Category: Partnerships

Almost every local business pays for a membership it barely thinks about. The Chamber of Commerce invoice arrives each spring, the trade body renewal goes through on direct debit, and the member profile created three years ago sits untouched with an old phone number and a logo from before the

Your accountant, the van leasing company, the firm that supplies your boiler parts: chances are you already rate at least one of them highly. Most local businesses hand out that praise for free in a quick email or a passing comment, and get nothing back beyond a thank you. Yet

Small businesses chasing local rankings tend to spend their energy on directories, review requests and the occasional blog post. Meanwhile, some of the most valuable links they could earn are sitting with companies they already pay every month: the boiler manufacturer whose products they fit, the paint brand they stock,

Directories and newspapers get all the attention, while the companies whose products you install, fit or sell every week are ignored. If you’re a heating engineer fitting Worcester Bosch boilers or a flooring shop stocking Karndean, those brands already know you exist. The question is whether their websites say so.

Your Google Business Profile does most of the heavy lifting in local search, but it doesn’t work alone. Google still looks at what the rest of the web says about you, and few signals carry more local weight than a link from a respected business down the road. A florist

A plumbing merchant in Leeds lists every installer who fits its boilers. A paint manufacturer runs a “find a decorator” page covering half of Manchester. A flooring brand publishes a stockist map with links to independent showrooms in Bristol and Glasgow. Each of those pages is a link waiting to

Plenty of local firms go looking for backlinks in all the wrong places. They buy directory listings nobody visits, pay for “guest posts” on sites with no connection to their town, and wonder why their Google Maps rankings barely move. Meanwhile, the people who already know and trust them, their

Every local business has a network of trusted contacts, even if nobody has written it down. The plumber knows a reliable electrician, the wedding photographer knows three excellent florists, and the estate agency has a solicitor it sends every buyer to. Very few of them have put that knowledge on

A plumber in Leeds once showed me an email he’d received offering “50 high-authority local links” in exchange for adding a “resources” page to his website. The sender promised his Google Maps rankings would climb within weeks. He was tempted, and honestly, I understand why. When you’ve spent years building

By the time owners get in touch, they have usually ticked off the basics. The website is live, the Google Business Profile is verified, and a handful of reviews trickle in each month. Yet a competitor two streets away still shows up above them in Google Maps, and nobody can

A lot of the businesses I speak to have already done the obvious work. The Google Business Profile is claimed, the website looks decent, and a handful of reviews trickle in each month. Yet a competitor two streets away still sits above them in the Maps pack, and nobody can

You probably already have the raw material for a decent set of local backlinks. You just haven’t asked for them. The plumbing merchant you buy from every week, the accountant who files your returns, the youth football team whose shirts carry your logo: each of these has a website, and