Building your brand authority in local SEO involves establishing your business as a trusted and recognized entity within your geographic area. This is usually achieved through a combination of optimizing your online presence, engaging with the local community, and building relationships with other local businesses and influencers.
Authority for local businesses can help improve visibility and customer conversion. If you want to drive more customers to your business through local packs, organic search, and referral traffic, then growing your authority will help all these channels function more effectively. You can build authority by using techniques like link building and citation building. You can also improve your reputation by encouraging your business's online reviews. For local businesses, geographic location is key; you want to be present in places where your customers can access your products and services. There is no point in being present in community forums in Boise, Idaho, when you sell cupcakes in Austin, Texas. You also need to make sure you abide by the guidelines of local directories and basic link building tactics to avoid wasting your time or damaging your backlink profile.
To truly build your business's authority and stand out in local search results, you need a focused approach that shows both search engines and potential customers that you're a trustworthy, prominent, and relevant choice in your area.
Focus on optimizing your Google Business Profile, building local backlinks, and actively managing online reviews. These three strategies will help you establish credibility, improve your online presence, and ultimately attract more local customers.
Think of your Google Business Profile (GBP) as your digital storefront for local search. It's often the first thing potential customers see when they look for businesses like yours.
Here's how to optimize it:
Complete every section of your profile, ensuring all details – business name, address, phone number (NAP), website, and hours – are 100% accurate and up-to-date. Inconsistencies can confuse both Google and customers.
Showcase Your Business: Upload high-quality photos that highlight your products, services, and location. Visuals make your profile more engaging and help users envision what you offer.
Engage with Customers: Promptly respond to all customer questions and reviews (both positive and negative). This proactive approach demonstrates that you're attentive, value feedback, and are committed to excellent service, all of which builds immense trust.
A fully optimized and active GBP is crucial for establishing credibility and making it easy for customers to find and choose you in local search.
Backlinks from other reputable websites act like votes of confidence for your business. When those links come from local sources, they send a powerful signal to search engines that you're a significant and authoritative player in your community.
How to earn valuable local backlinks:
Sponsor Local Events: Support community events or sports teams in exchange for a link on their official website.
Partner with Local Influencers: Collaborate with local bloggers or social media personalities who can feature your business and link to your site.
Get Featured in Local Media: Offer expert commentary to local news outlets, contribute articles to local online publications, or pitch stories about your business's impact on the community.
These local backlinks influence your site's Domain Authority and reinforce your geographic relevance, helping you rank higher in location-specific searches.
Find link opportunities with Moz's Link Explorer.
Online reviews are a cornerstone of local business authority and influence purchasing decisions more than almost anything else. Actively managing them builds trust and visibility.
Your review management strategy should include:
Encourage Reviews: Make it easy and natural for satisfied customers to leave reviews on key platforms like Google, Yelp, Facebook, and industry-specific sites. A simple "We'd love to hear your feedback!" or a follow-up email can go a long way.
Respond to All Reviews: Address both positive and negative feedback professionally and promptly. Thank customers for positive reviews, and for negative ones, acknowledge their concern, offer solutions, and invite them to connect offline. Your responses show you value every customer's experience.
A strong, well-managed online review profile not only directly influences your local rankings but also builds social proof and convinces potential customers that you're a business they can trust.
Learn how to get more reviews locally.
And improve your online visibility
Any work you accomplish via your publishing and community strategies can earn some links with no additional work on your part. When content and happenings are noteworthy, they can accrue links and mentions on their own. But in competitive markets, you’ll typically need to move from a passive to an active link building strategy on the basis of a local business’s relationships, events or groups it’s sponsoring, company news, and other notable features.
The simplest strategy to find possible link sources and unstructured citations is to search Google for the pages ranking highest for terms you want to rank for in a focus market, and see if there is any opportunity for these pages to link to your business, or at least to mention it in an unstructured citation.
For example, if a page from the website of a local soccer league is ranking highly for “buying kids soccer gear” in your focus city, a sporting goods store might sponsor a team in that league and get listed as a donor on the ranking page. At a minimum, look at the SERPs and document the opportunities:
Doing this type of research manually requires a lot of elbow grease when you need to rank a business for many, many terms. Even just managing a spreadsheet of opportunities, wins, and losses can become too time consuming. Where resources permit, it’s time to automate.
Get a free trial of Moz Pro and check out the Link Intersect tool to help you discover unstructured linked citations opportunities via competitive research. Simply enter the URL of one or more top local competitors, as shown in this example of a lodging business researching two large nearby resorts:
Click the “Find opportunities” button and Link Intersect surfaces the links that one or both competitors have earned:
Link intersect shows you the DA, Spam Score, top referring page, and whether one or more competitors have earned a link from the domain in question. From these findings, you can create a strategy for emulating the success of top competitors by building out a similar link profile.
There is no magic number of links, unstructured citations, and unstructured linked citations you need to build for a client. The resources you need to invest will be based on the unique competitive level of each business location in each market.
Link building is widely considered to be one of the top competitive ranking factors for local businesses in tough markets, with organic authority underpinning local and localized organic rankings.
