Local SEO Link Building Strategies and Opportunities in 2024

As a general concept of anything regarding backlinks or internal linking, just basically creating hyperlinks. I wanted to go over some basics of terminology, just so we're all using the same vocabulary, so to speak. So when you are looking at the three parts of the anatomy of a link, I want to break that down for you. So there's the destination, which is basically just what it sounds like. It's where the link is pointing to. And so you might have an, like a length, that's a hyperlink like this, and it's pointing to that page, right? So that is the destination of this link. So the destination is just the page that it's pointing to. Okay. The next thing you want to look at is the anchor text and anchor text is the words that are highlighted, that become the link itself. So when you are creating anchor link text, a lot of times you want to use keywords that you're trying to rank for. And there's three different types of more or less anchor link texts. So the three types are a keyword, a back link, which an example would be like white label, digital marketing solutions, or white labeled digital marketing tools. And you see if you hover over the link and you look down just below my face, you'll see that it's pointing to ninja marketing dust solutions. That would be a keyword rich back link, right? That anchor tag, the anchor text is it includes keywords that I want to rank for. The next one is a branded back link, which is just the name of your company. And then it points to the URL. So in this case, ninja marketing solutions, and then what's known as a naked naked URL. Backlink is just the actual roll URL that you're pointing to. It's just the destination without any kind of like anchor text in its place. It's just called a naked URL. Backlink you want to have a healthy mix of these. It looks unnatural if you're just using keyword stuffing techniques for your backlinks. And especially if they're all the exact same thing, it just looks unnatural to Google. So you want to have a good, healthy mix of these when you start creating these backlinks it just looks more natural the way it would actually occur if you weren't actually trying to make it occur. And the last thing that we want to talk about is the REL tag. Now there's three primary identifiers in a REL tag that we want to look at. There's actually more than three, but the three that matter for the backlinking strategies are the no-follow, which basically tells the bot in this case, we're just going to assume you're trying to rank in Google. And so the Google bot it's telling you do not follow this link. Don't provide any link equity or link juice to the destination of this URL of this hyperlink. This is extremely common in social media. So if you post a link on Facebook or whatever that is not going to have it's, it's going to be a no-follow link. In other words, it's not going to pass any link equity. Now, as a side note on that, Google has said that they will still sometimes follow the link. They just don't know. They don't necessarily apply any link equity to it, but a lot of times they will follow it as a hint for what the URL is about what the, the actual link is. So it, it's, it's really unnatural looking if you have no links that are no follow, because any healthy business, any prominent brand is going to have, especially a lot of social media mentions. And so when you have links on social media, those create no follow links. Now they don't pass any link equity. So if we have our choice, we would rather have what we consider a do follow link. We'll talk about that in a second, but it's unnatural if all of our links are, do follows. So we'll, we'll talk about that here in just a second. The next is REL equals UGC or user generated content equal to the no-follow. That means it does not pass any link equity through the URL. What it's doing is it's telling Google that you are intentionally placing that content there in, and therefore you're telling it to omit the link equity on it. Don't, don't use this tag. It is a violation of Google's terms and conditions to go create your own content and backlink to your own websites. And so if you're following it by the book, then you need to use either the REL equals UGC or the next one that we'll talk about. But you're going to really hinder your ability to rank because your backlinks are all going to be, they're not going to pass any link equity and similar to UGC or user generated content is sponsored. It is against the terms and conditions of Google to pay for link placement to an external site. If you do pay to have it listed, like for instance, in a directory, you are supposed to have REL equals sponsored, which indicates to Google you're paying for that placement. It does not pass any link equity, which would help with your domain authority. And therefore you're not in violation, but similar to those it doesn't pass any link equity, so we're not gonna use it. And if there is an absence of any of these no follow UGC or sponsored, then that's what we call a do follow link. There's no such thing as a tag that says, do follow Google just assumes or any bot just assumes that it should follow the links unless there's a tag specifically telling it not to. But since there is no tag that, that warrants that, that you know, term, we just call it a do follow link. If it doesn't have any of these three tags in it. And so you can see if you look at the source code, I just included a link that I had posted on Facebook to an article. And you see where it says, REL equals no follow. It also has no opener. It's just cause opening in a new window. And so it's, it's doing something different, but again, the three main ones that we're concerned with this one is a REL equals no follow. Sometimes you might see that as the user G the user generated content or sponsored, this is telling it's not passing any link equity from Facebook to the article that I had posted, or the link that I had posted. But again, it is unnatural if all of your links are, do follow links. So you know, that doesn't mean that we would prefer to have, do follow, but it doesn't mean that you should skip posting links on Facebook because the user traffic certainly helps as well. So that is the three parts of the anatomy of a link. The next thing I want to talk about some basic terms for back linking. So we have what's called internal links and external links. Internal links are basically where your domain links to