Local businesses need to get noticed by their customers to survive and thrive in the competitive business market. One way to do this is to include active and passive link building as part of your digital marketing strategy.
Let’s Explore Why Link Building Matters
- Links give your business a competitive advantage over your competitors
- Quality links help to build a positive online reputation
- Your website’s search engine visibility gets a boost from quality links
Now let’s look at these two types of link building strategies and how they will work best for your local business.
Active Link Building for Local Businesses
Active link building is when you actively pursue different avenues to create links to your local business website.
Techniques for Active Link Building
- Claim and optimize your business listings on directory websites
- Create social media profiles for your business, such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and include links to your website and optimize each description consistently
- Guest blog on third party websites and include a link to content on your website in the post
While active link building can be a time consuming task, there are definite advantages to investing in this process that makes it worth the time and effort.
Passive Link Building for Local Businesses
Passive link building is the natural process in which people link to your business website or blog without your asking. This requires educational, relevant and creative content on your website. The biggest benefit of this strategy is that it can create viral effects with the help of social media.
Techniques for Passive Link Building
- Blog posts on your website that is informative and useful
- FAQs, tools and guides on your website as resources
- Discounts and freebies that attract customers to your website and encourage them to share
When using link building as part of your digital marketing strategy, it is important that either you or someone that represents your business pay close attention to the types of inbound links you have coming into your website for quality. The wrong type of links can damage your website rankings. Read about Google’s updates for more on this.
How Link Building Can Increase Search Rankings
Link building can and will increase your local search rankings based on the types of inbound links you have coming into your website. For instance, having your business listings claimed on all the directory websites will help you to dominate local SEO for your geographic area. There are services such as Advice Local that will claim these listings for you.
If you have inbound links to your website from organizations such as the BBB, Angie’s List, industry associations and chambers these are high quality links that Google and other search engines will see as valuable.
You want your link building strategy to be a mix of both active and passive link building and by your intentionally creating active links, they will lead to passive links.
One final thought, don’t try and be the website with the most links, be the one with best quality of links!
Have you been using link building as a strategy for your business or your clients? What has worked and what didn’t? Let’s discuss.
