Securing relevant backlinks in Local SEO

Some of the best ways to build backlinks are naturally, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put together a plan to conduct some outreach, and secure meaningful mentions of your business with a link back to your site. A great starting place, is to build up your social media presence, and create an awareness of your business, so that others want to start talking about you, and writing about your offerings. After that, it’s still a good idea to explore where you can get some quality backlinks. When you secure a backlink, it can be a nofollow link, or a follow link.

This refers to a technical tag that is placed along your link. A nofollow will indicate to Google that the owner of the page doesn’t want to pass any credibility along to your site. They’re simply giving you a link, or a mention, but they won’t vouch for your credibility. A follow link means the site is willing to let some of its link juice pass through. It’s going to affirm that your site is legitimate. I wouldn’t worry too much about what a site provides you with. If you have 100-percent follow links, that’s going to look suspicious in Google’s eyes.

If you’re putting your backlinks on sites that are valuable, nofollow links will still contribute meaningful traffic, which is going to be a win. A fantastic way of researching where to get backlinks is to look at what your competitors, or similar businesses that are local to you, are doing. There are two great tools for that. The Moz Open Site Explorer and SEMrush. Both will give you limited data for free, so it’s an easy place to start.

You can research with these tools to get a complete picture of all backlinks. These tools are going to show us our page authority, and our domain authority. The higher the number, the better that backlink is.

These tools will give us a great perspective of some referring domains that we might want to reach out to. You might reach out to one of those sites, and see if you can get your site listed as well. By finding backlinks that are natural to your brand, and come from quality sources, you’ll be providing Google with the important signals necessary to boost your rank.