Every business owner has probably searched for their company name on Google and felt worried when it didn’t show up on the first page. In today’s world, where people use the internet a lot, not being visible on search engines means you are invisible to your customers.The good news is that with a plan, any business, no matter how big or small or what industry it is in can improve where it shows up in search results.
The foundation of that plan is based on two things: SEO and link building.
Understanding both of these and how they work together is really valuable for businesses, in 2026 can help with local SEO and link building.
Starting From the Beginning: What Is SEO?
When you want your website to show up near the top of the list when people search for something on the internet you need to do Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. Search Engine Optimisation is the process of making your website better so that it appears higher in the results that Search Engine Optimisation helps with which’re the pages that come up when you use a search engine. Most people use Google to search for things. Google handles more than 90 percent of all searches that people do all around the world.
When someone searches for “plumber in Leeds” or “best accountant near me,” Google runs through billions of web pages in fractions of a second and decides which results to show first. SEO is how you influence that decision in your favour.
At the heart of SEO are three areas.
On-page SEO is about what you do on your website. This includes the content you create, the words you choose, how you organize your pages and how quickly they load.
Off-page SEO is about actions you take outside your website. It mainly involves getting links from websites.
Technical SEO is about making sure your website is set up correctly. This way search engines can easily crawl and index your content.
These three areas are the foundation of a search engine plan. If you want your business to grow steadily from search engines without spending much on ads, investing in SEO is a good idea. SEO helps you get visitors without paying for ads. A good digital marketing service can help you with this. Investing in SEO and a quality digital marketing service is the way to achieve long-term growth.
What Makes Local SEO Different?
While general SEO targets broad search visibility, local SEO is specifically about making your business visible to people searching in a particular geographic area. For the vast majority of businesses — restaurants, solicitors, dentists, estate agents, retail shops, tradespeople — local customers are the lifeblood of revenue. Local SEO ensures you show up when those customers are actively looking for what you offer.
Local SEO involves a distinct set of tactics. It means optimising your website with location-specific keywords, building local citations (mentions of your business name, address, and phone number across directories), earning reviews from real customers, and — perhaps most importantly — managing your Google My Business profile effectively.
When a customer in your city searches for your type of service, Google often shows a “local pack” — that prominent box with a map and three business listings that appears above the organic results. Getting into that local pack is enormously valuable. It puts your business directly in front of high-intent local searchers at exactly the moment they’re ready to make a decision. Local SEO is how you get there.
Google My Business: Your Most Powerful Free Tool
If there is one thing a local business should prioritise above almost everything else in its digital presence, it is claiming and optimising its Google My Business (GMB) profile — now officially called Google Business Profile. This free listing from Google is what populates that local map pack and provides searchers with your address, phone number, opening hours, photos, and customer reviews at a glance.
An incomplete or unverified GMB profile is a missed opportunity of significant proportions. Businesses with fully optimised profiles — with accurate information, high-quality photos, regular posts, and a steady stream of genuine reviews — consistently outperform competitors who’ve neglected theirs.
Google looks at your Google My Business profile to see how relevant you are to an area. The more you fill out and use your profile the more Google trusts that your business is a match for people searching locally.
Some small things you can do to build trust are:
- Reply to reviews
- Post updates
- List your services
- Keep your business hours correct
These actions show Google and potential customers that you are active and reliable.
By doing these things you are helping Google understand that your business is a fit for local searchers.
Link Building: Why Other Websites Talking About You Matters
If local SEO helps Google know where you are and who you serve then link building shows Google how much the wider web trusts you. A backlink is like a recommendation from another website that links to yours. When big websites that people trust link to your business Google thinks your site is reliable and should rank high.
This is why link building is one of the ways to improve your websites ranking. Businesses with good backlinks always rank higher than those without even if their website content is similar.
The hard part is getting backlinks, It takes time, planning and work. There are two effective ways to get backlinks:
- Guest posting
- Press releases.
Guest Posting: Strategic Content That Earns Links
Guest posting is when you write an article for another website in your industry or area and they give you a link back to your site. This is a way to get backlinks because the link is in a real article on a website that gets lots of visitors.
For businesses writing guest posts for local publications, news blogs or community websites is especially good. A link from a respected local website makes your backlink profile stronger and shows that you are relevant to the local area. Both of these things help you rank higher in search results.
The important things for guest posting are relevance and quality. If you write an article for a website that is respected in your field it will help your rankings more than getting many links from unrelated websites that are not very good. Businesses that focus on providing value through guest posting rather than just trying to get links get the best results over time.
Guest posting helps because it gives you a link on a website that people actually visit. This link is in an article that’s helpful to readers. When you write guest posts you should think about what will help the people reading the article. This way you get a link and the people reading the article get something useful.
If you do guest posting in a way it can really help your website. You should look for websites that are related to yours and that have articles. Then you can write an article for them. Get a link back to your site. This can help you get visitors and make your website stronger.
Press Releases: Amplifying Your Business at Key Moments
Press releases are something that people do not use enough when it comes to search engine optimization and building links. If you send out a press release through a trustworthy news service it can get your company’s story on a lot of news and media websites at the same time. And each one of these websites might link back to your website.
The best press releases are about something that’s really worth talking about: when a business is starting a new place or opening, someone is getting a big award, a company is doing something good for the community or two companies are working together. Local reporters and editors are always looking for stories to tell and a good press release gives them what they need. When a local newspaper or a business magazine writes about your company on their own and includes a link to your website that link is very valuable.
From a search engine optimization point of view press releases help make your company look more real, bring people to your website and make your brand more well known. All while helping to build the links to your website that Google uses to figure out if your company is trustworthy and press releases are a big part of local search engine optimization and link building.
Bringing It All Together
The businesses that always do well on Google are not doing one thing well. They are doing things well all the time. They have made their website good for the words people search for they have an active Google My Business profile they have gotten real reviews from customers they have gotten links to their website from other websites by writing guest posts and sending out press releases and they have worked with a good digital marketing service to keep their plan working well and up to date.
This does not happen quickly. That is a good thing. Google likes businesses that keep trying for a time. Every good link to their website every time they are mentioned in a listing every post they make on Google My Business helps to build trust and makes them look more important and this gets harder and harder for other businesses to catch up.
For any business that wants to keep growing and be found on search, local SEO and link building are necessary. They are the key to making it work.. Working with a good digital marketing service to make this happen is a very smart thing for a business to do for its future.
The businesses that show up on the page of Google did not get there by chance. They got there because they knew it was important to be found and then they did the work to make it happen. They understood that Google is where people look for things and they wanted to be seen so they made a plan and followed it. Google is where people go to find things and the businesses that are on the top pages are the ones that people see and that is why they are doing well.
