What Is Link Building?

There are three types of links – inbound links, which is what we refer to when we say “link building”, internal links and external links.

Inbound Links

Acquiring inbound links means having hyperlinks placed on other websites to your own. These links—often called backlinks—act like votes of confidence, signaling to search engines that your content is trustworthy, valuable, and authoritative. 

Inbound links can be earned organically (when others naturally link to your content), built manually through outreach and partnerships, or acquired via strategies like guest posting, digital PR, and business directory submissions.

Backlinks are important for organic search results, Google Map Pack results and being cited by LLMs (large language models such as ChatGPT or Gemini).

Internal Links

Internal link building is the process of adding links on your website to other content. So for example, if I was talking about how to rank higher in the map pack, I added a hyperlink “how to rank higher in the map pack” to an internal resource page of mine. These allow search engines to effectively crawl and understand your website.

External Links

External links are links placed on your website to other websites. For example, I often cite this whitepaper when discussing ranking factors for the Google Business Page. This is an external link from Salt Water Digital and an inbound link to Whitespark.

What Is The Difference Between Do-Follow Vs. No-Follow Links

You might SEO’s talk about Do-Follow vs. No-Follow backlinks.

Do-Follow Links:
These are standard hyperlinks that pass SEO value (known as “link juice”) from the referring site to the linked site. Search engines crawl these links, and they can positively influence your rankings.

No-Follow Links:
These links include a rel=”nofollow” attribute, which tells search engines not to follow or pass SEO value to the linked site. Originally designed to combat spam, they don’t directly impact search rankings. Typically this html markup is used for  paid links, affiliate links, and user-submitted content.

How Google weights these is difficult to say, the standard answer is that no-follow links pass no link juice. I suspect this isn’t entirely true and they still serve as a brand mention which can be helpful for ranking in both organic and in LLMs.

When we acquire links for clients they are almost exclusively do-follow links. There are some exceptions however, we generally don’t count no-follow links towards our link total.

Is Link Building Still Important for Local SEO?

For every local SEO campaign we run there are three areas we focus on. As of June 20th, 2025 the order of the importance:

1. Local Map Pack
2. Organic Rankings
3. LLMs

Eventually, I expected LLMs will surpass organic rankings to take over the #2 spot but for now this is where our focus lies.

Is Link Building Important for ranking in the Local Map Pack?

Local SEO experts agree, yes it still is important. It has diminished over the years but it’s still the fourth most important factor behind Google Business Page signals, On-Page signals and Review signals. This is a fun little graphic from Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors

Image Credit: White Spark

Here’s another interesting data point. If you scroll down on this article the “Let’s Talk About Link Building (The Right Way)” you’ll see an image of a map pack – it was essentially a guest post on a non industry relevant company website. 

Image Credit: Sterling Sky

Map pack rankings are difficult to measure in a bubble. They fluctuate wildly and assuming you’re running an SEO campaign odds are you’re also adding content to the site, improving on-page SEO and generating reviews. However, we’ve found that lighter SEO campaigns that include no link building tend to perform worse than those that include link building.

In short, link building helps local map pack results.

Is Link Building Important for Ranking Organically

This one is a little bit more straight forward. There is a direct correlation between domain authority (an imperfect metric that rises with links built) to organic rankings. 

Why are some franchises so prevalent in the organic search results? There are really two reasons 

1. They have a ton of branded search
2. They have massive domain authority

Take 1800GotJunk. They rank extremely well for “junk removal” in every city I tested. Here is a non-localized version of their keyword rankings.

In short, link building helps organic ranking results.

Is Link Building Important for LLMs

Ranking well in LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews, Perplexity and so forth correlates strongly with ranking well in organic search results.

Back to our old friends 1800GotJunk. Here is the “conversational search” I might use to find a junk removal company. Guess who shows up #1 in ChatGPT

The other four that show up, also show up on the first page of Google’s Organic Search.

Compare that to the local map pack and only ⅓ show up. The important distinction here is Google Map Pack results are proximity driven. 1 800 Got Junk doesn’t show up in my map pack results despite having the most reviews in the city because 

1. They’re not very close to me
2. They use a service area business instead of a physical location.

This might be the most compelling reason we want to continue to focus on local organic search and not just map pack results because even as LLMs siphon clicks from organic search results, the correlation is extremely high for local searches.

What Link Building Strategies Do You Use?

Building links on a local level is notoriously fickle. Most local businesses don’t have several thousand dollars per month to spend on link building alone. 

Link building scales extremely well for larger campaigns. You can do mass outreach, PR, linkable assets and so forth. Those techniques break down when you’re building a handful of links per month.

The main ways we acquire links are:

1. Guest posting. 
2. Link inserts
3. Digital PR (for larger campaigns)
4. Citations (local directories)

We have a few other ways we acquire local links but those are our bread and butter.

We try to look at sites that are relevant, real websites that get traffic. I always tell clients, if you’re a personal trainer my preference would be to acquire links from other businesses in the same industry or adjacent industries, regardless of the domain authority or how much traffic they get.

What Are Citations

Citations are part of all of our campaigns but they’re generally not counted as links – unless it’s local chamber of commerce or some other highly relevant directory that is paid. 

A citation is a link that displays your name, address and phone number. Yelp is the easiest example – here is Salt Water Digital’s Yelp Listing. These are helpful for all three: Google Business Page rankings, Organic Search Results and LLMs.