Link building for a local business, without the outreach spam

Almost everything written about link building is written for businesses that sell to the whole world. For a plumber in one city, most of it is irrelevant, and the parts that are not are mostly already sitting in the business waiting to be asked for.

Seven you already have

1. Your suppliers

Manufacturers and wholesalers run installer directories, dealer locators and approved trader pages. If you fit their product, you are usually eligible and nobody has ever asked you. Trades built on branded materials do best here, which is why it is the first thing we check for roofers.

One email to your rep. Not a pitch, a question: do you have an installer listing, and how do I get on it. These pages are old, established and genuinely relevant, which is a combination that is hard to buy.

2. Trade associations and licensing bodies

If you pay membership fees to anything, check whether your entry links to your website, and check that the link is not pointing at a domain you stopped using in 2019. Half the time the entry exists and the link is missing or broken.

3. Anything you sponsor

The junior football team, the school fete, the community hall. If your name is on a shirt, ask whether it can also be on the website.

One caveat worth knowing: where money changes hands specifically for a link, Google's policies expect it to be marked as sponsored. Sponsoring a team and being listed as a sponsor is normal and fine. Paying a site for a link and pretending otherwise is a link scheme.

4. The businesses you refer work to

Every trade has neighbours. Plumbers and water damage restorers. Electricians and solar installers. Removalists and storage. Photographers and venues.

You already send each other work. A recommended trades page on each site is an accurate description of a real relationship, useful to your customers, and the most natural link either of you will ever get.

5. Local news, when you have something to say

Local papers and community sites are short of stories and always have been. What they cannot use is a press release about your new website. What they can use is a person who knows something: what the flooding did to hot water systems, why callouts spiked in the cold snap, what the new council rule means for homeowners.

You are the expert on something they need a quote about roughly four times a year. Being the person who answers the phone is the whole tactic.

6. Your own customers, when they are businesses

If you do commercial work, some of your customers have websites with a suppliers page, a case study section or a news feed. A job well done is a reason for them to mention you, and most will if asked at the right moment.

7. The place you are actually from

Chambers of commerce, business improvement districts, tourism boards, council business registers, community noticeboards, the Rotary club. These are unfashionable, and unfashionable is a synonym for uncontested.

The two that cause trouble

Buying links. Google's spam policies name it explicitly, and it includes exchanging goods or services for a link, which catches a lot of arrangements people think are fine. The offers arrive by email and the sites making them exist to sell links to people like you.

Mass guest posting. Not the occasional article on a site that genuinely wants it, but the industrialised version: the same article spun onto forty sites nobody reads. It is cheap because it is worthless.

If a site would take a link from a plumber in Brisbane and a dentist in Manchester in the same week, it is not a link, it is a listing you paid for.

How many you need

Fewer than you think, and the number is not the point. For most local businesses, a couple of dozen genuine, local, relevant links puts you ahead of your competitors, because your competitors have four and three of them are broken. If you want the sources ranked by what they return, the best channels for local backlinks covers that ground.

Check what they actually have before deciding you are behind. Links are one part of the off-page picture, and for most local businesses the listings side comes first.