Place before price
Picking donor sites for your state and town
A bakery in Duluth and a law office in Phoenix need different links. Here is how to match donors to your place, using the filters we actually have.
Plain answer
Match the donor to the customer, not to the map
Among local link building tips, this one comes first: most of the lift comes from relevance to your trade and your region. The marketplace filters by niche, language, Domain Rating, traffic and price. It has no state filter, so you read each donor's own pages to see where it sits.
- Open the donor's About page and a few articles
- Look for named towns, counties or school districts
- Skip any site that covers every state with the same text
What a place usually needs
| Where you are | What helps most | What wastes money |
|---|---|---|
| Big metro, such as Chicago or Houston | Trade and neighbourhood sites, plus a few strong niche donors | Broad news sites with no local angle |
| Mid-size city, such as Boise or Tulsa | City guides, school and club sites, one regional paper | Dozens of cheap links on random topics |
| Small town under 20,000 people | The town paper, the chamber, the high school booster page | Paying $200 for one link when $20 would do |
| Statewide service, such as roofing across Ohio | Trade sites that mention the state, plus one page per metro | One generic page for the whole state |
Reading a donor's location by hand
Open the site and scroll. A real local publisher names streets, teams and events. It will mention the county fair or the new overpass, and a copy-paste site will not.
Then check the language column in the marketplace, because English alone is not much of a filter in America. Use niche as your main lever, and match it to the service you sell, whether that is dental, roofing, tax prep or pet care.
Domain Rating helps, but it is an Ahrefs metric and it says nothing about town. A DR 25 site that your neighbours read can beat a DR 60 site they have never heard of. Judge by who reads it.
A fifteen-minute shortlist
- 1
Write your service area
List the cities, counties and the one state you serve. Keep it to ten names at most.
- 2
Filter by niche and price
Set a price ceiling first. With $100, aim for rows under $25 and see what remains.
- 3
Open ten donors
Read one article on each. Drop anything that looks stuffed with unrelated topics.
- 4
Add the best five to the basket
Nothing is charged at this step. Sleep on it and come back.
Google's link spam update of December 2022 and the March 2024 core and spam updates both target links made to manipulate rankings. Relevance and real readers are the safe harbour, though no one can promise safety.
Three slips we see on place-based plans
Chasing the state capital
A link from a big city site does little for a business that serves a town two hours away.
Trusting the word local
Many sites say local in the title and publish the same text for fifty towns. Read before you buy.
Forgetting the page
A link to a thin page wastes the click. Build the page first, then link to it.
When one state is not enough
A state is a coarse unit, and a county or a metro area is often a better one. Pick the smallest area where you really do business.
Some owners serve two or three states, such as a moving company near the Georgia and Alabama line. Treat each state as its own small campaign.
Start where the phone rings most. Spend the first $100 there. Two or three links in each of two states beat one link in six places. Then review Search Console after a few weeks and see which city page gained impressions.
The city page guide covers how to build one landing page per place, and the budget page shows how to split the money. For the free routes, read about local newspapers next.