Google’s successive updates have been laying more emphasis on link quality, especially inbound links. Your link building strategy should adapt to these changes to ensure that your local rankings receive a boost through authority links from trusted websites.
One sure-fire way of getting noticed by updated bots is to begin posting your comments on local blogs that are specifically related to your business or industry. However, there is a fine line between posting comments and spamming, and you should remember to post comments only if you feel you can add some value to the blog. You need to seek out quality blogs to post comments. After leaving your comments, you can link them to various posts and locations such as your root domain, Google+ local landing page, and local business page.
Another link building strategy is to begin blogging on local blogs after creating a list of local keywords. You can then proceed to write for local blogs related to your business or industry as a guest writer. You can use inurl:location “guest post” to seek out sites that accept guest bloggers and post links after your blogs just as in the previous paragraph. If possible, you can include your name and business details on your blogs to boost your rankings through the unstructured citation route.
Yet another sure-fire way of boosting local rankings is to provide positive reviews on local websites in return for allowing you to insert your links on those websites. Thus, you can write positive reviews about your doctor, barber, car mechanic, or anyone that has a website. You should ensure that their websites have decent rankings and are not barred by major search engines before adding reviews with your links.
If you have a decent marketing budget then you can also offering scholarships or sponsorships to students that study in local colleges or universities. You can provide a general outline of how students can qualify for the scholarship or sponsorship once you contact various colleges or universities or even local schools. Your offer should be displayed on their sites along with sufficient inbound links to impress students, parents, and most importantly, search engine bots. In addition, you can also release press releases to gain publicity for your kind-hearted support to the local community.
The above strategies will certainly fit well with updated search algorithms released by Google and boost your local rankings to a noticeable extent. Use them and track your efforts continuously to further fine-tune each strategy.