What types of backlinks work for local seo?

[Flex1]

I am curious as to what types of backlinks work best for local seo. As in would Web 2.0's work well? Would niche relevant blog comments work well? Things of that nature.

I was thinking of doing what I would usually do for national SEO, and do Web 2.0's, then blog comments and social signals going to those web 2.0's. Just do a multi tiered backlinking pyramid.

I'm just curious as to if that would work well for Local SEO. I'm thinking it would work well for organic rankings, but I don't know if it would help out in the 7 pack.

 

[HowDoYouKFC]

It's the wrong question to ask. The question to ask is "For a local small business, what does a "natural backlinking profile" look like?

"Natural" looks like a mention on the local high school football team's website. Natural is the local TV station listing the local business as a charitable contributor for a community project that they sponsored. (In my town they remodel houses for poor people that can't afford it.) Food Bank contributor. PTA contributor. Mention on the City Council website for having supplied the sodas for a local celebration.

Here's what's NOT natural:

Any kind of purchasable spam backlink from any Vendor, anywhere on the planet, anywhere, any time, period, amen, that is all.

If someone is offering to sell you backlinks, they are offering to get your website penalized. How hard can it be, really, for Google to spot the one out of ten, one out of twenty, one out of fifty local businesses for any particular niche that is cheating and gaming the system?

DUH.

The "SEO Gurus" would have you believe that Google is stupid. At least, that's what you'd have to believe in order to think you are going to get away with something. Here's the first place Google looks:

Page 1.

That's it. Ten results, and the cheaters are probably closer to the top than the bottom. Most have a few citations, some have a LOT. Some have a handful of local backlinks connected to the community and yet one in particular has 1,000 backlinks from some website out of South Vietnam.

DUH. I wonder which business gets the manual review? Duh. Local SEO "Gurus" rely on you the client to be too stupid to imagine that Google isn't stupid. Back in the day I made the mistake of purchasing 20 Twitter backlinks and immediately got my client penalized minus 4 or so. The very same day. Turns out, the backlinks were from some kind of South Vietnamese restaurant review site. Who would have thought that Google would realize that South Vietnamese Restaurant Reviewers don't REALLY and LEGITIMATELY want to link to a local American Plumber multiple times. MAN! Who would have thought that South Vietnamese Restaurant reviewers were so CWAZY about American Plumbers. New trend, but I never figured out how to exploit the niche.

I'm just going to say it like this: You're wrong. Fundamentally wrong. Either you've been cherry-picking your information and only assimilating that which sounds good, promises fast, easy results, or you've been listening to the WRONG dude. If you were my client, we'd spent at least 4 hours trying to rewire your brain into a better understanding of what Local SEO is all about, what's feasible, what's a pipe-dream, and what are straight-up SEO marketing lies.

 

[Flex1]

I know non natural backlinks are bad. I'm not saying that I would do those. I'm just curious as to if it would work for local SEO because I have used these same techniques for national SEO and they work. I know natural is best, but if I look at businesses in my area they have at least 700 to 1k backlinks. I know for a fact those aren't because of just natural means. I have looked through them and I know they are not. That's why I'm saying why can't I just manually of course, not using any spam software or anything just make backlinks for the website?

Lets say I have a chiropractor as a client, it's hard to get them to spend more money on something as in helping the community or whatever just for 1 backlink. Or what would I say to the news station or newspaper to get them to write a story or make a backlink on there website about a chiropractor?

I guess too me getting natural backlinks as in backlinks from community based websites for certain companies would be extremely hard.

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Check how your local competition is ranking. Try to build the same link profile.

 

[Andrew Scherer]

I have ranked in the 7 pack purely with citations before.

I've also had a lot of success with guest posts and other kinds of high quality contextual links.

But diversity is the key here. I would use spammy stuff in moderation, if you're thinking about it.

 

[HowDoYouKFC]

Check how your local competition is ranking. Try to build the same link profile.

Agree with this. I think it's dangerous to assume that methods that work for non-local seo will also work for local. All local results are locally competitive, too. You should keep that in mind. For instance if a chiropracter in Miami has a, b, c, and d factors giving him #1 results, that doesn't necessarily mean that all 4 of them are necessary in Denver. Do a slow, careful survey of the top 10 results in your area/niche and make certain that, to the greatest extent possible, if your client's competition has "something", then you client does too. Frequently, simply by doing everything that all the top 10 results are doing you get high-placement because no one else is trying to do ALL.

