Some people are shocked when I tell them it should never take more than 3 months for a Local SEO client to have their site and listing ranked in the top 3.
Sure, there are some exceptions in incredibly competitive niches and cities, but for 99% of you, you should be ranking a client within 3 months of ongoing SEO work.
A couple days ago I came across a Bright Local blog post, sharing data from one of their polls/surveys.
Of course, the thing they find newsworthy and headline worthy is that “Citation Building is the Most Popular Tactic for Link Building in Local SEO”.
We’re going to cut through the headline and get to the real point.
In this blog post you will learn:
- Link Velocity in Local SEO
- The Types of Links You Should Get
- How You Can Take Advantage of Other SEO’s Inexperience
- How Many Links You Should be Building
- And Much More
A Little Dose of Propaganda
For some of you that are new here, and remember a recent post about EMD’s and Local SEO, it may seem like I’m bashing Bright Local. I’m not… I think they have a great SaaS platform for those doing Local SEO.
I just think it’s funny that the headline they get out of it is that citation building is the most popular way to generate links, instead of the astonishing fact that 81% of those doing SEO take over 6 months to generate 100 links. Even more newsworthy than that, is that 56% of SEOs don’t acquire more than 40 links in a 6 month period.
This is insane.
Now in all fairness, I understand why they point out that citation building is the most popular way to get links. After all, it does support their platform. It’s in their best interest overall. The dangerous thing to them is if people doing Local SEO start believing that citations aren’t as important as they once were.
Oh, and newsflash, they aren’t as important as they once were. I still recommend citation building for Local SEO and I can’t imagine not recommending it, but things like NAP consistency are becoming less important these days. More on that in a future case study post coming later this month…
So what can we get out of this?
Most Doing Local SEO Aren’t Doing Much Work!
Look, if you are one of those people not building many links for your clients or for yourself, don’t feel bad. You have a lot of company that does the same as you.
The good news for all of you reading this, is that if you have been getting lackluster results, you now know that you can get better results with a bit of work. You don’t necessarily have to work harder, you just have to work smarter.
Knowing the majority of people doing Local SEO aren’t doing much work, gives you a great advantage.
There’s a company that is pretty well known, with individuals that are popular in the SEO community, that only build or claim 2 or 3 citations each month. They worry more about alt tags, and minor on page issues than off page issues. The tactics they’re focusing on aren’t exactly known to be big difference makers.
This is a big opportunity.
Now some will say that you need to be careful, because of a thing called “link velocity”…
The Truth About Link Velocity
When people refer to link velocity, they’re talking about how fast you build links. They make a good point about how a new website won’t have the popularity to naturally attract 100 links in a month. They also make a good point about how you don’t want to have a losing velocity.
For the most part, in Local SEO, this isn’t much of an issue.
It wasn’t long ago I wrote a post about how reviews can help your local SEO campaigns, and I mentioned the separate algorithm they use for reviews. One point I made was review velocity, almost the same concept as link velocity except it actually exists on a local level.
Link velocity, can be a bigger issue for national, organic search when you’re building up your authority. Once you have strong authority, that isn’t even an issue anymore.
Do you really think Neil Patel needs to worry about link velocity? Do you think Moz cares about link velocity?
No, and for Local SEO, neither should you.
How Many Backlinks Can be Considered “Safe” and How Fast?
The simple answer… as many as you can possibly have, and as fast as possible.
Now we’re not talking about GSA spam, or spammy, questionable links, though they do have their place in the world.
We’re talking about citation sources, location and industry relevant links, brand controlled properties, etc.
You can get the top 50 strongest citations in 2 weeks if you want. It won’t be “unnatural”, in fact, it is considered unnatural for an established business to NOT have these sources of citations and backlinks.
3 Ways To Easily Build More Backlinks
A lot of people doing Local SEO avoid the topic of backlink building because they don’t really know where they can get links for a small local business.
Here’s 3 easy ways you can build more links.
1.) Citations
Obviously, since that’s the preferred way of building links for most SEOs focusing on local, we can’t go without mentioning these.
Most citation sources will allow you to link to the domain. FourSquare, Yelp, YellowPages, Manta, and countless others allow you to link to your domain.
These are high authority sites, well trusted in the eyes of Google, and should be a primary source for you when it comes to building links and citations.
These are also resistant to abuse. You can usually blast a bunch of backlinks even GSA spam, to give a bit of a boost.
After you claim some of the top citations, head over to fiverr and buy a gig. People will say these are low quality citations and you should avoid them, but these are perfectly safe. If someone can get you 100 citations on Fiverr, it’s worth the money. If the citations include a link back to your site, then even better.
