Do you own a local business? Are you hoping to attract new customers? If so, local link building is a valuable asset in marketing your company’s website. Read on to learn different ways to successfully link build in 2018.
Alumni Links
Alumni links are links from your or your employee’s alma mater to your website. These links will either end in .gov or .edu. Alumni links are beneficial because they are trustworthy, valuable, authoritative, and have a long history of online presence.
To use alumni links, simply contact the alumni coordinator of your or your employee’s alma mater. Ask if they have a distinguished alumni page. Then, ask if you or your employee can be featured on it or if they could link the alumni page to your business’s website.
Local Infographics and Build Tools
Local infographics and build tools can organize niche information about the local area in a graph or interactive map. This can help drive traffic because other organizations will find the information useful and link to your website.
So, get creative and turn boring information into something that is fun and engaging. We recommend Fusion Tables to get you started. It’s free!
Facebook-like Charity Drive
A great way to get involved in your community and give your business more local visibility is to set up a Facebook-like charity drive. First, find a local charity and ask for them to make a post about your company’s participation on their Facebook page. Offer to compensate them $10 for every “like” the post gets up to $1000. Once the drive is over, ask them to write a blog post about the drive and include a link to your website.
Interviewees
Interviewing someone is a great way to bring traffic to your site because interviewees will want to promote the blog or podcast on their own site or social media. The first step to link building this way is to find someone to interview for your podcast or blog. This should be fairly easy to do since most people love talking about themselves, their business, or expertise. Try to invite someone you already know who already has a following to an interview.
Sponsorships
Another wonderful way to get involved in your community as well as give your business local visibility is to sponsor a local sports team or an upcoming 5k. Also, try your best to attend the events; it will help personalize your brand even more.
To sponsor a team, one option is to contact your local parks and recreation department. If there’s an upcoming 5k, contact the organizer and ask to sponsor. Better yet, organize your own 5k!
Free Resources
Create your own niche-specific images (like photos) and post the images you create on Google Images. Browsers looking for niche images like yours will stumble across them and be directed to your site. Also, when they use your images on their website, it can redirect their traffic to you.
Intern Job Board
Job boards like Monster and ZipRecruiter require you to purchase a business profile. Instead, business profiles on intern job boards are most usually free. Intern job boards, or local college job boards, are a great way to give your business’s name visibility in the community (even if you’re not hiring at the time).
Writing Contest
Ask a local college or university if they have any blog or writing clubs. Within these clubs, search for writers to compete in a writing competition. This will be a good way for the student writers to add another piece to their portfolio.
Next, put the competing blog posts on your website. The writers will want to include their entry on their own blog, linking it to your site.
Wikilinks
Wikipedia is, arguably, one of the most popular websites online. So, building a business profile on Wikipedia is an innovative way to bring visibility to your brand as well as drive traffic to your site. If you don’t know how to do this, you can easily find someone on konker.io or legiit.com to build the page for you.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s protocol is that only “businesses of distinction” are allowed to have pages on their site. Since this is the cases, it’s more than likely your business’s page will only last about a year on Wikipedia; however, the amount of traffic that will be directed to your site in that short amount of time is worth it.
Local News
Local news media is always looking for new stories and businesses to feature. Reach out to the local media and see if they’d like to interview you. If they feature you on their website or in the paper, make sure they also link the article to your website.
Link Building Takeaways
What we find in common with all the ideas listed above is that the best ways to build valuable links involve building relationships. With altruism, creativity, and increasing your business’s visibility in your community, you can easily increase local traffic to your website.
Contact the experts at Market My Market to help you build links that will drive the right traffic. Call (800) 997-7336 for a free marketing quote or use our contact form to discover how we can help your business grow.