And, as I've said before, the BBB is the best "backlink" money can buy. Separates the "wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am's" from the true & established pro's. Any kind of government backlink is worth getting for example if your locality offers a link for the public record of the DBA. Again, dig around in your client's competition and at least in the beginning, don't do anything that the competition hasn't done. Also stop trying to take the square peg of local SEO and fit it into what you think you understand about the round hole of "global" SEO because they are completely different. However, having said that, if you can find an actual competitor using a blackhat method and maintaining long-term local results then maybe you could consider it, however the LAST thing I would do is listen to the opinions of people that want you to pay them to get your client's website de-indexed. You won't get any kind of compensation or justice, trust me on this, my friend is long gone now and the guys that did him in are still selling their trash. They'll make you go away too, if/when things go tits-up.

 

[rankspire]

High quality local citations, links from event sponsorships, charity, testimonials etc plus push people to post reviews etc. The usual web 2.0 social bookmark route may land you in trouble when it comes to a local site. Even if you're doing it, use them on buffers.

 

[sully1975]

I would say be more cautious when picking something that could be considered trickier with SEO on a more local angle. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered as they say. The best overall advice I can say is get creative and look around to find opportunities that others have overlooked on the local level.

For instance I am in a Town run business council that is morphing into a town run chamber of commerce that I am going blog and press release about. Some call the Newsjacking here.

About a year ago I did a reality TV show that was a bar flip over show copy. It may have finally been picked up. My camera time is NON-Existant pretty much, but I milk that out with social media and such when my episode comes up if it does.

I can write for the local township free paper, which I discussed here before.

A writer of our area's biggest real paper, at one of these town business council came up and was intrigued of a local father-son business and wanted to know if we would be interested to write a story about us.

I was going to introduce myself to all the local paper and news stations if they needed an electrician or a HVAC company for comment on a situation such as a electrical fire, copper theft, electrocution, flooding, power outage, etc... we would love to accommodate them.

PS: New Citations or a cleanup of citations never does hurt a local company.

The biggest thing a local business can do is demonstrate their expertise online by text or video to a person. If you own a business and can force yourself to write one new thing a day or do one hour of seo work you'll be fine.

 

[freckletone]

It really depends on the vertical niche... for competitive niches like "attorney" in a big city like "Chicago" and people want to rank for "defense attorney Chicago" (just an example, the city really isnt Chicago) i see people on the first page using PBN and even paid links.... in the maps and organic listings

For local SEO I use citations, business directories like Yelp, Superpages, geo directories (directories in the city the client wants to target or is located in like Chicago business directories, try to get listed on Chicago blogs with legit articles or manual comments... press release... articles on quality related sites (example would be Biggerpockets for real estate, Medium for something general etc).... a few bookmarks at top places like Stumbleupon etc( not 10,000 shietty PR 0 spam ones) but like 5 manual ones... We don't just aim for the google maps listings but organic as well; often they end up getting listed for both. In addition we also try to do as Sully1975 mentioned above; local sites etc... Also events sites if the business has real community events etc...

I'll give you a secret; try to get links for niche specific but also GEO specific relevant sites..... so if you are a lawyer get business profiles on all the high profile lawyer authority sites and directories.. and if you are in chicago as many chicago directories and blogs as you can.

 

[serplock]

I've always used relevant links from local websites only. For example if I am to rank a website in New York then I will try to find links from websites that are NY based as getting links for a local website from a (national website) doesn't make sense and looks unnatural.

 

[sarahjeff4u]

I think building a social media reputation by engaging more local people on your profiles and replying to their any queries can also be beneficial for the local SEO.

 

[Nut-Nights]

I think building a social media reputation by engaging more local people on your profiles and replying to their any queries can also be beneficial for the local SEO.

It may help you with getting clientsm But not SEO

 

[BlueSteele]

Too often folks forget to go back to the basics. Someone mentioned it above, what are you top ranking competitors doing? That's hardly all you need to do, but it's a great place the start. So much of what people do these days is point and shoot. And providers (link providers), especially those in the local space just love to sell it to them. Standardized lists, void of competitive analysis or research. At best, you have a few different citations than anyone else they would build for. To a point, in the US for example, there are 30 or so standard local directories you want to be in, but after that IMO, your time is well spent looking at your competitors. Where are their reviews online? Search their phone/address, where are their citations found? You won't find citations if there isn't a link on Ahrefs. I can think of plenty of good citations where they don't give you a link unless you fork over cash. There are also plenty of good local sites/blogs/whatever that won't always link to you.

I was inspired this week by the first SEO blog I think I ever read: http://bluehatseo.com. It often reminds us of the simple stuff. Stuff that was good back then, and is still now.

My .02 / rant

-Adam

 

[john1444]

Like the name implies getlocal quality links from your target region. The most important thing is the quality of the links and these is what differentiate link builders from SEOers.