With citations alone, you should be able to accumulate over 100 backlinks in the first month or two.
2.) Branded Properties with Content Syndication
The next easy way to get links, are properties controlled by the business or brand.
Think web 2.0 sites, and different types of media. These can act as an unstructured citation and also provide links. If you have a blog on your site or for you client’s site, an easy way to pick up links is to syndicate your content to these web 2.0s.
Parasite sites are usually a good way to accomplish this – Check out this related post on Parasite SEO in 2016
To make the process easier you can use IFTTT or Zapier, or if you’re a wordpress fanatic, the SNAP plugin might be for you.
One unique way that a lot of your competitors will overlook is video syndication.
It doesn’t require much work, a basic animoto slideshow video will do the trick. You then submit the video to different sites and include a link back to the site along with the business name, address, phone number format to pick up other powerful citations.
Here are some of the sites you can use for video syndication:
- Youtube
- Vimeo
- Dailymotion
- MetaCafe
- Veoh
- Flickr (yes, even Flickr)
One simple slideshow style video, and 6 easy backlinks with 6 high authority citations that most of your competitors won’t bother getting.
For the purposes of Local SEO, don’t even worry whether a link is dofollow or nofollow. While nofollow won’t pass page rank, that’s not the purpose of backlinking for local SEO, so ignore that topic altogether.
3.) Press Release Syndication
Not only can a good press release give you strong links back to your site, and some solid brand mentions and media attention… It can bring you a TON of unstructured citations.
It seems that a lot of people doing Local SEO want to use some free press release site, and then they think press releases won’t work for SEO.
Well, one press release site, especially a free submission site, is not going to get the job done.
Instead, use a professional service.
My friend Alfred at Press Synergy offers pretty competitive rates and I believe can syndicate your press releases to hundreds of sites that can bring you 400+ links pretty easily.
To get the most bang for your buck, no matter who you use for press release syndication, you should always include the business name, address and phone number format for additional citations.
Final Thoughts
Your competition’s laziness, or maybe ignorance on what can and should be done for Local SEO, is your opportunity.
It’s your gain.
Knowing what your competition is doing, should be giving you more confidence to do the job and get it done fast!
No wonder why the average SEO client only stays with a company for 3 months before moving on.
Do you have additional tips to share? Comments? Questions? Drop a line or two in the comment section below.
Nathan excellent article.
Quick question…Do you have any plans to put your local Seo knowledge into a course, ebook or video?
Would be great to learn from you.
Hi Baal, I’ve been working on a course for a while now. It’s taking a lot longer than I anticipated, but it’s coming eventually!
More good stuff Nathan, thanks for more “food for thought” (again). And like Baal, I’m curious too as to *when* you plan on offering a course 🙂
You can’t rush perfection Rey. LOL.
drop a line or 2 LOL… First off GREAT article. I think Link Velocity is the most feared aspect of SEO in many respects. To Fast, to Much, not Enough ( Negative Velocity ) what is the right amount already? LOL. I personally do not consider Citation building when factoring Link Velocity. I have built as many as 60 in a week, with no ill effect. Citation “sites” are known by the likes of Google, and I think it is to be expected that a new business or website will go out and build them. “Link building” becomes a different animal tho… there is to much, and there is to fast, and or to slow. BUT… there is a difference between DOMAIN link Velocity and PAGE Link Velocity. You can develop PAGE Velocity to a point of to fast and to much in hurry… but spread your efforts across many pages ( Domain ) and you can develop links til the cows come home. ( I don’t have any cows.. so I guess I can build links add infinitely lol )
My personal strategy is to develop a kick ton of content, setting a solid onpage / on Domain structure ( internal linking ) and then develop linking across many points of entry. Page Velocity is minimal, but Domain Velocity is accelerated. This also minimizes your hypertext percentages along with many other factors.
Yeah, citations are natural…its unnatural to not have citations with links, do I don’t really understand why people are afraid of that. Agree on the difference between domain and page velocity, but only to a certain extent. Most local sites aren’t going to draw a lot of links to their services page lol. With good site architecture, I could probably argue that links to the root domain is probably more effective than to specific pages. Of course, I’m talking about small local sites, not larger ecommerce or enterprise level.
I’ve never had a problem with link velocity unless I was just straight spamming.
