Fatrank Podcast

James Dooley: Hi. Today I am joined with Chris Walker, the founder of Legit. Today’s topic is the best local link building services that you know of. Obviously, you have a large freelancer pool of different people doing a lot of things. You can see a lot of results where people are buying link building services specifically for local SEO. So Chris Walker, what do you believe is the best link building strategy using specific Legit services?

Chris Walker: It is not going to be anything revolutionary, at least to begin with. Citations are the first thing. I know some people say they are not necessary and they do not work any more. They are wrong and I am right. You absolutely still need to do those. Do them the right way. Optimise them. There are plenty of great vendors. There is one in particular whose name is Citation Expert, so it is easy to remember. He does a great job. Get all the big ones, but then get as many local-specific ones as you can find because those work really well. You have to do a little bit of homework to figure those out. The same goes for niche-specific or industry-specific ones. Those work really well too. That is step number one for sure. Do not do anything else link building-wise for local until you do that. Not only that, but those are still things that people might actually find. If you have your Yelp listing or whatever, that might be a place to get sales. So do not think of it just from an SEO perspective.

Chris Walker: Then there are other ones that you will not be able to get through Legit, like your local Chamber of Commerce. I find that is well worth the money. They are usually three or four hundred dollars a year and you also get the advantages of being part of the Chamber. That link works really well. It makes a big difference. That will rank on its own sometimes too.

Chris Walker: Then, I think they are the devil, but Better Business Bureau. Pay the $500 and get that link. That works really well. It is not what you asked, but it works really well for LLMs as well.

Chris Walker: I also like to do a lot of what I call branded entities, for lack of a better term. Things like Web 2.0s built around either the name of the business, like jamesspa.weebly.com, or keyword-optimised ones as well, like lawyerdetroit.weebly.com. Those have worked really, really well for me in the past.

Chris Walker: There is also SEO Neo, which is an automated link building tool that works really well for moving the needle with Google Business Profiles. There is a service from my friend Aaron Grankey, although I am probably pronouncing his surname wrong. He has a service on there that he sells as instant rankings or something like that, but that is what he is doing and that works really well.

Chris Walker: Then you have your cloud stacks and your Google Drive stacks. There are also a couple of really unique ones, like bio entity stacks. Again, people are going to tell you those do not work. They are wrong. I have done it. It works. So those are some of the best ones that come to mind.

James Dooley: The interesting part is that a lot of the ones you have mentioned are about making sure that, whether it is bio entity stacks, Google stacks, cloud stacks or whatever it is, you are repeating the same description of who you are and what you do, and getting that NAP listing in as many different places as possible. So getting the email, the telephone number and the address. Getting the name, address and phone number repeated so many times across the internet makes massive differences too, or at least as close as you can get.

Chris Walker: Yes, for sure.

James Dooley: Do you do anything with regards to press releases or anything like that as well?

Chris Walker: Yes. That is another one. It is kind of a hidden tactic. A lot of people know that press releases are very valuable for SEO, but they work really well for influencing local SEO as well. Get the NAP in there. Some of them will allow you to embed a map. If you cannot, you cannot. If you can, that helps too. Getting the NAP in there and the business name as part of it matters. You can get creative and come up with angles to write it around your business name. So yes, press releases are another one. I forgot all about that.

James Dooley: If I have a business owner that comes to me and they want to rank locally, whether that is a Google Business Profile or a local website, and I was to send them through to Legit, and let us say they were to go and use Citation Expert and buy 100 citations, then do something like a social fortress with all the Web 2.0s, and then do the press release and all the other stuff like the cloud stack and the entity stack, there are so many different services on Legit that they can use. Once you have got all those URLs, is there any indexing service on Legit that can index all those as well? Because I think that is also very important. It is fine doing the citations, but Googlebot needs to be crawling these as well.

Chris Walker: Yes. There are a couple that I can think of. One has a username like Keith444 or something like that. Just search indexing or something similar. That will work. Or you can use a tool yourself, like IndexMeNow or something like that as well. I always try to force all those links to index. Some of them are not going to, no matter what you do, but you will get 50 or 60 per cent of them to index. For a long time I did not think indexing mattered. Now I kind of think it is a big deal.

James Dooley: It makes such a big difference. Here is something for you. Here is a key takeaway. We own a link building agency and so many times now, when we take on a new client, what we will do in month one is export their existing backlink profile. We are obviously building links, but we will export their existing backlink profile. We will try to get them all from Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Majestic and Link Research Tools. We will go and find every single one of them that we think is worth keeping. Any that we think are toxic, not very good or not relevant, we will not bother with. Then we will go and quickly look at maybe the best 500 referring domains, get those URLs and load them back into the indexer.

James Dooley: Before we have even built a link, you start seeing the crawl stats massively increase on the website. I am not saying rankings to start with, but you start seeing the crawl stats increase. Then what starts to happen is that a few days later, pages that were not indexed start to become indexed, and then you start seeing impressions jump up. Then in time, the clicks start going up as well. And that is even before we have started to build any of our own links. So we look like a superstar, right?

James Dooley: Just because we are going in and getting those old links recrawled. I do not know whether it is that Googlebot has not picked up certain links and Ahrefs has, and they have not been crawled, or whether it is the freshness of Googlebot recrawling that link. I have no idea what it is, but getting those even old links recrawled by Googlebot, we have found, has had good effects and helped quite a bit.

James Dooley: But I want to ask you one more thing about SEO Neo.

Chris Walker: Mhm.

James Dooley: I did not even know you had that. Obviously, we have been using you quite a lot for different services now and I did not even know there was one for SEO Neo. And do you know what has been a pain in my backside? I have had two people trying to learn how to use SEO Neo. I love Milerno, who is one of the people in there, but Elias from Stealth Code, who built it, used to have SEO Autopilot. I think it is a great tool, but at times trying to physically use it and set it up ourselves is just a pain.

Chris Walker: Yes, I have no patience for that either.

James Dooley: Yes. I just need someone to do a done-for-you service and I did not even know that was on Legit, which I think is brilliant because then I can start doing image sharing or video sharing on those profiles, as well as doing the links and the NAP listing too.

Chris Walker: Yes. There are only a couple of people that do it and the one I mentioned does not brand it as SEO Neo. He brands it as Google rankings or something like that.

James Dooley: That is probably why I did not see it. They should probably change that.

Chris Walker: Yes, they probably should.

James Dooley: Even just put it at the end or something. We searched for that because we were thinking we need to stop trying to do this ourselves. We just need a service that can do it.

Chris Walker: Yes. It is a great tool. All mass link building tools, in my opinion, are really difficult to use, so I have never had the patience to do it myself either.

James Dooley: Yes, for sure. So anyone watching this who wants better local rankings, whether that is in a Google Business Profile or a local website, today I have been joined with Chris Walker, the founder of Legit, who has gone through a few different services. Let us know whether you think we have missed anything. Leave a comment in the comment section if you think there are any specific types of links that are working very well for local SEO. Chris Walker, it has been an absolute pleasure.

Chris Walker: You too. Thank you.