Best Backlinks for Local SEO (and the Ones Your Competitors Can't Copy)

At a glance

• The best local SEO backlinks come from sites relevant to your town and your trade: local press, suppliers, partners, associations and events you take part in.
• Google Business Profile, directory citations and consistent NAP details are table stakes. Every competitor has them, so they don’t put you ahead.
• Earned local links take relationships and time, which is why they’re harder for a competitor to copy.
• Links you own are the third tier: an expired domain that once belonged to a local business in your niche can carry its old local links to a blog you control.
• Check what your local competitors have with a backlink gap report in Ahrefs or Semrush, and go after the sources that link to several of them.

What counts as a local backlink

Being nearby on a map doesn’t make a site relevant. A random blog that happens to be hosted in your city adds nothing local. What you want is relevance: the linking page should make sense to someone looking for your business in your area.

Links from relevant sites outside your area still help too. A plumbing trade site in another state is relevant to a plumber, even if it says nothing about your town. Local links add the place signal on top. What makes a link strong in general is covered in getting good backlinks. This page is about where local ones come from.

The three tiers at a glance

Tactic	Effort	Typical link	Does your competitor already have it?
Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect	Low	Profile link, mostly not a ranking link	Yes
Core directories (Yelp, Foursquare, industry directories)	Low	Often nofollow	Yes
Chamber of commerce, trade associations	Low to medium	Member directory link	Often
Suppliers and partners	Medium	Followed link on a partner page	Sometimes
Local press and local blogs	Medium to high	Editorial link in an article	Rarely the same story
Events and sponsorships you actually do	Medium	Sponsor or event page link	Rarely
Unlinked mentions and broken links on local sites	Low to medium	Editorial link	Not on your mentions
Expired local domains you own	High upfront	Link you control on a site with local history	No

The pattern is simple. The easier a link is to get, the more likely every competitor in town already has it.

Tier 1, table stakes: listings and citations

Local citations are listings that mention your business name, address and phone number (NAP). They live on Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, Foursquare, industry directories and the large business-data aggregators that feed many smaller directories.

Do they count as backlinks? Some include a link to your site, many of those links are nofollow, and individually they pass little. Their real job is consistency: the same name, address and phone number everywhere tells search engines and customers that your business is real and where it is.

Your checklist:

• Claim and complete your Google Business Profile.
• Claim Bing Places and Apple Business Connect.
• List on Yelp, Foursquare and the two or three directories your industry uses.
• Check that your name, address, phone and website URL are written exactly the same everywhere.
• Fix or remove old listings with an outdated address or phone number.
• Join your chamber of commerce and any trade association that lists members with a link.

Do this once, keep it tidy, and move on. You need it, but it won’t separate you from the business down the street who did the same.

A word on paid listing and citation-building services: they submit your details to hundreds of directories for a fee. Most of those directories have no local or industry relevance, and Google’s spam policies list “low-quality directory or bookmark site links” as link spam (fetched 2026-10-28). The handful of directories that matter, you can claim yourself in an afternoon.

Tier 2, earned local links

These take more work, and that’s why they work. A competitor can copy your directory listings in a day. They can’t copy your relationship with the local paper.

Suppliers, partners and associations

The businesses you already work with are the easiest earned links. Suppliers often have a “where to buy” or “certified installers” page. Partners (the electrician you refer work to, the property manager who calls you) may list recommended contractors. Ask them directly: “We’re on your installer list, could you add a link to our site?”

Local press and local blogs

Local news sites, community blogs and local podcasts need stories. A new service, a milestone, a useful seasonal guide (“what to check before your pipes freeze”) or an opinion on a local issue can all get coverage. Pitch one story at a time to the person who covers that beat.

Events and sponsorships you actually do

Sponsoring a local team, a charity run or a school event often comes with a link on the sponsor page. The key word is “actually”: take part because it fits the business, and the link follows. A sponsorship bought only for the link is a paid link with extra steps.

Hosting your own event, a workshop, a free clinic or a meetup, gets you listed on local event calendars and often covered by local blogs.

Local resource pages

Many towns have pages listing local services: a city’s new resident guide, a neighborhood association’s recommended trades, a library’s community directory. Find them with searches like [your town] + "local resources" or [your town] + "recommended contractors", then ask to be included.