Let's face it: some brands have an easier time generating buzz and earning links than others. Industries like hospitality and retail naturally lend themselves to exciting, shareable content. But if you're in a less glamorous sector, like insurance or plumbing, building online authority can feel like an uphill battle.
Here's where a powerful strategy comes into play: a so-called "boring" business can reinvent itself as a true community champion. By actively promoting local initiatives, sponsoring others, and becoming a go-to source for hyperlocal information, your brand can become a household name within its community. Your primary goal is still to sell your products or services, but your authority-building strategy shifts to fostering and publicizing strong local relationships.
Local SEO, Aaron Weiche, recently shared an exceptional example of this methodology in action. Take note of how Mark Benzer, an insurance agent in Buffalo, Minnesota, launched the Buffalo Community Podcast. Benzer’s praiseworthy efforts have included interviewing people from all walks of life, from local business owners to teachers to politicians.
Instead of overtly promoting himself or his policies, Benzer focuses on celebrating others. He sponsors local sports teams and even opens a bar tab for educators and first responders at a local brewery. Benzer's approach is a masterclass in building a positive reputation, local authority, and good community spirit, all rolled into one impactful strategy.
If your business is struggling to make its mark in a target city, consider adopting this down-home, yet highly sophisticated, approach. It's a proven way to cultivate local authority organically over time.
While the majority of verticals have mainly the same Google Business Profile features and similar opportunities for building online authority, each industry walks a slightly different path. The hospitality industry, for example, stands out as existing in one of the most unique, nuanced corners of Google’s local business environment. Auto dealerships are another category where special tactics must be used for developing maximum prominence and relevance.
As you’re developing a marketing strategy for building the authority of a particular business, make use of the following resources for specialized local SEO tips for specific verticals:
Car dealerships enjoy some fantastic advantages within Google's local environment. Not only can you create a Google Business Profile (GBP) listing for each physical location, but you can also add individual listings for qualifying departments and even separate listings for the specific car makes you sell! Special local search marketing tips for the automotive industry can be found here and here.
Selling to other businesses is a unique discipline, and when the business model aligns, local SEO can be an incredible asset for building B2B relationships. Learn how to make the right local search marketing moves to connect with other businesses in your area this Moz Blog post.
Whether you're marketing a bank, a community credit union, or an accountancy firm, there are often fantastic opportunities to create multiple Google Business Profile listings for individual practitioners or even ATM machines. Read these tips for advice on local search marketing for financial institutions.
Effective organization and seamless communication are paramount when marketing franchises, given the many different players involved. Learn how to navigate these complexities to ensure a consistent and powerful local presence across all locations. Read this guide dedicated to local search marketing for franchises.
From hospital campuses to independent medical providers to dentists, chiropractors, and dozens of other specialties, local SEO for the healthcare industry must typically tackle the complexities of multi-practitioner and multi-department Google Business Profile listings. Read a good intro to local SEO for healthcare companies here, and check out the resource hub at healthcare marketing software provider, PatientPop.
Tom Waddington’s blog will be your best resource for understanding how Google’s Local Services Ads are increasingly dominating the home services market. But while brands in this vertical will increasingly have to pay to play in Google’s local results, don’t overlook what organic SEO can do for these businesses.
Google treats lodging businesses like completely different animals than the rest of the local ecosystem. This vertical is heavily monetized by Google, and has different Google Business Profile features and odd restrictions. If you’re marketing a hotel, motel, inn, B&B, or other hospitality brand, this guide for hotels will help and check out Acorn Internet Services’s blog for veteran advice.
Local SEO for lawyers and attorneys wades into some of the most competitive territory on the Internet. Spam fighting skills are essential here, as is a clear understanding of handling multi-practitioner Google Business Profile listings. The Juris Digital blog is an unusually excellent learning resource dedicated to local SEO for lawyers.
Educational institutions need to master multi-department Google Business Profile listings management. Other entities, like non-profit organizations, typically spend their time trying to achieve maximum visibility on a budget. Get up to speed with the seven most important focus areas and find a great list of free local SEO tools on the Moz Blog.
The complexities of local SEO for realtors lie in adhering to Google’s guidelines for representing your business to avoid eligibility violations, and managing multi-practitioner listings for all the partners in a firm. Here’s an extensive set of tips specific to real estate local SEO.
Learning to use Google as a source of leads and bookings for restaurants is specialty work. You’ll need to manage online reservations, menu publication, and large volumes of reviews. Read Miriam Ellis’s article on restaurant local SEO to prep yourself for marketing in this diverse and interesting vertical. There’s also this article weighing in-house vs. third-party delivery options, which can have a massive impact on restaurant reputation.
Retail marketing is diverse, challenging, and full of creative opportunities. Learn how to create stats-based strategy. If you’re marketing a business in the DIY category, like a craft shop, read this helpful article. Also consider whether emerging product kiosks could boost business, and if you’re marketing independent retailers, use every trick in a book to win back their customers from Amazon.
The less competitive the market, the less marketing that needs to be done to make a local business prominent on the web. Learn to create small, effective local SEO campaigns for rural clients in least-competitive markets using this guide.