What are local links, and how do I get them?
Short answer
Local links are links to your website from other websites tied to your area or your trade: a chamber of commerce, a supplier, a youth league you sponsor, a local news site. You get them by being involved in real things and asking to be listed. They are earned one at a time, and buying them breaks Google's rules.
A link is local when the website it sits on is tied to your area or your trade, and you get one by having a real connection to that site and asking for the connection to be shown. The site might be an organization, a business or a publication that a person in your part of San Diego County would recognize.
What counts as a local link
A real tie to your city or your line of work is enough. The common sources for a home-service company:
| Source | What the link looks like | How it comes about |
|---|---|---|
| Business associations | A member directory entry for your company | You join, then check that the listing links to your site |
| Suppliers and manufacturers | A “find an installer” or dealer page | You ask your rep how to be added |
| Trade associations | A member or contractor listing | Membership, often already paid for |
| Community groups | A sponsors or supporters page | You support a league, school or event |
| Local news and neighborhood sites | A mention in an article | You do something worth writing about, or answer a reporter’s question |
| Businesses you work alongside | A “trades we recommend” page | A property manager or remodeler you already take work from |
Don’t confuse a local link with a citation. A citation is a listing of your name, address and phone number in a directory, and it may not link to you at all.
How to get them
Start with the relationships you already have. Write down every organization you pay dues to, every supplier you buy from and every cause you have given money or labor to. Then look at each of their websites. It’s common to find that the membership exists and the link doesn’t, and one email can fix that.
After that, do things that give someone a reason to mention you. A hypothetical electrician in Vista who donates the lighting work for a youth ballfield has given the league a reason to thank the company on its site. A hypothetical roofer in La Mesa who explains to a neighborhood newsletter how to check a roof before the rainy season has given the editor something to publish.
This is slow, and it doesn’t scale. The upside is that a link earned this way is hard for a competitor to copy.
Are sponsorship links allowed?
Sponsoring a local cause is fine. Paying for a link in order to move your rankings isn’t. Google’s spam policies treat buying links for ranking purposes as link spam, and Google asks that links which were paid for be marked as sponsored in the page’s code so they aren’t counted as an editorial vote.
In practice I suggest sponsoring only what you’d sponsor if links didn’t exist, and leaving it to the organization how it lists you. A marked link still puts your name in front of local families, which was the reason to sponsor in the first place.
What not to do
Don’t buy link packages, trade links in bulk with strangers, or pay for listings on directories that exist only to sell links. These are the patterns Google’s policies are written to catch. If an offer like that is in your inbox now, is buying backlinks worth it sets out the risk.
How much will they help?
Nobody outside Google can tell you how much one link is worth. A link is one local signal among others, which is the subject of do backlinks matter for local SEO.
In local link building I treat a new link like any other change. I measure your rank grid before and again about two weeks after, knowing Google can take longer than that to find a link and count it.