another page within your domain. In other words ninja marketing solutions is pointing to another page within ninja marketing solutions. That's an internal link versus an external link where ninja marketing solutions links to something that is not ninja marketing solutions, or if a, another site we're linking into ninja marketing solutions that is called an external link. And when an external link points to your site, whether it's your homepage or whether it's a page you're trying to rank or an article you've written, whatever it is when an external link points back to your site that is called a back link. Next is Google's page rank. Page rank is this metric that Google uses. They used to it used to be a, probably the heaviest ranking indicator or ranking signal that Google uses, but basically it's a metric that they use to understand the overall authoritative strength of a page. It is loosely speaking, what everybody else models their domain authority ratings after. But page rank is generally it is scored on a zero to 10 versus like domain authority, which we'll get to in just a second is essentially on a score of zero to 100 page rank plays a lot into consideration. Loosely speaking is basically a combination of the quality and quantity of backlinks Google used page rank, because it assumed that the more other websites were linking to your page. The more authoritative you must be on a given topic because other places are finding useful information from you that leads us into domain authority. Domain authority is a vanity metric. It was originated by MAs MAs, SEMrush, majestic, all of them have their own versions of essentially what page rank is to Google. It's, it's essentially your domain or your page. If you're using page store instead of domain authority, it's essentially your domains page rank, but with other metrics. So I'm oversimplifying this, but one way you can think about it is the domain age, how old it is, plus the backlink accumulation versus similar sites in your industry, right? So if you are in a plumbing industry, it wants to compare the number, the quality and quantity of links that you have, your backlink accumulation compared to other plumbers. It wouldn't be fair to compare you to, you know, personal injury attorneys. They're just two very different industries. So domain authority or page authority is generally the domain age plus backlink accumulation. That is at the domain level. If you were using page at the authority, it is one specific page within the domain. And then lastly, the last topic we want to cover link placement, the link placement of a back link has direct correlation in the amount of link equity that it will pass. If you have a lot of back links on a page, you are dis you are distributing a lot of link equity all around, so it dilutes it. So if you've got a bunch of backlinks that dilutes it, versus if you only have one or two it's passing a lot of link equity from whatever domain is linking out to whatever is linking to also known as the destination and the placement in the page has a lot to do with that. If it's a prominent link that's displayed in an article like in the top of the article, then Google considers that to be a very prominent placement versus something random that's down in the footer of the template, so to speak. So we want our links in short, we want our links to be, do follow. We would like them to be prominently placed inside of an article for us. It's like a review article. We would like it if the anchor text included keywords if not, we'd like branded backlinks and we would like them to be from high authoritative sites. So your backlink accumulation, if you're accumulating you know, sites from somebody's personal WordPress blog, that's probably not as good as if you could get a link from like Fox business or something like that. So I hope that helps us some basic terminology with that terminology in mind, we're going to look at internal versus external backlinking strategies.

Hey guys, I wanted to talk to you at length about some more relevant topics when it comes to local SEO link building strategies and how we can find opportunities to build quality backlinks. What is, what is a quality backlink? How do we know if what we're chasing after is a quality backlink, et cetera. So I want to dive in and give you some real world examples and help you understand what we're looking for. So let's, let's take a look when we're looking for backlinks to our local businesses. And I'm going to say site, but keep in mind any of these could be your money site. So it might be your GMB listing or your Google business profile. It might be your actual domain name, et cetera. If these are going to end up being tier two links, it might be a link to a tier one link. Most of what we're going to be talking about ideally would be a tier one link, but just keep in mind that when I say we're trying to boost up something, it's not necessarily just your money site, your money site could be like your Google business listing. So when we're looking for backlinks to that money site there are three primary criteria that we're looking for to make a good back link. And so we're going to take them piece by piece. It's great to get all three. It's good to get even just two out of the three and it's even, it's even good to get one out of the three. So let's take a look at them. The first one that we want to consider is authority and authority is like your domain authority or your page authority. It's a vanity metric Mazda zit. There's a Google it's based off Google's old page rank, which is still used, but basically it's an accumulation. It's a, it's a, it's a combination of your domain age and your backlink profile. And your backlink profile is basically considered how strong the links are to your site versus other sites like yours. And so the accumulation of number and quality of backlinks helps make up your domain authority. If those links are pointing to a specific page within your site, that's page authority. So you're going to hear me talking about authority. It can be at the domain level, it can be at the page level it's for the purposes of today's conversation at a conceptual level they're interchangeable. We're just looking for authoritative backlinks. And so the higher, the domain authority is from the site that is linking to us the better it is for us. That makes sense. Right? So if Fox news were to link to you, that is a lot better than John Doe's, WordPress blog linking to you because it has