Find high DA link opportunities in your local area

[Cleanily]

Hi, part of my link building strategy is ideally going to be from outreach to local businesses. I run a local service business operating in multiple locations (with no physical base). I have created local landing pages on which I'm showcasing local businesses and photographers (relevant not in terms of industry but location). Its my intention to show off their business as best I can, then get in touch to say "hey, we love what you're doing with X product/service, check out our site here [link]. We'd love it if you could link to us etc etc". Assuming that this is a valid strategy, what is the best way to find locally relevant sites with the highest domain authority?

[julie-getonthemap]

I'd invest some time in becoming a power house social media user. It has an easy to understand metric (# of followers) that can be leveraged to get people interested in you.  If I retweet your message to my 15,000 followers, I'm doing something that could benefit you a lot. You might get your potential partners reaching to you.

[Cleanily]

That makes total sense Miriam yes. Really appreciate your help as obviously didn't want to invest a ton of time and effort into generating the wrong content. Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

I admire how you are trying to think of creative ways to connect yourself to other businesses. If the other local businesses were home-service related, like:

• Window washers

• Chimney sweeps

• Gutter cleaners

• Landscape maintenance companies

• HVAC

..or similar services that surround maintaining a clean, functional home, then I could see you featuring them as a bonus service to your clients. You might even come to co-promotional deals with some of these (10% off your cleaning service for a month + 10% off a chimney inspection). In this scenario, there is a common thread tying all of the businesses together, that I'm just not seeing in the idea you are considering about wedding photographers and home cleaning/other startups.

Being a startup may galvanize the business community, but is unlikely to be seen as a desirable commonality by consumers. So, best advice here, you've got to find connections that make sense in terms of both geography AND industry. Going with other home service-related businesses would be natural, and provided the content you create is meaningful (not just a list of links) could prove useful to consumers who might feel confidence in businesses your company recommends if they trust your business. Hope this helps!

[Cleanily]

Again, great ideas Miriam, though just to clarify though, I was thinking (in my capacity as a start-up local business) of featuring other start-up local businesses that I think do a great job, not because we clean for them. Additionally I was think about getting local photographers to provide great images for each of our local landing pages (think airbnb do this?). Basically because its a great way of getting top notch original images without pinching them. From the photographers point of view, we clean for hundreds of young professional couples who, during the time we clean for them, get married. If they had originally seen a local photographer mentioned as supplying the images for our site (we have a carousel of images right at the bottom of the page where they can feature multiple images and a brief paragraph about the work they do - almost all do weddings obviously)...

I think your clean bathroom idea could work really well from a social media point of view, so will have a think about that. Let me know if you think the proposed coverage of 'local start-up heros' on each landing page has no legs - I also thought that such entities would be more likely to be social, and as they are local, THAT in itself would be relevant.

Cheers!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Cleanily,

Thanks for coming back with further info. You are right ... from a public perspective these good features of your business aren't really going to be a jumping off point for connecting you to other businesses. Sometimes, cleaning companies have something particular about the way they operate (like green practices) that can hook them into a larger web of businesses with similar goals/customers, but in your case, things look pretty standard.

You could do features of businesses you clean locally, but honestly, I'm not seeing big connection between someone learning that a cleaning service cleans X restaurant and people wanting to then eat at that restaurant, or for the restaurant wanting to link to your cleaning website because you've featured them. That's just not a natural flow.

Thinking ...

You know something that always gets me? Businesses with dirty restrooms. My gosh, I really, really don't like that. Not to mention, there are groups of people that are in the position of urgently needing to find a restaurant while away from home. These might include:

• Travelers

• People with medical conditions (IBS, ulcerative colitis, bladder troubles)

• Families with small children, out on the town.

These people often find themselves at the mercy of gas stations, which are often appalling.

This may be kind of an off-the-wall idea, but what if you did some sort of social outreach mapping out the cleanest restrooms in the towns you serve. You have some inside information on this, because of which businesses you serve (that is, if you clean their restrooms) and you could expand on that surveying/photographing local restrooms, make a map and award the top restrooms the 'Brand Name Cleaning Company Stamp of Cleanliness' or something like that. I don't know if the businesses that are featured might be excited enough to link back to you, but you could generate some social mentions. It would associate your brand with both the local area and with cleanliness (things you want). You might even make it onto local blogs/local news with this promotion.

