benefits you get from the relationship.
2. Sponsor local organizations.
Local nonprofits also offer a way for community members to get involved in causes they care about. Many local nonprofits look for annual sponsors in addition to events. These tend to provide more long-term benefits than an event that only lasts a few days. Local nonprofits offer a way for community members to get involved in causes they care about.
When thinking about which nonprofits to support, consider the values of your typical customers and look for organizations that align with the message you want to send to them. For example, if you own a health food restaurant, nonprofits that focus on improving healthy food access or sustainable food practices would be a natural fit.
3. Join Local Professional Organizations with Directories.
Most cities have a chamber of commerce, and some have different chambers focused on certain business owner demographics, like an LGBTQ chamber of commerce or a Hispanic chamber of commerce. You can also find a number of professional organizations specific to certain industries.
See if there are any professional organizations related to your business in your area. If they have a directory that you can be included in, it’s a good way to get a local link.
4. Host a charity drive or fundraising.
It’s also a great networking opportunity to meet other people working towards a similar cause. Here’s a tip that can help you do some good and also get some links. If you work to help a cause that other people are interested in, they’ll be motivated to help spread the word to get more people involved. As noted earlier, it’s also a great opportunity to network with other people who are working towards a similar goal.
If you support a nonprofit, they will help promote it on their site. Local journalists and bloggers may make it newsworthy. Any followers of the nonprofit or publications may be inspired to share news about it.
5. Write and promote local content.
White-hat link building often includes content marketing because good content creates opportunities for other websites to link to it.
If you’re a local business, you don’t have to try and compete with businesses in your industry that aren’t also local. You only need to be as visible as the other local businesses in your industry.
If you want your local business to be successful, find topics that are both relevant to your business and to the local community. For example, if you own a bike shop, you could write blog posts about the best biking trails in town and local legislation that adds new bike lanes. This will help you gain some traction with the community.
6. Create unique and original data.
I love to earn white hat backlinks from unique and original data. It’s a great way to scale your SEO strategy.
Why are people so attracted to sharing interesting data?
An example of this is the study of 800+ SEO professionals that was conducted by uSERP. The purpose of the study was to learn the thoughts of the professionals on backlinks and how they impact search engine rankings.
Within days of publishing the report, sites like CMI and AppSumo linked to it, driving thousands of visits to their site. This increased their link equity and generated leads for their services.
How do I create unique and original data I hear you ask. This is a great question! There are a few ways that you can create original data. One way is to create surveys or polls and distribute them to people that you know will answer them honestly. Another way is to keep a daily journal detailing your thoughts and experiences. You could also create artwork or write articles and submit them to magazines or online publications. Whatever method you choose, make sure that you are consistent and detailed in your data collection so that you will end up with high-quality information.
First, find your niche. What area are you focused on, and what interesting statistics would you like to learn more about?
Start talking to customers, readers, or colleagues and work backwards.
Google Trends can help you see how current trending topics relate to your niche. This can help you make your content more viral and increase your chances of getting links from high-tier media sites.
Use social media platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn to collect survey responses, and then create a content piece with custom images that people will want to share.
7. Outreach high-volume of link-building.
Outreach link building is a process where you contact other websites in order to get links back to your own website. The process is more difficult than ever because it is hard to get responses from other websites.
Link building can be competitive as everyone is trying to improve their backlink profile and site’s ranking. The best quality backlinks usually come from bigger brands in your niche, so you may need to send a lot of emails to get them.
Building links can often be a numbers game, where you have to send a high volume of emails to get a response from a small percentage of sites.
So, how many? 100? 200?
Way more.
The better the quality of your outreach and the more valuable your promised content is, the more likely you are to get a positive response from the site you’re trying to contact.
You need to be specific and have good content if you want people to link to your site.
Try to send 400 emails per month to sites that are related to your interests. If you can’t find enough sites, try using a tool like Ahrefs to find more specific topics.
Look up a specific topic or niche on the content explorer tool on Ahrefs. For example, astrology. While this sounds like a seemingly small niche, and there might not be 400+ blogs directly on astrology, there are over 400,000 unique pages discussing the topic:
This is how you expand your niche quickly to target hundreds of thousands of pages!
Contact different sites for different topics and you will have a lot of sites to get white hat backlinks from.
White Hat Link Building Services and Companies
Acquiring backlinks from high-authority websites can be time consuming.
You need to spend money….
- Researching topics that you can realistically rank for
- Planning, writing, editing, and publishing content
- Creating custom images, videos, and data
- Researching sites that can link back to this content
- Finding the right contacts and emails to send campaigns
- And repeat that on a massive scale
You may want to see results quickly. However, realistically, you may be waiting a long time. It could take months, or even longer, before you see new backlinks.
When there is so much saturation in link building outreach, it is more efficient to outsource the work.
companies that specialize in building white hat links can deliver results quickly.
Here are some of the best white hat link building services out there:
8. Create and give out awards.
If you give out local awards to individuals or businesses in relevant categories, it will get the attention of the people you honor who are then likely to share about the award to their own audiences.
If you own a gym, you could create awards for businesses related to health and fitness that your customers are likely to value. This would provide your customers with a way to engage, and would also give you an opportunity to connect with the businesses that win. The winning businesses are likely to link back to your awards page, and people who love those businesses may share news of the award.
9. Perform a survey.
If you can provide local bloggers and journalists with a useful statistic, you’re likely to gain a number of links from it.
Design a survey about topics that are important to your community. Ask people on your email list and social media followers to take the survey. If you have good relationships with other local businesses, organizations, and influencers, ask them to help spread the word about your survey to get more people to take it. The more people who take your survey, the more useful the data will be.
Publish your survey responses with accompanying charts and graphs. Then, promote your findings around the internet; if your data is something that people in your community care about, other websites will mention it as well and include a link back to the source.
10. Promote your projects to local press.
You should try to reach out to local journalists and bloggers to let them know about your efforts. Tactics like hosting a fundraiser, creating awards, or releasing original survey data can all potentially be newsworthy. But the people writing the news need to learn about them to know to cover them.
You should send a press release every time you do something newsworthy, and you should contact specific journalists if you have something relevant to their beat.
If you’re looking to increase your brand’s profile with local audiences and drive more attention to your business, you may want to consider hiring a local PR professional. They already have those connections established, so they can help you get coverage for your tactics faster.
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