Link earning for local businesses who can't afford content marketing
-
What are some of the best ways to earn and build quality relevant links that will increase exposure to your target market in addition to assisting search rankings?
I personally find that local niche directories and PR are the best ways to accomplish this without having content to "earn links"..what else works? Any interesting ideas??
-
Completely agree Drew! My problem is that I find it very hard to create the kind of exceptional and unique content necessary to really earn links and social virality on a low budget
-
The first step I would take in this type of situation is to focus on getting accurate listings in the really authoritative local business indexes and directories. Use the tool at GetListed.org to be sure that you have accurate results across all these directories.
Next, use a tool like the Open Site Explorer to research your local competition and see if they have any quality links that you could also get for little cost and effort.
Then, reach out to the Local domains (Chamber of Commerce, BBB, organizations or local charities, etc). Often, these are relatively inexpensive and provide quality links.
If you want more valuable links, then the honest way is to earn them. Bite the bullet and blog twice a week. This will pull in those valuable long-tail keywords and hopefully snag the interest of someone who will link to you. Also, having a blog opens up a lot of free high-quality links from more directories and RSS feeds.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My keywords aren't performing for my Umbraco site
A client of mine has just redesigned their site which was pretty small (homepage, about us page and contact us page) and now it includes homepage, about us page, 3 services pages, 5 blog posts and a contact us page. their domain authority is 5, so that gives you an idea of their size. We updated their key pages with keyword optimised content and added the keyword to their meta title and meta description. they're in the process of adding the alt tags and also they need to enable meta tags for the blog posts. Everything is quite in the process at the moment and their organic traffic is low. But I believe that some of the keywords should start moving places for the pages that have been optimised and they haven't. Is there any reason for this? I believe the services pages which have meta tags should have started ranking at least in very low position for the selected keywords. Is there something I'm missing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Wright0 -
Can you rank without 10 x content
If I create a page about a "Normandy bike tour "and present the same things (pictures, hotels, dates, day by day itinerary, clients reviews, map) as my competitors can I still rank ? Or do I need to add something totally that my competitors don't have on their webpages to rank and compete ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
What sort of content for 'non-niche' website?
Hey guys, had a question with regards to content production. We run an store called Yellow Octopus in Australia and we've literally got thousands of products (4500 skus last count). We've got everything from novelty mugs to kitchen accessories to gag gifts, t-shirts and tech gadgets. I've read a lot of material on creating awesome content to attract backlinks and we are ready to craft our content strategy. We've got a team in place - graphic designer, illustrator and writers to execute that strategy. It's just a matter of formulating the strategy! Largely speaking I have an idea of the quality of content required because I look at a lot of it. The real issue is what type of content is right for us? Most of the articles I have read focus on niche industries i.e. SEO, Piano sales or health foods. Right off the bat I can come up with hundreds of content pieces that work around those niches. However, with such a diverse range of products I'm unsure of what our niche really is, in fact not having a niche is almost our niche. Of course we could do gift guides like '30 Unbelievable Gifts for Foodies' (and we do, do those). However they aren't really the type of posts that are likely to attract back-links. Is the best strategy to split the content into categories? What sort of content pieces would you suggest for a company such as ours? Many thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheGreatestGoat0 -
Google's 'related:' operator
I have a quick question about Google's 'related:' operator when viewing search results. Is there reason why a website doesn't produce related/similar sites? For example, if I use the related: operator for my site, no results appear.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecomteam_handiramp.com
https://www.google.com/#q=related:www.handiramp.com The site has been around since 1998. The site also has two good relevant DMOZ inbound links. Any suggestions on why this is and any way to fix it? Thank you.0 -
Being Outranked But Don't Know Why!
My client, Comprehensive OBGYN of the Palm Beaches, is being outranked by two sites that have lower DA/PA and seemingly inferior on-page work for the term "palm beach obgyn". https://www.google.com/search?q=palm+beach+obgyn&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a Our site is comprehensiveobgyn.net The two sites beating us are "obgynpalmbeach.com" and "obgynspb.com" My only thought is the exact match domain factor may be coming into play a bit, but It doesn't seem like it should make THIS much of a difference. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
.GOV Link - same impact on my site's rankings whether link to home or Gov related category?
I own a job site and I am about to get a link from a .GOV. My site has a category called "State Jobs". Should I ask the ".Gov" to link to my homepage or to the state job page and use the anchor text "State Jobs". I understand "State Jobs" page would get a big kick by that being the anchor text and linking to that specific page, but the question I have is this: for my site as a whole (homepage and various categories) would they get around the same "push up" whether the linking is to 1) my homepage with anchor text being my site's name or 2) to the state job specific page and in this case the anchor text would be "State Jobs"? thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
Can videos be considered duplicate content?
I have a page that ranks 5 and to get a rich snippet I'm thinking of adding a relevant video to the page. Thing is, the video is already on another page which ranks for this keyword... but only at position 20. As it happens the page the video is on is the more important page for other keywords, so I won't remove it. Will having the same video on two pages be considered a duplicate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brocberry0 -
How Does SEO Help Local Businesses
Hello, I recently took a position as a digital marketing manger with a advertising agency. Its my job to grow the digital marketing department. One of the issues I am running into is 90% of our clients are local businesses. When doing keyword research it is very difficult to find keywords with lots of search. For example, if I am optimizing for a Ford dealership in Hackensack,NJ there are not a lot of searches for this term. How can I justify a larger SEO budget when there is just not a lot of search volume for these keywords? This is nothing like Dog Training Videos or something similar. Am I missing something? Where can I pull traffic from for local businesses to justify larger SEO budgets? Thanks, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0