A study by SEO authority site Moz has shown that links are essential for ranking local keywords. Local SEO is big business now and requires a different set of strategies than e-commerce SEO. You want to build authority and trust with Google so you can get your business featured in local packs.

Location plays a big part in local SEO rankings, so always ensure you have your address listed on your website, and make sure to include the postcode and full address alongside things like your company registration details for UK limited companies. This not only builds trust with consumers but will also help Google to rank you for local terms.

Location-based terms are keywords such as “boiler repair London”, “taxi firm in Stockton-on-Tees”, and “hairdressers in Basildon”. In short, they are hyper-localised search terms which feature businesses that sell location-based services or products. These tend to be small family-owned firms or just smaller firms in general which specialise in a certain product or service and have a local marketing budget to reach their target audience, which is usually within a 5-mile radius.

Most clients who digital agencies take on will find that smaller local businesses that do not have nationwide reach tend to come with a much smaller marketing budget; they expect results and a positive ROI, and in general some of your existing SEO strategies for e-commerce sites will not work as well when shrunk down for smaller local businesses.

Another thing to consider is that you may want to get links from inside your own country; for the UK, this might be getting backlinks from .co.uk sites that are established and trusted already with Google. These tend to help you a little more than having links from a .com domain name.

Our first tactic is the one that is most used; local citation sites and directories are great ways to build local backlinks and build towards becoming an authority in your market. Most of your competition will simply not do this at scale, especially if you are competing in a small town; getting 10 or 20 of these links in a market with low competition will likely be enough that you stick at number one forever.

The second tactic you can use is to reverse engineer the top results within your market. You can use tools like Ahrefs, which has a free backlink checker; just run the top results and see how they are getting links; export these out to a spreadsheet and start viewing them live to see if you can grab a link on these websites for yourself.

The third tactic you can use is to form local partnerships with other local business owners that have related but not identical markets and would be willing to market your business by providing referrals and links from their website. For example, if you want to rank for local graphic design terms, then why not reach out to local website designers who are freelancers or small businesses? These firms are much more likely to want to team together, and this is a great value proposition for both businesses, which will benefit from work referrals and backlinks.

The fourth tactic you can use is putting together local content on your website and creating more generic content rather than commercial content. An example might be a local skip hire firm; they may struggle to attract links because no one really likes linking to firms unless they have personally used them, but if you have some interesting local content, you are more likely to attract backlinks from local bloggers who already have established websites and don’t mind linking to non-commercial content.

The last link-building tactic would be to check social media sites; if you can filter by hashtag or search groups locally or filter by location somehow, then these are often goldmines of information that most competitors leave untapped. From these local searches, you can find out what kind of content and topics really draw an audience in the local market; for example, you may find out that old pictures of popular tourist spots in your area are extremely popular and get shares and likes on social media. From here, you could create a page with these images and invite others to view that page.

As you can see from the above tactics, local SEO requires a much more creative approach than doing SEO for an e-commerce site with national reach. You will often not be able to get links from press releases and guest posts due to the fact that the market is smaller and there are simply fewer influencers, bloggers, and websites in general to create content for.

When you are in a small market, you will often have to really dig deep to come up with some content. Most of your articles about “how to choose an accountant in Leeds” will be a rather dull read and won’t get many backlinks from other websites. Instead, try to see a much bigger picture and think about how to get larger authority sites to link to you by publishing more generic content. For example, if you could publish a list of tourist spots in Leeds, then you would open up a new angle to get some attention.

The biggest mistake most business owners make is to aim too narrow and only talk about their own business or market. Instead, start to think about how to become a local resource that people from inside and outside your location would link to. A great example of this is Wikipedia. They often dominate search results for just about every town and city despite not having a physical location. They do this by telling you detailed information about the town or city, things like the history of the place, local sports teams, famous people from the area, local monuments, and much more.

You don’t need to be a site as large as Wikipedia to win a local market; instead, just focus on producing a few key pieces of content. The easiest way to do this is to take a look at a free keyword research tool and come up with some ideas based on that. For example, if you notice the local football team gets a lot of search volume, then why not produce an article on the top 5 players in the club’s history? This will allow you to get some local search traffic but is also more likely to attract backlinks to your website than commercial content.

