Scalable Link Building Ideas for Location Service Pages

By Garrett French

July 6, 2023

Filed under: Citation Labs News, Content Planning, Content Strategy, Enterprise Link Building Tips, Local Link Building

Scalable Link Building Ideas for Location Service Pages: Cleaning Services Edition

Local sales pages present one of link building’s greatest challenges.

Here’s our approach – as always we begin with a deep dive on a URL to understand the target customer, as well as the “decision space” within which purchases occur.

Always Start With The Page

For this exercise we’re examining a page from the cleaning services company Coit. Their Denver page, specifically: https://www.coit.com/denver 

We pull out key information such as:

“Cleaning Services For Your Home And Business”

We make note of things like stated benefits as well as any restrictors (eg… Location) and audience.

>> Benefits:

  • Quality
  • Customer Service
  • Trust

Not really unique selling propositions but worth considering in terms of values such as “quality,” in that we can quantify what goes into making one approach to cleaning better or “higher quality” than another.

>> Location:

  • Denver

This will be important for our publisher prospecting, as well as our concepts. We need to focus on Denver-relevant topics and publishers.

>> Audiences:

  • B2C – home
  • B2B – commercial

The page itself functions as a location-specific cleaning category page, given the focus on two distinct customer audiences (B2B and B2C from the same page) as well as four key task types with their own unique pages.

The good news is that building links to the Denver category page will likely have ranking benefit to the directly-linked sub pages.

>> Task Categories:

  • air ducts: location | home/commercial
  • carpets: location | home/commercial
  • stone: location | home/commercial
  • area rugs: location | home/commercial
  • fire: location
  • mold: location
  • flood: location

This is a fairly wide range of types of cleaning and restoration. Some of our linking concepts below could be a better fit for the task-specific sub-pages. We’ll present them all in the assumption that they’ll need all the links they can get to their category page, and that the ranking impact will flow down to the sub-pages.

Leap From Key Benefits to Target Stakeholder Audiences for Link Building

Our target audience is homeowners and people responsible for keeping a commercial space clean and functional.

One question that would be wonderful to learn from Coit – what are life events or circumstances that incite people to seek a cleaning service? On the B2C side, perhaps selling a home creates the desire for a one-time deep clean. Perhaps it’s the birth of a first child or getting a big promotion at work. 

On the B2B side it might be the raising of cleaning rates from a competitor, or perhaps a decline in the quality of the competitor’s cleaning work made painfully visible in customer reviews.

Learning the inciting circumstances for the customer’s cleaning services search helps link builders formulate data points and helpful guidance that should live on the page. What we’re doing in this work is thinking about the benefits of the offering (cleaning services) from the perspective of stakeholders, many of whom may not be actual buyers of the offering.

Here are some Stakeholder “sketches” for both B2C and B2B buyer groups.

Potential B2C Benefit Stakeholders:

  • Allergy-prone children
  • Immuno-comprimised relative
  • Pet-allergic visitors
  • Potential buyers of a home
  • Visiting in-laws
  • Party guests
  • Relations of a couple seeking to ease chore-related tensions
  • Self-care/self-worth feelings
  • Ability to focus on “leveling up” in career or hobby
  • Ability to spend more quality time with family and friends
  • Environment – concern about water usage
  • Safety – concern about potentially harmful cleaning chemicals

Potential B2B Benefit Stakeholders:

  • In-store customers, day-to-day
  • Owner/manager: refocus employees on customer service, not cleaning tasks
  • Owner/manager: improve employee morale by removing tedious cleaning tasks
  • Reputation management – recovering after cleanliness complaints
  • Owner/manager: tidiness, cleanliness impact on productivity, wellness and prosocial employee behaviors

You could also try using ChatGPT to generate these stakeholders. We explore using ChatGPT for link campaign brainstorming here.

In our next section we’ll think of campaign concepts for these stakeholders through the lens of our target location (Denver).

Stakeholder-based Link Building Campaign Concepts for Denver Cleaning Services

In this section we’ll examine some of the potential stakeholders and build out our citable element concepts that will support our campaign ideas (here’s a stand-alone guide to creating citable elements). It’s vital that the citable elements you create align with actual publishers – the potential linkers to whom you’ll be pitching.

One final note before we dig in – stakeholders in the sense that we define them are NOT “buyer personas” for a given offering. It’s great when you’re able to build a campaign out that lines up with actual buyers, but there’s not always enough publishers to provide a ranking return on the investment.