Unlinked mentions and broken links on local sites

If the local paper mentioned your business without a link, ask for one. It’s the cheapest link there is, since they’ve already written about you. Broken links work the same way locally as anywhere: find a local site linking to a business that closed or a page that’s gone, and offer yours as the replacement.

Find what your local competitors have

The fastest way to find local link opportunities is to look at who links to the businesses ranking above you.

1. List the three to five competitors that show up for your main local search terms.
2. Run them through a gap tool. Semrush’s Backlink Gap finds domains that link to competitors but not to you (per Semrush, fetched 2026-10-28). Ahrefs offers a similar Link Intersect tool.
3. Filter for domains that link to two or more competitors. Those are the local sources most likely to link to you too.
4. Sort the list into the tiers above. Tier 1 sources you claim. Tier 2 sources you ask.

You’ll often find the same local news site, association or sponsor page links to every top competitor. That’s your shortlist. A full guide to checking competitor backlinks is on the way.

Tier 3, links you own: expired local domains

Here’s where you can get ahead of everyone using the same playbook. Our PBN guide explains it with a plumber:

Your client is a plumber in your city. You find a domain that years ago belonged to a different plumber, who was featured as a “businessman from a community” in a few local newspapers, which brought a lot of links to his website. He then retired and let the domain expire. You register it and build a new blog about plumbing on it. Since most of the links to the domain are still live, the blog keeps a lot of the authority the previous owner built.

That blog now links where you choose, with the anchor you choose, from a domain with real local history. No competitor can copy it, because you own it.

The guide singles out local businesses as the place this route helps most. Local services aren’t online-first, and as it puts it, “It’s hard to acquire backlinks to a plumber’s website.” Small local businesses also face a search engine that, as the guide says, primarily wants to sell ads. They need every tool available.

Vetting an expired local domain

Not every old local domain is worth buying. The guide’s minimums and checks:

• At least 10 Ahrefs Domain Rating and 10 or more referring domains. Below that, results are questionable.
• A clean backlink and anchor text profile, with nothing from or about pharma, adult or gambling sites.
• Relevant history: check on the Wayback Machine that the old site was in your niche or area.
• No recent heavy link loss, and the domain still indexed if you bought it at auction.

For the full process, see how to choose an expired domain and how to use expired domains.

One rule the guide is firm on: remove the previous owner’s personal information. Names, addresses, phone numbers and photos of the old business owner come off the site. A rebuilt local blog is your property, and it shouldn’t impersonate anyone.

Hosting a few local blogs

Where Easy Blog Networks fits. A handful of local-niche blogs only help if they don’t share an obvious footprint. On Easy Blog Networks, each blog is hosted with a different hosting provider on its own IP, installs in one click with a random theme and plugins, and gets daily backups and automatic updates. Plans start at US$39/month for 10 blogs, with a 7-day free trial.

For agencies with local clients, one network can serve several clients in different towns or trades. Just don’t link every client from every blog. Outbound link patterns are one of the harmful footprints our PBN guide warns about. Keep each blog topically close to the clients it links to.

Internal links that support local landing pages

Once links arrive, help them reach the pages that need them. If you have a landing page for each service area (“emergency plumber in Springfield”), link to it from related blog posts and from your service pages. Internal links tell search engines which page is the main one for that topic, and they pass on some of the value your homepage and posts earn from outside links.

For the bigger picture of how local links fit in with the rest of your plan, see our guide to link building strategy.

FAQ

What are the best backlinks for local SEO?

Links from relevant local sites that a competitor can’t easily copy: local press, suppliers and partners, associations, events you take part in, and expired local domains you own and rebuild.

What is a local backlink?

A link from a site relevant to your area, your trade, or both. Relevance matters more than where the linking site is hosted.

Do citations and NAP listings count as backlinks?

Some do, but many are nofollow and each passes little. Their main value is consistent business details across the web.

How many local backlinks do I need?

It depends on what the businesses ranking above you have. We look at the numbers question in how many backlinks is too many.

Can I get local backlinks for free?

Yes. Listings, associations, supplier links, unlinked mentions and local press cost time, not money. Owned blogs on expired domains cost domains and hosting.

Is there a local backlinks checklist or PDF?

The Tier 1 checklist above covers the basics, and the tier table works as the full checklist. Work down it from top to bottom.