high domain authority. So I'll have some common authority sources that we could target our directories things like yellow pages, if they're getting indexed and they are, do follow links also for the purpose of this conversation, everything we're going to talk about, we're going to assume is they do follow link. If it's not a do follow link, sometimes they're still worth getting, we've covered that in other discussions. We're going to hope that everything here is a do follow link, but directories, we could, we could certainly target some directories for authority, podcasts, or influencers if if they're giving us a shout out and a link that that can be really helpful interviews. Interviews can be online interviews. They can be video interviews like they can be anything you want in an interview. And it's very similar to like a podcast Herro was you will hear as Herro or horo. It is an acronym. It stands for help a reporter out. It is very, very similar to an interview, but the way you, the way it works is you actually go to help a reporter.com. And there's a couple of other versions of it, but help a reporter.com is one of the more common ones and what's happening is there's somebody that's trying to write an article. And you know, a journalist is trying to write an article about some topic and you can go in there and see the topic they're trying to write about. And if you're an authority on that topic. So for instance, if there was somebody writing an article about how because of COVID, everything has gone to digital. And so digital marketing is now a more impactful for businesses. They might want to interview me for insights into digital marketing. And if they do what they will do is they will give you a link to your site, a back link. And those are usually done from very high domain authority sites. I have seen people that get links this way from places like Forbes and Fox news and Fox business, and like huge places like that. The domain authority on those can be a game changer for your site in very short order. So that is another way it's, it's in the same vein as the interview, but you're actually bidding on it and you have to write like a little sales pitch on why you're an authority and the topic you might discuss with them. And that becomes the help, a reporter out method. You can get some really high domain authority backlinks that way. The next thing that we want to talk about the next contributing factor to our link equity is known as geographic relevancy. See, keep in mind, we're talking about local SEO. So your local business proximity is king. If I Google best pizza near me, they're not going to show me pizzas. I'm in Athens, Georgia. They're not going to show me pizza from Chicago though. Chicago deep dish pizzas may be better than what we have in Athens, Georgia. They're not going to show me that because it's, the proximity is not relevant. It's not geographically relevant to my location. So we want to keep that in mind when we're trying to get back links, some examples of some areas we might look for that would be local sponsorships. You can go on and you can find you know, places that you can sponsor something local, either a highway or even a, you know, like a sports league or something like that, boys and girls club and get a backlink from these organizations because you are you are getting that, that sponsorship. And so one way to do this is actually to go and to your local newspapers website and find areas where they are linking out, especially if they're do follow links and find out what it takes to get into that section. A lot of times it can be like a $50 sponsorship. And if that gets indexed, that can be a very geographically relevant backlink for you local organizations, that's the same vein as what we just talked about, but maybe that sponsorship, like let's say we're sponsoring a boy scout troop or something like that. We do $150 donation. The local sponsorship might get picked up in the paper, which is kind of what we just talked about. And it might also get picked up on their local you know, website or their, their sub domain or whatever it is that the organization uses that can be very geographically relevant as well. Local directories, for instance, I live in Athens, Georgia live local. Athens is a directory of businesses within Athens that are locally owned. That can be a relevant back link as well, geographically relevant backlink as well. So we've talked about authority, we've talked about geographic relevancy and there are some times that we can target links that meet both. They fall in this area right here. They're both, they both have high authority and they are geographically relevant. So some examples of that, that we would be targeting might be your local chamber of commerce, especially if they've got, do follow links. That one's an easy one. All you got to do is join the chamber. You're almost guaranteed a link from that. A local BNI chapter be an I as business, a business networking international. It's very similar to a chamber of commerce. But it restricts industry types to one like there would only be one digital marketer in the group or one plumber, one electrician, whatever. But they almost always have a local you know, page and you will get a back link from it, local newspapers. We've kind of already talked about that, but a local newspaper like USA today or Fox five Atlanta, if you're in like Atlanta area, your local newspaper will almost always have an online version of their newspaper. And so you can get sourced out from the online version of their local newspapers, local websites, guest posting is a big way to to get a back link. And so if you are on a local website and you are like a sponsored speaker at an event as an example. So one of the big charities that the JCS group does here is they do a better business. It's a big event. It's like a trade show kind of, and they will have local speakers. Those speakers will actually get a they'll get a back link on the page when it talks about them being their speaker profile, right? So authority, geographic relevance. The next thing we want to talk about is contextual relevance. This is the third and final one. Contextual relevance means that like, if I was trying to rank a local plumber, it wouldn't do me a lot of good to, I mean, I guess a better than nothing, but it's not contextually relevant to get a backlink from a blog that talks all about birdwatching or something like that. I want it to be contextually relevant and it