The growth of your business is not something that should be left to chance. Take control of the future of your company by making sure those that are looking for your products and services can find you. Strong local SEO will get your site ranked highly on Google for local search results. Whitby local SEO is one of the go-to sources for lead generation and new clients for a local business in Whitby.
The value of appearing in the organic local search results is obvious. Why not be found by people who are actively searching for your product? No matter if you’re a new business or have been around for years, you can increase the number of people who find you by improving your SEO.
The fastest way to make this happen is to hire an SEO company in Whitby. However, if you’re feeling brave enough, here are two major tasks to accomplish to make your website rank higher in the local organic search results.
- Optimize your website
- Build local backlinks
Improve your on-page SEO for searches in Whitby
The process for optimizing your website starts by making sure you have adequate content on your website. One of the biggest hurdles to overcome is making sure you have covered the content topics of your business. The ultimate goal is to answer every possible question a visitor may have who lands on your site by publishing local content about your company and what it offers.
Part of this process requires building a blog with linkable assets. Not only does this serve as a resource for your clients and potential customers, but also it gives other websites a reason to link to your site.
Google bases a large part of its ranking criteria on the trustworthiness of your site. Is your site credible, authoritative and considered a source for expert opinion? Building a blog that generates traffic and backlinks demonstrates these qualities.
If you are knowledgeable about your business and can publish content to teach people about it in an organized manner, you are about halfway to owning a website that ranks highly. The two biggest areas to spend time on will be your content and backlinks.
Use as many optimization tactics as possible to improve your on-page SEO. Once you have built an optimized website, the final task to improve ranking ability is to acquire quality backlinks.
Whitby local link building strategy
Competing on a global level allows you to find websites from anywhere in the world to link to you. The challenge is how to get the websites with the greatest amount of authority to link to your site. This is the same concept for local SEO but within your target city.
A local business can use links from around the world to build authority to a website, however, they don’t have the same power to create a local presence. Acquiring links from websites in your target city are the most powerful backlinks for ranking in that city.
Think of links as referrals
A link from another website is similar to a referral from another business. Collect the most trusted types of referrals for your website to see the greatest gains in your site’s ranking. The more quality referrals your website acquires, the more convincing it is to search engines to rank your site closer to the number one position.
Let’s assume that you are in the market to buy a swimming pool. You ask two people for referrals on who they believe to have the best reputation for quality. One of the people you ask runs a bakery, and the other is another pool manufacturer. Whose opinion do you think would be more knowledgeable?
Obviously the person who is in the same industry should have more insight into the business. Think of the links you acquire from websites in the same way. The more relevance your links have to the keyword you are trying to rank for, the more powerful they are in moving your site to the top of the search results.
How do I find local sites in Whitby to link to my website?
The beauty of local SEO is that you can limit your search to the city you are trying to rank highly in. Resource page link building is an effective strategy to find sites that have pages that link to useful sites, suppliers and vendors. Here’s how you can execute a resource page link building strategy.
Create a list of link prospects
There will obviously be a tiered level of the quality of links you will find, so your first task will be to make a list of prospective links to choose from. You can start your search by typing the following into Google:
[your keyword] + [your city] inurl:links
The search results will list websites that are associated with your keyword and city and have the word “links” in the URL. For example, if your company does landscaping in Whitby, this would be a search you could perform to find relevant links:
landscaping Whitby inurl:links
To produce these results:
If you take a look at the first result, it is a site located in Oshawa, which is next to Whitby. This means it isn’t the best type of link if you’re targeting Whitby however, it is extremely relevant because it’s the next town and it’s a gardening site. This is a link prospect you would want to pursue.
You can repeat this search replacing variations of your keyword to generate different results. You can also replace the word you tell Google to look for in the URL with another probable word such as “resource” or “resources”.
[your keyword] + [your city] inurl:resources
The goal is to get links from the sites that are closely related to yours. If there is a slight connection you can still use those types of links to tie in your website to your city for a stronger local presence.
Tier 1 vs. tier 2 links
Separate your list into two tiers based on the relevance of the link prospect. If the website is not in your industry but is in your city, you would consider it a tier two link. Your first tier consists of the websites you will contact first because they are in your city and relevant to your business.
Make contact with relevant sites
This stage of the outreach process is the first of a two-pronged approach. You want to make contact with the website owner first before you go asking them for favours. At the end of the day, you’re asking other sites to give you a link so you don’t want your first impression to repel the owner or for your email to be dismissed as spam.
Here is an example of an email that will get your prospect warmed up to the idea of giving you a link to your site simply because you aren’t asking for anything.
The ask
Once you’ve sent this email, follow up with a second email, asking for the link to your site. What is proven to do wonders for your success rate is to offer value to your prospect as a way gaining more favour and encouraging them to give you what you want.
Avoid link exchanges
Try to avoid reciprocal links. A few instances of where you link to another site and they link back may not harm your site, but too many link exchanges may have an adverse effect on your site’s ranking. It’s ok to engage in a few, but if your backlink profile is all link exchanges, you run the risk of being flagged for unnatural link building.
Offer value by finding broken links
One way to offer value is notifying the prospect of any broken links to their site. By using the Chrome extension “broken link checker” you can quickly identify any broken links on the resource page and let the webmaster know about it.
Your next email can go something like this:
Follow up
Make it a point to follow up on your link requests to make sure your emails were not in vain. It may turn out that the Webmaster has added your link but hasn’t bothered to respond. Check the resource page before emailing a follow up email.
In some cases, it may even work out better to pick up the phone and call. If you can get to the right person who makes the decisions on the website you can get a straight answer. It helps to add a little personality to your efforts-just make sure you aren’t’ too pushy.
Gauge your results
When you get a link to your site, gauge your results. It should only take a day or two to see the effects of your link. If your niche isn’t that competitive you may be able to see large gains in ranking with just a few links. At any rate, the number of relevant local links you acquire will have the greatest impact on moving your ranking.
Resource link building is a Whitby local SEO strategy that is highly effective in getting your website found in the local organic search results. Explore what your city has to offer in terms of the resource pages offered by local businesses. You may be able to form alliances and make the connections with the companies that will catapult your website to the first page of Google.