  1. Stakeholder: (B2C) homeowner trying to sell their home
    1. Offering-Specific Challenges:
      1. difficult to justify the cost
    2. Applied Expertise (as Onpage Citable Elements):
      1. Impact of cleanliness on home price, time on market, specifically in Denver
      2. Cost of cleaning vs. impact on home price, time on market
    3. Audience-Facing Publishers:
      1. Local realtors
      2. Local lenders
    4. Campaign Concepts:
      1. 10 Simple Cleaning Tips that Makes Homes Sell Faster
      2. Sparkle Magic: 10 Ways Clean Denver Homes Sell for More
      3. Red Flags for Homebuyers: 6 Signs of Neglectful Homeowners

Sample Citable Element pulled from section b for Stakeholder 1 (homeowner trying to sell home) – and how it might appear on the page (the left column is the new citable element):

  1. Stakeholder: (B2C) parent with allergy-afflicted child
    1. Offering-Specific Challenges:
      1. Knowing and identifying molds/allergens common to Denver
      2. Knowing symptoms of allergic reactions in Denver
      3. Wildfire smoke impact on allergies
    2. Applied Expertise (as Onpage Citable Elements):
      1. Facts about common Denver allergens and steps required for removing them
      2. Where allergens gather, in living spaces
    3. Audience-Facing Publishers:
      1. Wellness/pediatric/allergen professionals in Denver
      2. Denver public health organizations
      3. Local news outlets seeking fact-based local stories about issues facing Denver residents
    4. Campaign Concepts:
      1. Fighting the (Species-Specific Mold/Spore/Pollen) Scourge Attacking Denver
      2. Quick Cleaning Tips that Stop Allergic Responses in Your Kids
      3. Scrubbing Your Home After the Denver-Area Wildfires Pass

Here is a sample citable element that could live on the Denver-area page.

This element calls out top allergens in the area and an estimation of impact.

This could be done relatively easily with publicly available data (one example is the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America‘s ‘Top 2023 Allergy Capitals’ report), and used for covered cities.

The citable element is designed to fit neatly into an outreach campaign.

  1. Stakeholder: (B2C) Partner in relationship seeking to balance chore-load
    1. Offering-Specific Challenges:
      1. How much impact could cleaning services have on my significant relationship
      2. Effective ways to reduce interpersonal resentment
      3. How much impact could cleanliness have on my sense of self worth
    2. Applied Expertise (as Onpage Citable Elements):
      1. Coit researches and publishes guidance on the impact of cleanliness on interpersonal and individual happiness
    3. Audience-Facing Publishers:
      1. Denver-area marriage therapists and mental health professionals
      2. Denver news stations
    4. Campaign Concepts:
      1. You’re Worth It: 10 Self-Care Hacks Proven to Improve Your Sense of Self Worth
      2. Solving the Chore Wars: Bringing Peace into Busy Denver Homes

Enabling link building outreach to news stations as well as Denver-area marriage therapists requires a citable element such as the one posted below (left column). Even better, conduct surveys or interviews with local experts to add to your findings.

  1. Stakeholder: (B2B) Business Owner
    1. Offering-Specific Challenges:
      1. How much will clean, tidy work spaces impact efficiency, safety, productivity and morale?
    2. Applied Expertise (as Onpage Citable Elements):
      1. Coit conducts and publishes research that outlines business results of clean, tidy working spaces. From offices to factories to restaurants (or whichever business type is the key customer).
    3. Audience-Facing Publishers:
      1. Denver business journals
      2. Office/retail space realtors
      3. Co-working space websites
      4. Denver-area Chambers of Commerce
    4. Campaign Concepts:
      1. Clean Means Green: Understanding the Impact of Cleanliness and Orderliness on Productivity

You could build an entire outreach campaign focused on cleanliness and its impact on workplace satisfaction.

  1. Stakeholder: (B2B) Business Owner
    1. Offering-Specific Challenges:
      1. How Do You Respond Effectively to Cleanliness Complaints in Customer Reviews
      2. How Do You Get Customers to Mention in Reviews How Clean You Keep Your Business?
    2. Applied Expertise (as Onpage Citable Elements):
      1. Reputation-management guidance for business owners responding to online complaints of cleanliness
      2. Review requests + signage that draws attention to your cleanliness and asks customers to mention it in reviews
    3. Audience-Facing Publishers:
      1. Chambers of commerce in the Denver area
      2. Local small business marketing agencies
    4. Campaign Concepts:
      1. Reputation Management: Effective Responses to Negative Online Reviews
      2. Going from Customer Satisfaction to Glowing Online Reviews
  1. Stakeholder: Denver community members
    1. Offering-Specific Challenges:
      1. making purchases from brands that genuinely support local community organizations
    2. Applied Expertise (as Onpage Citable Elements):
      1. Description of Coit’s commitment and desire to give back to Denver-area non-profits and community events
    3. Audience-Facing Publishers:
      1. Denver-area non profits and events
    4. Campaign Concepts:
      1. Sponsor/donate services to Denver-area non-profits and events

You could simply request links to your Denver page from non-profits you’re sponsoring. Or you could add a more linkable/citable element to your page. We call these “Advocacy Elements” and will be addressing them further in an upcoming article.

Reliable, white-hat and serp-impacting link volume comes from the relevant connections you can make between the stakeholders and publishers. That’s 6 of the 17 potential campaign concepts outlined… That’s more than enough links to get the page ranking and stay there for years!

Further Reading:

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