doesn't have to be a direct relevancy. So like, as an example, if you owned a pastry shop and you do some catering getting a link from a wedding venue, that's contextually relevant because you would cater weddings, right? Same if you were a flower shop, a wedding venue, that's an easy example, but like birdwatching blog linking to a, an electrician probably doesn't have much to do with it. And so it's less contextually relevant. So some examples might be national associations vague or generic online directories that are specific to your, your industry. A lot of times those two go hand in hand like a plumber's union or something like that. If you had a national association of photographers if you're a dog trainer and you wanted to do the AKC it's, it's contextually relevant might even have authority, but it doesn't have much geographic relevance niche specific forums. This is a lot where for digital marketing, we capitalize on this all the time. It's where we would go on there. And we would we would post information that is relevant to our industry, even though it's not necessarily geographically relevant. And ideally our do follow links would be in the middle of all three. They would actually be in this little area right here where they would have contextual relevance, geographic, relevance, and high authority. Now, again, we talked in the beginning about how it's great to have all three it's worth doing. If you only have two, it's still worth doing, if you only have one, but ideally we'd like to go for all three with our do follow tier one backlinks. So where do we find those? Let's take some look at some examples, some low hanging fruits, some easy foundational backlinking is things like local niche directories and Atlanta photography associations. I Googled that I know nothing about photography. I found like 13 of them off the bat that all had do follow links. So joining one of those associations gets you a back link that meets all three. You can check their domain authority, but especially if it's higher than yours, you're going to meet all three of the criteria. That's great blog and review style articles. And a lot of times you'll find these a, these might even be in a local newspaper, but it would be something that's like top five cigar shops in Atlanta, top five Italian restaurants and Dunwoody, whatever. A lot of times you can say best whatever number. So if you're Googling it, you could do like best wild card industry near me. So best wildcard means it doesn't matter if it's 5, 7, 10, whatever, best wildcard plumbers near me, and you'll might see review articles best cigar shops, whatever you'll see review articles. And then you can contact the author of that review article and say, it's unfortunate that we weren't we weren't in included in this, could you either update your article or maybe we'd offer you, like, if you were a cigar shop, maybe we'd offer you a private tour of the shop and you know, give them a free tasting of a cigar or something like that. If they will come to your shop and review you a lot of times, they will. Next is like white papers or case studies. This is huge. We've, we've done really well with this. A lot of times, the way that I like to do this with, with local clients is we have access to local university, university of Georgia's minutes for me. And then in Atlanta, you've got Kennesaw state, Georgia tech, Georgia state. There's a lot of of universities here. Universities have grad students, they have to write thesis papers. So one way that you can do this is an example would be a white paper on how tax changes in Fulton county might dictate how you choose an accountant. Obviously I would be trying to rank a local accountant in Atlanta. And so I would have my accountant be that, that domain authority expert, that industry expert, where they would be quoted in that white paper, that white paper would end up being published on in this example, like Georgia state's EDU website, it's high, high domain relevancy domain authority, it's contextually, it's geographically relevant story about Fulton county, which is in Atlanta. It's awesome way to do it. I've had really good success with that. And then one of the most common ways is general press releases. If you were to release something in this case, the tax shelters, local accounting group, if you said the tax shelter is hiring for CPAs in Athens, Georgia, you could probably get that involved in some local websites especially if they were like new sites, things like that. You can get some, some good backlinks from press releases that, that are great. So tax shelters is expanding, opening up a new location, hiring changing his name, bought a company, any kind of relevant information that you can put in a press release. And there's all kinds of companies that do press release services. I highly advise you to just Google tax a tax shelter to Google, like press release service, and you'll find, you'll find plenty of them. So link building opportunities as a recap, and then we're going to look at some specific tactics. So as a recap from the concepts, you can join your local chamber of commerce or BNI chapter. That's great opportunity. Join a niche relevant business association, like the example we talked about of Atlanta photography associations. You can look for directories and citation listings. We're going to go through an ample amount of those and link to the best tool that I have found for that. You look for guest posts on local websites. That's an excellent way to do it. You can try to get featured on local list posts like top five, whatever in your area. And you can look at your competitor's backlinks. You can do some competitive research and see where they are getting backlinks from. And we're going to show you a cool tool and how to use it there as well. But if you find somebody that is listing out your competitors and they might be in those the, the local list posts like top five cigar shops in Atlanta, if you find where your competitors are getting backlinks from, you'll likely run across a lot of these, and you'll find some low-hanging fruit on how you can start picking away at that. So that is just an overview of what we're looking for in our backlink profile. Now let's take a look at where we can specifically go start building those links from a foundational backlink all the way into competition research. So we can figure out where it is that we need to start targeting links to our site from to build that domain authority. Thanks guys.