Limited budgets are often the biggest hurdle to overcome when it comes to local SEO. Most of the strategies above are either low cost or free to put together. Since most local business owners do no marketing other than word of mouth or footfall, you should easily be able to dominate search results with enough time and creativity.

Thinking outside the box is critical to getting great backlinks from local websites, but it doesn’t need to stop at that point. Think about how you can leverage press releases to take up local search terms. You don’t need to wait for Google to rank your website; you can get on page 1 with a decent press release if you plan things out and use a trusted high-authority website and create a keyword-rich press release that ranks for your local keywords but also helps to promote your brand.

Local branding is perhaps the most important part of local SEO. While you want to aim to get backlinks, you should look well beyond that. Instead, focus on local branding, such as getting your business name trusted and established before people need your product or service. This is why creating local pages not based around your core business is still effective; it allows people to click on your website and see your brand name. Even if they don’t purchase anything from you, they will now have been exposed to your brand messages and will be more likely to remember you in the future.

The truth of the matter is that in 2026 there is no such thing as a local business; with the power and leverage of social media, you can advertise both your location and website to the whole of the UK or even internationally. Most businesses simply don’t understand the concept of how the internet can help them to build a brand and make more money from local marketing. Many people will never visit your business or become a customer, but with Facebook shares, Instagram posts, and YouTube, you may find that your business and brand name will go viral well beyond your local potential customers, and as a result, you will dominate the local market.

People have also been known to travel all over the UK to create brand new content for social media, so you no longer have to worry about just appealing to local customers; there are plenty of content creators that will travel the full length of the country to take part in all-you-can-eat food challenges and record the entire process for social media. Never limit yourself to just your local market; even if you only have a local physical location, people are willing to travel hundreds of miles if you offer them something of value.

The SEO industry began in the late 90s but really has only become a mainstream marketing channel in the last 20 or so years. This is due to large businesses realising the potential of the channel for branding and making sales. Once they started to see the potential of SEO, they started to recruit the best minds in the business, and since that time, we see just how much the industry has taken off.

We now have free YouTube courses, paid courses from experts, blueprint guides, and a whole wealth of information and strategies from all around the web. The issue we face today is not the lack of information but how to sort the information and get to the gold, the strategies and winning moves that are actually applicable in 2026 and beyond.

Most will make some mistakes along the way as they learn from trial and error about what works, but some just start off on the wrong foot and can never recover a site once it starts to downturn.

The first most common issue in this industry is learning out-of-date information; this can include guides from years ago that recommended old-fashioned link-building methods, out-of-date on-page editing, and even poor recommendations on free tools to use. When someone new reads this information, they apply it in 2026 and can’t figure out why it no longer works; after a while, they try even harder and double down because they figure they are not working hard enough. Sure enough, the site’s rankings go down even further.

One of the biggest problems that the industry faces as a whole is the idea of copy-and-pasting your way to victory. People assume that local SEO firms are a good place to copy strategies, or they look at who is number 1 for a keyword and copy what they do. When you do this, you simply don’t understand just how many factors are being measured and how that site is winning. When you don’t understand this, you can easily copy and paste the wrong strategy that will not work for your brand-new website.

An example of this might be copying the number 1 result, getting the same links as them, rewriting their content in your own words, publishing endless articles, and being active on social media but still not getting any rankings. One factor people always overlook is the age of a website, and that is something that can’t be duplicated. If you have a competitor’s website that is 20 years old, then it has built up plenty of trust with Google that your new website simply won’t have.

Those who are new to SEO simply have no idea how much trouble they could get in from copy-and-paste thinking. You should only ever implement a strategy when you have tested it at a small scale, broken it down, analysed it, and then understood it. If you are willing to put in the time, then you can find some great strategies to model around, but if you try and take the shortcut approach, you will never learn the inner workings of SEO.

