Backlinks for beating the local competition
- Citations confirm your NAP (contact details) and will help with Google Maps.
- Backlinks are for SEO & Organic search.
Vanilla Local have been building citations and backlinks for over 20 years.
When you complete your Google Business Profile, Google is looking to confirm your company details, often referred to as NAP: name, address, and phone. It does this by looking at other online mentions of your details. This includes everything from Social Media to directories.
A citation is an old web directory link. They are important mentions of the correct use of your company name and contact details. They help Google decide if your company is legitimate and can be shown on Google Maps and in what position.
How many do I need?
If your company name and address details have not changed, then a few hundred would be more than enough.
How much do they cost
200 citation links are £250. You can order them by contacting Vanilla Local here.
Do more citations mean a higher ranking on Google Maps. No not really. It is important that any mentions of your company with an incorrect address or name are changed.
Two-thirds of the optimisation success lies in the written page, its code, and how that code relates to the rest of the website.
However, the remaining third is how many web pages link to this page, in what way, and in what words. This hypertext creates a link signal that Google can use to improve your rankings.
The first links within the website are called internal links. If a page, like a blog, for example, has very few links pointing to it, then Google might rightly conclude that, although it is of interest, it is not mission-critical to the website or to what it is trying to achieve.
Backlinks in the context of local SEO are links from external websites to pages on your website.
For example, if you are talking about something that is not related to Dorset or the West Country, when you place a link at the end of a sentence with the word Dorset linking to your website, then Google would not understand the context.
If however, an entire paragraph was devoted to gaining a product which you sell and also talks about where this product can be bought and how it is available across Dorset, and the anchor text linking to your website is either across Dorset or simply a for more information, click here type of anchor text at the end of a sentence.
Also, it is important which webpage is linked to. If on your website you have a section domain.co.uk/Dorset/buy our products here, this would be an appropriate page to link to regarding Dorset.
However, it could be more beneficial to actually link to the domain.co.uk/Dorset, as then the link strength would be passed to all the pages within that folder.
There isn’t really any such thing as a backlink; there is only actually toxic anchor text.
However, a bad link in this context is one that you have paid an agency to build but has no positive impact on your Google rankings.
This would include citation links or NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) backlinks. Here, the content is poor. It is often only the name of your company and your address.
Also, the anchor text context is poor; invariably, click here for more websites. Either way, I don’t think anyone could describe these pages as high quality.
Let VCM show you how to get good backlinks that support your local optmisation
The belief that endlessly repeating your address and your phone number on web directories to prove your business is located there, is false. This is because it is so simple to add citation links, which anyone could create using fake addresses.
A far better low-cost backlink strategy could be using social media local tax for example #Guildford #Surrey or #Kent. Although we haven't tested the results of these it would seem likely that these are improvement on citation links.
Google success as a search engine is all about its ability to understand how different websites link to each other and how this makes some websites more trustworthy than others. But Google is a machine. How they define where a website is not necessarily just in the name. For example, DorsetJournal.com may well be hosted in America. Does this mean it isn't in the UK? You can see how nothing is clear-cut.
Vanilla Circus is expert at backlink and have 17 years of success. We have tried and tested the very best methods of ringing the most link juice from a link we have outsourced. We have databases of websites that we can contact to try and source a link for our clients that is both contextual in location and appropriate for what they sell. What is important in all back linking is to follow Google's direction and clear list of rules.
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