Hey Nate,
Another awesome post, lol. These guys are amazing what they teach and put out there… SEO is like do your own research and testing. Cut out theory by setting up some test sites and see what works and what does not. The best SEOs I do that, and I know you do it. 🙂
Also, are there any updates on your local SEO course? I have your very first course on starting an agency, so I’m looking foward to your possible coming SEO course. Can’t wait actually for it. :))
Marc
Thanks for the comment Marc. No real updates right now, still in the works. I’m hoping to make some major progress on it this month. We’ll see!
Nate – any suggestions for tracking inbound links (from citations and elsewhere). I subscribe to 2 different service providers and neither seems to give me the full account of the real number of backlinks. The reporting does not show all of the links I’ve created. Does it take time (weeks/months) for links to begin showing in reporting? I’m using Agency Analytics and ProRankTracker. The free Moz Link Checker never seems to give the full report either (even with a Moz Local account). Am I missing something? Any service you trust/recommend?
Hey John, in Agency Analytics you can actually add specific links to track – you don’t need to wait until they get picked up in the reports. It’s the “monitor” feature. 🙂
It may seem a little old school, but I’ve always exported backlink data from webmaster tools at the end of each month. Other than that, you can try AHrefs or monitorbacklinks. I haven’t found anything that’s very accurate.
You have to think, it takes Google maybe a month or two to index comment backlinks on old blog posts. Imagine how long it will take for a smaller company with limited resources.
Nate — thx and good point about Google being big, the other guys smaller and with less resources… yes, forgot about Webmaster Tools…I do find they’re actually the most accurate and up-to-date…should have mentioned that.
Hannah — I overlooked the “monitor” feature in Agency Analytics. Thanks for pointing that out again. Appreciated.
Hey Nathan – Really like your point about it being easy to be better than competition. It’s actually ridiculously easy to be better than the other SEO dudes in town, just with a bit of focus and actually caring about the results your clients get.
2 Brisbane people commenting on the same post! Small world, lol. You’re absolutely right, a lot of people will do very limited work and call it a day… or month.
So Nathan, all those videos that I have on Youtube for each of the 35 city based landing pages, it would be worth while for me to put them all on the other 5 sites? Or should I pick say 5 to put on one site and another 5 to put on another?
BTW, I am a different Andrew than the one above lol.
Hey Andrew, lol… Yeah, it could be beneficial. Linking back to the landing pages, but I would also go a step further and link back to the original video on youtube since they’re the most likley to get integrated in the SERPs. I would also optimize them differently, use different supporting keywords so the main topic/idea would get passed along. The way I see it, nofollow links don’t pass PR, but there’s a lot of evidence supporting that they do pass relevance.
Great article Nate.
This is by far one of my weakest points, i.e., getting links built. This reminds me that I am part of the large percentage of lazy people.
weehooo
nice list of link building suggestion
thanks
I will do it and post the result
Thanks for the comment Arba, let us know!
Hi Nathan,
I just tried to contact Alfred at Press Synergy by email but it bounced. It looks like his site is undergoing some changes, though he’s still taking orders. I have what may be a sensitive topic for some and want clarification before I pay.
Do you know how to reach him?
Thanks,
Joe
Hey Joe, he said he was migrating from one server to another. Maybe hit him up on skype, tell him I gave you his info.
user name – cputweaker
He just finished an order for me.. good stuff.
Apologies for repeating what others have said, but I’m astonished by those figures regarding how few links most SEO providers are building. I mean, what do they do all day? I’d find it hard to look my clients in the eye if I was doing that little off-site work.
Thanks for the tip about press synergy by the way. I’ve been looking for an affordable and decent quality press release distribution service, as most good quality services tend to be pricey, and the cheap ones (in my experience) aren’t great quality. I’ll be looking into it for sure.
Yeah man, press releases are so useful, even though you’ll get a lot of nofollow links, it creates a strong location footprint, gives unstructured citations, and creates a strong association between the business name, location, and keywords.
Hey Income Bully….found you through your Woodward Monthly Update (August). Glad I stumbled upon your website. I too am trying to build a strong profile. I can definitely see opportunities as you have outlined. I’m definitely headed over to the parasite article next.
Great stuff…keep up the good work.
Hey Josh, glad you’ve come here! Let me know if there’s any questions you have along the way.
What about using Yext for citations? I’ve heard that they can get some citations that you can’t get on your own. Any opinion about them?
I think Yext is a little pricey considering the other alternatives. However, it’s pretty quick for citation clean up. Synup is one I’ve heard good things about and it’s a bit cheaper. No personal experience with it though.
Any reccomendations on a press release service? I have had very mixed results lately. Thanks.
I previously recommended press synergy but it has been sold and I’m not sure if I can continue to recommend. I’m looking into other options right now and will let everyone know.