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Complete Link Building Guide for Local Trade Businesses (2025)

Link building plays a critical role in driving organic traffic from search engines and can significantly impact your online visibility. When combined with strong technical foundations, quality content, and a good user experience, effective link-building can transform your website’s performance in search results.

The need for quality, relevance, and authenticity has never been more important than in 2025. While quick-fix, low-quality link-building techniques might show short-term gains, they have no place in a strategy focused on sustainable, long-term success in search results.

Modern link building is essentially great marketing. The businesses that understand this fundamental shift are the ones that typically achieve lasting results. However, there’s still an important technical aspect to building links that requires careful attention and strategic planning.

For local trade businesses like electricians, plumbers, HVAC contractors, etc, mastering these principles can be particularly impactful. In an industry where local reputation and trust are paramount, building the right kind of online authority through quality links can dramatically improve your visibility to potential customers. This guide breaks down everything you need to know into practical, actionable steps.

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. These hyperlinks – or simply ‘links’ – are how users and search engines navigate the web, connecting different pages and websites together. Think of it as a vast network where each link serves as a pathway that search engines can follow to discover and understand websites.

Not every link needs to be actively built. Many valuable links occur naturally – a satisfied customer might mention your excellent service on their blog, a local news website might feature your community project, or an industry publication might reference your expert advice. These natural, unsolicited links are incredibly valuable and often signal to search engines that your website is genuinely worth recommending.

In fact, earning links without asking for them is considered the holy grail of SEO. It happens when you’ve created something truly link-worthy, whether that’s through:

⚡ Exceptional service that gets people talking

⚡ Valuable content that others want to reference

⚡ Innovative solutions to industry problems

⚡ Noteworthy community involvement

⚡ Expert insights into your trade

However, waiting for natural links isn’t always enough. That’s why businesses also use proactive link-building strategies to help build their authority and improve their visibility in search results. This involves identifying quality link opportunities and reaching out to relevant websites in your industry or local area.

Search engines use links in two fundamental ways:

  1. Discovery: Links help search engines find and crawl your website. They follow these connections to understand how different pages and websites relate to each other.
  2. Ranking: Links are a key factor in how search engines evaluate and rank websites. Quality links from relevant websites signal to search engines that your content is valuable and authoritative in your field.

Citations and directory listings serve as a fundamental part of any local trade business’s online presence, but their importance is often overstated in the SEO community. While they’re valuable for establishing your business’s legitimacy in Google’s eyes, you don’t need hundreds of them to see results.

Citations are online mentions of your business that include your name, address, phone number (NAP), and website URL. While not all citations include clickable links, they help verify your business’s existence and service area to search engines. The key is consistency – your business information should be identical across all listings.

In our experience, building a strong foundation of 50-100 quality citations is sufficient for most trade businesses. Focus on the essential major platforms and industry-specific directories. What matters most is the quality and relevance of these listings, not the quantity.

To get started, download our curated list of the top 50 citation sites for trade businesses. These are the listings that actually matter for your industry. If you’re short on time, there are reliable citation-building services on Fiverr that can handle this for you – while not ideal, this is still better than having no citations at all.

Getting Citations Indexed

Once your citations are built, it’s crucial to run the live links through an indexing tool like Speedy Indexer. From our experience, as many as 80% of citations never get indexed by Google, making them essentially useless until they’re discovered.

Simply download the Telegram application to interact with the Speedy bot, then create a new task and submit your citation URLs. When you sign up, you’ll get 100 free credits to start with.

If you need more credits, you can get 5000 for just $22 USD, which is more than enough for your entire SEO campaign. This indexing service speeds up the process of getting your citation links crawled and indexed by search engines.

Speedy Indexer Bot

One way to check if your citation or link is indexed is to type site: URL into Google (replace URL with your citation link). If it returns an image like the one below, it means Google has not indexed the link.

Link Not Indexed

Speedy Index can be used for any backlink you build on websites you don’t control. For websites you do own, you can submit URLs directly through Google Search Console for indexing.

Content marketing, in its purest form, aims to create such high-quality, relevant content that other websites naturally link to it as a reference in their articles. For trade businesses, this could mean creating truly valuable assets that solve real problems for your audience.

Take an air conditioning running cost calculator (like this excellent example from Ford & Doonan) as an interactive tool that requires custom development to create. These calculators often need a developer to uniquely code them to ensure accuracy and usability, making them valuable but resource-intensive assets. This type of content naturally accumulates backlinks – exactly as we’ve just demonstrated by linking to their calculator in this article.

Another example is creating comprehensive guides like “how to get an electrical apprenticeship” – pieces that naturally attract backlinks from industry publishers and educational websites.

However, let’s be realistic about content marketing for trade businesses. While this strategy can work, it requires substantial time and resources to produce content of this calibre. Creating truly link-worthy content isn’t just about writing a basic article – it often requires unique research, data, or interactive elements that provide genuine value to your industry.

That said, producing high-quality content should still be a core part of your local SEO strategy. We’ve noticed that articles ranking in the top positions of Google tend to naturally accumulate backlinks over time – publishers often look to top-ranking content as authoritative sources worth referencing. Focus on making your content so comprehensive and well-optimised that it deserves to rank at the top.

Download our Electrician Keywords Master Document for blog topic ideas and keyword search volumes to help guide your content creation efforts.

A solid starting point for finding backlink opportunities is to analyse your top-ranking competitors’ backlink portfolios.

If Google is rewarding these businesses with top positions in search results, their backlink strategy (among other factors) is likely contributing to their success.

By examining these competitors, we can find link opportunities that are already working in your industry.