Interestingly, dirtiness made it into a recent survey GetFiveStars took of things that cause customers to complain. Another found that 80% of patrons would avoid a restaurant if it has a dirty restroom. And, you have only to search the term yelp restaurant dirty bathroom to see how repelled consumers are by a lack of cleanliness. In other words, it's something people feel very strongly about and your business, as an authority on cleanliness, might possibly step in and provide some help.

Maybe you won't go with this idea, but maybe the brainstorming process will help you think of something similar. I'm honestly not seeing a huge opportunity for some of the more standard linkbuilding relationships one can often turn to, so, in cases like yours, something outside-the-box can be required.

I'm going to ask one of my team members to pop in to talk to you about assessing DA using Moz Pro to answer the other part of your question.

[Cleanily]

Hi Miriam, thanks again for getting back, yes I do have Moz Pro...in terms of the actual service we provide there are a few things I suppose, though in terms of actual cleaning I would only be saying the same as any other company:

Things which are differentiators:

1). We have built a custom platform which allows our cleaners to start and finish each job via our app, in addition to allowing cleaners to receive messages/instructions.

2. This means back office can tell if the cleaner is late/doesn't show at all or leaves the early late. Their start and finish locations (and times) are also recorded.

3. Customers are automatically charged (as long as jobs have been completed correctly).

4. Customers have the ability to meet a local cleaning manager or book online. This puts us somewhere between an 'on demand' service and a traditional agency. 'Almost on-demand' I guess.

[MiriamEllis]

Hmm, housecleaning. Thinking about that.

In the meantime ... a couple of questions:

1. Do you have Moz Pro?

2. Is there anything particular about your cleaning service ... like green housecleaning or some other distinguishing factor?

[Cleanily]

Thanks Miriam, that is useful in focusing efforts. The problem is that since my business (house cleaning) could be relevant to pretty much anyone, I've had a hard time coming up with creative correlations which would foster engagement. Also as we do a small amount of commercial, quite a large number of bars, restaurants, or basically any space which needs cleaning would be relevant. Furthermore, a local audience would also be interested to a degree, in reviews of the aforesaid I guess. We do currently rank highly for quite a few locations and could therefore demonstrate value to people we reached out to. What I was trying to find was some means of filtering out local businesses (rather than manually) with high local DA, given that so many would be relevant.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi There!

I agree with this advice from Chris, "identify local businesses that compliment yours and delve into ways you can jointly generate interest."

In terms of seeing DA, do you have the Moz Bar installed? That will show you the DA of any page.

I would also suggest that you think of this topically. Think of a topic/keyword that relates to your industry/geography and look it up in Google. See what is ranking well in Google for that term and then see if there is a chance to build a relationship with the highest visibility players, if they are of high quality (i.e. not dumb spam ranking well) and could be related to your business in some way.

The relationship is very important. For example, let's say yours is a dog walking business. You might see a natural relationship between your business and:

• Local vets

• Local obedience trainers

• Local pet supply/feed stores

• Local Canine Companion-type organizations

• Local programs that take dogs to visit elders, people recovering from illness, etc.

• Local dog parks

• Other types of local parks where you are allowed to take dogs on/off-leash

• Dog-friendly restaurants and lodgings in the area

• Local colleges offering veterinary courses

All of the above meet the related geography/industry criteria and could be featured to add meaningful content to your website that might be helpful to your dog-loving audience. If you write excellent content, including reviewing these places/services, photographing them, and engaging the business owners where appropriate for an interview, you will be creating a valuable resource that the businesses may well link to. There may also be some opportunities in that quick list of mine for co-promotional events between your business and another local business.

This approach makes much more sense than a dog walker attempting to correlate his business with chiropractors, autobody shops or window washers, just because they are local. Ask yourself: is my audience looking for pet-related services going to be interested in what I'm building? If so, the relationship makes sense. If not, likely best to skip it.

You might also get some good ideas for meaningful outreach here: https://moz.com/blog/using-the-barnacle-seo-method-to-prove-local-community-awareness

Hope this helps!

[Chris.Menke]

That sounds a bit simplistic to me.  My first questions is what value are you providing these local businesses that makes it worth them linking to you? Just a landing page? On your site?  Will those pages rank? Most certainly not above theirs.

There's nothing wrong with building community and contacts within your local area of business but spend your time on something that's actually of value to them and, ideally, a common audience. Don't be discriminant; identify local businesses that compliment yours and delve into ways you can jointly generate interest. I If you focus on stuff their audience will tune in to, those other local businesses will be more receptive to joining you online.  It's all about the audience anyway, right?