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

Chris Walker: Yeah, I mean it’s not going to be anything revolutionary at least to begin with. Like citations are the first thing. I know some people say that’s not necessary, they don’t work anymore. They’re wrong and I’m right. You absolutely still need to do those. Do them the right way. Optimise them. There’s plenty of great vendors. There’s one in particular, his name is Citation Expert, so it’s easy to remember. He does a great job making sure you get all the big ones, but then get as many local specific ones as you can find. Those work really well. You have to do a little bit of homework to figure those out. Same with niche or industry specific ones. Those work really well as well.

Chris Walker: That’s step number one for sure. Don’t do anything else link building wise for local until you do that. Not only that, but those are still things that people might find. If you have your Yelp or whatever, that might be a place to get sales. So don’t think of it as just an SEO perspective.

Chris Walker: Then there’s other ones you won’t be able to get through Legit, but local chamber of commerce I find is well worth the money. They’re usually three or four hundred bucks a year and plus you get the advantages of being part of the chamber. That link works really well. Makes a big difference. That’ll rank on its own sometimes too.

Chris Walker: And then I think they’re the devil, but Better Business Bureau, pay the five hundred dollars, get that link. That works really well. It’s not what you asked, but it works really well for LLMs as well.

Chris Walker: Then I like to do a lot of what I call branded entities for lack of a better term. Like web 2.0s and things around either the name of the business, like jamesspa.weebly.com, or you can do keyword optimised ones as well, so lawyerdetroit.weebly.com. Those have worked really, really well for me in the past.

Chris Walker: And then there’s SEO Neo, which is an automated link building tool that works really, really well for moving the needle with Google Business. There’s a service that my friend Aaron Grankkey has on there for that. He sells it as instant rankings or something like that, but that’s what he’s doing and that works really well.

Chris Walker: And then your cloud stacks and your Google Drive stacks, and there’s a couple really unique ones like bio entity stacks. All of those, again, people are going to tell you those don’t work. They’re wrong. I’ve done it. It works. So those are off the top of my head some of the best ones you can get.

James Dooley: I think the interesting part is a lot of them that you’ve mentioned is making certain that whether it is bio entity stacks, Google stacks or cloud stacks, is trying to make certain that you’re repeating the same description of who you are and what you do and getting that NAP listing in as many different places. So getting the name, address and phone number repeated so many times across the internet, it makes massive differences.

Chris Walker: Yeah, absolutely. Or at least as close as you can get.

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

Chris Walker: Yes. That’s another one. Everyone knows 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 can, that helps too. Getting the NAP and then the business name as part of it. You can get creative and come up with angles to write it around your business name. So yes, press releases are another one.

James Dooley: If I’ve got a business owner that comes to me and they want to rank local, whether that’s a Google Business Profile or a local website, if I was to send them through to Legit and they use Citation Expert and buy a hundred citations, then do a social fortress with all the web 2.0s, press releases, cloud stack and entity stack, is there any indexing service on Legit that can index all those as well? Because I think that’s important. It’s fine doing the citations, but Googlebot needs to be crawling these as well.

Chris Walker: Yeah, there’s a couple I can think of. One is his username is like Keith444 or something like that. Just search indexing. That’ll work. Or you can use a tool yourself like Index Me Now. I always try to force all those links to index. Some of them aren’t going to no matter what you do, but you’ll get fifty or sixty percent of them to index and that helps.

Chris Walker: For a long time I didn’t think indexing mattered. Now I kind of think it’s a big deal.

James Dooley: It makes such a big difference. We own a link building agency and so many times now when we take on a new client, on month number one we’ll export their existing backlink profile from Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Majestic and Link Research Tools. We’ll find every single one of them that we think is good. If some are toxic or not relevant, we won’t bother.

James Dooley: We’ll look at maybe the best five hundred referring domains, get those URLs and load them back into the indexer. Before we’ve even built a link, you start seeing the crawl stats massively increase on the website. Then a few days later, pages that weren’t indexed start to become indexed. Then you start seeing impressions jump up and in time the clicks start going up as well. That’s even before we’ve started to build any of our links.

James Dooley: I don’t know whether Googlebot hasn’t picked up certain links and Ahrefs has, or whether it’s the freshness of Googlebot recalling that link. I have no idea what it is, but getting those even old links recrawled by Googlebot we’ve found to have good effects.

James Dooley: I want to touch on SEO Neo. I didn’t even know you had that. We’ve been using you quite a lot for different services and I didn’t even know there was one for SEO Neo. I’ve had two people trying to learn how to use SEO Neo. I love Milerno, but Elias from Stealth Code who built it used to have SEO Autopilot. I think it’s a great tool but trying to physically use it and set it up ourselves is just a pain.

Chris Walker: Yeah, I have frustrations with that either.

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

Chris Walker: There’s only a couple people that do it and the one that I mentioned doesn’t brand it as SEO Neo. He brands it as Google rankings or something like that. That’s probably why you didn’t see it.

James Dooley: That makes sense. We searched for SEO Neo specifically because we thought we need to stop trying to do this ourselves. We just need a service that can do it.

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

James Dooley: Anyone watching this who wants better local rankings, whether that’s in a Google Business Profile or a local website, today I’m joined with Chris Walker, the founder of Legit, who’s gone through a few different services. Let us know whether you think we’ve missed anything. Leave a comment in the comment section whether you think there’s any specific types of links that are working very well for local SEO.

James Dooley: Chris, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Chris Walker: You too. Thank you.