Another effective approach is to search for relevant websites in related niches. For trade businesses, these typically include:

⚡ Home improvement and renovation websites

⚡ Real estate and property websites

⚡ Construction industry publications

⚡ Trade school and apprenticeship websites

⚡ Local news and community sites

To start analysing your competitors’ backlinks, you’ll need access to either Ahrefs or Semrush. In this guide, we’ll walk through the process using Ahrefs.

  1. Log into your Ahrefs dashboard
  2. Enter your competitor’s website URL into the search bar at the top
Ahrefs Search Bar

3. Click on ‘Backlinks’ in the menu to view all their backlinks

Select Backlinks

4. Select ‘Show best links only’ and then show results

This will show you all of the competitor’s highest-quality backlinks.

Best Backlinks

5. On the right-hand side of the page, select ‘Export’

Repeat this process for multiple high-ranking businesses in your industry by searching for terms like “Electrician Perth”, “Electrician Darwin”, “Electrician Sydney” etc. By looking at successful trade businesses across different cities, you can build a comprehensive list of proven link opportunities. Start compiling all these URLs into a spreadsheet.

In the next section of this guide, we will show you how to get in contact with these websites and publishers and acquire backlinks from them.

To effectively build backlinks through email outreach, you’ll need a few essential tools. While this can be expensive with multiple subscriptions, we recommend using AppSumo to find lifetime deals on these programs – they generally all work the same way and can save you significant money.

Email Scraping Software:
First, you’ll need a tool to find contact information from your compiled URLs. We use Outscraper, which scans websites and returns contact details, focusing primarily on email addresses.

Choose the email and contact scraper task in Outscraper. Copy and paste all your compiled URLs into the platform. Once this is completed, download all the scraped email addresses.

Outscraper

Email Verification Tool:
Next, you’ll need to verify these emails using a tool like Reeon. This crucial step checks whether email addresses are active and safe to contact. Without verification, sending too many emails to dead addresses can get your domain penalised, causing your outreach emails to land in spam folders.

Copy all of your email addresses into the bulk email verification tool and then download the CSV file once completed.

Reeon Verification

Sort through the spreadsheet to where it says “is_safe_to_send” – all of the email addresses that say ‘true’ are good verified email addresses ready to receive emails.

Is_safe_to_send

Email Outreach Platform:
Finally, you need a platform to manage your outreach campaigns. If you cannot find a current deal on AppSumo, we recommend Instantly.ai as our preferred email client. We currently use a platform called Mail Lead to set up bulk email campaigns to ask for guest posts and link insertions on other websites.

When setting up an email outreach account, we recommend purchasing a new domain and hosting email address through Google or Outlook as these have the most trusted servers and better inbox placement rates. Using a separate domain for outreach protects your main business email domain from potential penalties that could affect email deliverability.

Before starting your campaigns, it’s crucial to properly configure your new domain. Set up your SPF, DMARC, and DKIM records in your domain DNS settings for optimum email delivery. This technical setup is essential for establishing trust with email providers and improving delivery rates.

It’s also recommended to use your email client’s warmup feature for at least 2 weeks before sending any outreach emails. This gradually builds your domain’s reputation with email providers and significantly improves your chances of landing in inboxes rather than spam folders.

You’re now ready to create your email campaign.

Ad Leads

Here you will have to add your verified emails, come up with the email copy and sequence then schedule the campaign to start.

For the email copy, we believe in being direct about paid link insertions or guest posts. While many experts recommend trying to get free links or guest posts, we’ve found this generally doesn’t work and wastes valuable time.

Our approach is to send a substantial volume of emails and record all responses, noting down the cost for each link opportunity. Download our free backlink outreach document to help you track all of your outreach campaigns.

Here’s an example of an effective email template we use:

Email Sequence

And here’s our follow-up email sent 2 days later to catch anyone who missed our first message:

Follow Up Email

There’s far more to assessing backlink quality than just looking at Domain Rating and traffic numbers. It’s imperative that you avoid spammy sites that could return toxic backlinks to your website.

One key way to evaluate a site’s quality is to examine its traffic graph over its entire existence. If you see a pattern like the one below where traffic has fallen off a cliff, it’s safe to assume this site contains spammy content and backlinks. This site has been penalised by Google and getting a link from such a site will likely do more harm than good.

SemRush Traffic Graph

Another critical indicator is to check the site’s top organic keywords. If these keywords are unrelated to your industry or aren’t even in English, stay well clear.

Top Organic Keywords

Another good rule to follow is that if any publisher allows CBD, Casino or Adult content on their site, you should also avoid it.

Selecting the Right Anchor Text

Anchor text is simply the clickable text within a link that takes you to another webpage. For example, when you see “click here” in blue on a website, that’s the anchor text.

Many SEO experts have varying opinions on anchor text usage in backlinks, with some suggesting that even branded anchor text (using your business name) could potentially be harmful.

In our experience, the best approach is to build a diverse backlink profile. This means having a mix of link insertions, guest posts, and Digital PR backlinks with a range of different anchor texts – from your brand name to various services you offer and locations you service.

If you’ve made it this far, you’ll understand that effective link building requires significant time, tools, and expertise. While the process we’ve outlined works, many trade business owners simply don’t have the bandwidth to manage it alongside running their business.

That’s where we can help. Get in touch for a free, no-obligation proposal where we’ll conduct a deep dive analysis of your website and your biggest competitors. We’ll create a customised strategy showing exactly how we can bridge the gap in backlinks and referring domains to help you outrank them in Google search results.

Over years of manual outreach, we’ve amassed a substantial database of industry-relevant backlink opportunities specifically for trade businesses. We can build these links for your website without all the hassle – just leave it to us.