A copy-and-paste strategy is always a poor way to begin in SEO because it teaches you to ignore the fundamentals and chase rankings instead. A true master of the SEO industry focuses on long-term results. A dangerous mistake would be to copy the top website in your industry only to find they get hit by a Google update and take your website with them. Be very careful before you proceed to copy anyone.

The second most common mistake in the industry is poor keyword research; many people who are new to the industry want to impress someone with ranking for a giant keyword with millions of searches, not realising it’s already game over before it even started. Spending hours on keyword research is a recommendation, as it may save you months or even years’ worth of work trying to rank the wrong keywords that don’t make any money or keywords that are just too competitive and not worth even going after unless you have hundreds of thousands in the budget to spend.

Keywords are a critical piece of the puzzle, but most don’t dig deep enough or get a poor strategy that revolves around picking the same keywords as everyone else or whatever the keyword tool they are using suggests.

This software is a great place to start your keyword research, but the real digging and gold comes from your own internal analytics and also generating ideas from things like message boards, social media, and reading product reviews and comments. These are the basics of both market research and keyword research.

Picking just one keyword to go after is also a large mistake that most make; they focus just on ranking a main broad keyword. It takes a long time to establish a website and get it to rank for a broad keyword. This method takes a long time and will deplete a marketing budget very quickly. Instead, you want to take the easier keywords first and find strategies to outrank the competition. Most of the major brands and competition you will face are very poor at building power to product pages, so they are often an untapped gold mine.

Long-tail keywords often have high commercial intent, so you will find that ranking for them brings in real sales and real money instead of just traffic and branding like broad keywords do. The reason for this is because when someone searches for a brand name and model, they are often “credit card in hand” customers. These are customers that have done the research on the buying process and already decided they are going to buy the product; all they need is a retailer that sells it.

Figuring out the best choice of keyword often comes from building out hundreds or even thousands of these long-tail keywords and performing some basic on-page SEO like title tag editing and including the keyword in the page name. Monitoring these keywords in real time will give you feedback on which keywords and products are the easiest to target. You can do this by seeing which of the keywords rank highest and start working on those before anything else.

Timing is a critical but underrated skill in SEO. So many in this industry burn precious time and resources by waiting around for keywords to rank instead of taking what is already working and improving on it. Remember, the faster you get a keyword to rank, the faster you can convert that to sales and money, either for yourself or a client. The last mistake most make is the over-reliance on software; they use software to analyse websites, do keyword research, and perform outreach.

Instead of doing this, you should focus on manually spending the time and really putting the hours into looking over data yourself. Instead of just exporting backlinks and trusting software, which is often filled with bugs or incorrect reporting, you should manually take a look for yourself, and you will find some major takeaways that others won’t have picked up on.
Software is a great way to break down and export major amounts of data quickly, but due to being out of date or some of the ways it reads data, you can often spot some errors in reporting or simply find that the software is no longer working or tagging data accurately like it should. This should help you to realise that software is just a tool; it will not do the full job for you.

We should look at software as semi-automation; it will help you get further down the tracks by extracting the data, but the best way is to manually look at it. Most of your competitors will not take a look at the information because it’s a very long and boring process that will require many hours of clicking on websites and taking a look to find patterns. This is a critical mistake, as many experts have spotted certain traits of a website that seem to form part of Google’s core algorithm.

Software is a great bonus for us that allows us to not have to manually extract data from hundreds of websites, but once we have the data, we should consider it our job to manually filter, analyse, and draw up strategies from it; being the first to spot an upcoming problem or a trend that others have missed creates a first-mover advantage that you can take credit for and put yourself above the competition.

In order to understand a problem you’re facing or an industry problem, you must look directly at it and really break down what might be happening and then come up with strategies to raise the level of your game. The best at SEO are very dynamic and not only roll with the multiple changes within the industry but also see them coming and have a strategy in place to deal with them when they show up.

If you are just starting out in this industry, then you will notice just how many SEO companies hit the panic button when a change rolls out. A new update or Google adding a feature or changing the rules can leave them in a cold sweat. The best way to deal with this is to make sure you can see where the future is heading and start 5 years before it happens. This type of information is what creates real value in the SEO industry and can help you stay ahead of the pack.