Link building from real Australian websites, not link farms
Google still ranks the sites other websites vouch for. Our in-house outreach team earns those links from Australian publishers, industry sites and local directories, then lists every one in your monthly report with the linking site's traffic beside it.
How we vet a site before we ask it for a link
A link is a vote, and Google weighs who is voting. Every prospect our outreach team finds goes through the same four checks before an email goes out, and a site that fails any of them comes off the list.
It covers what you do
A plumbing supplier's blog linking to a plumber counts for more than a news site that covers everything. Relevance to your trade or your city is the first check, ahead of any authority score.
People actually read it
We check the site's organic traffic in Ahrefs before anything else. A domain with a high authority score and no visitors is a link farm dressed up as a publisher until it proves otherwise, and Google has learned to ignore those.
The link sits inside the content
A link in the body of an article, placed where a reader would click it, carries weight. Footer links, sitewide blogrolls and pages with 200 outbound links carry almost none, so they never make the list.
The anchor text reads naturally
Most anchors should be your brand name or the page title, with a small share of keyword anchors. A profile stuffed with exact-match anchors is what gets sites penalised, and we inherit plenty of those.
Our link building services: what every campaign includes
Six kinds of work, run every month by the outreach team on our payroll. The mix depends on your market. A Penrith electrician needs citations and local links first; a national store needs publishers.
Outreach and guest content
Our outreach team finds Australian sites that cover your industry, pitches them something worth publishing, and our writers produce it. The link goes inside an article a reader would finish. The publisher relationships behind this have been built over 10+ years, and every placement passes the four checks above before it is pitched.
Our guide to guest postingDigital PR
Data stories, surveys and expert comment that journalists and bloggers want to cover. These are the slowest links to earn and the strongest ones you can get. Our own politics infographic was picked up by Business Insider Australia, Inc and Entrepreneur.
How we did itCitations and directories
The directories that matter for your trade and your city: industry associations, chambers of commerce, supplier listings and the major Australian business directories, with your name, address and phone identical on every one. For a local business this is the foundation the rest of the campaign stands on.
53 Australian citation sitesUnlinked mentions and lost links
Sites that already mention your business without linking to it, suppliers who list you as a stockist, and links that broke when one of your pages moved. Asking for these is the quickest win in link building, because the site owner already knows who you are.
Internal links
The links between your own pages decide where the authority from every new link ends up. We map them so it flows to the service, category and suburb pages you want ranking. Left alone, most of it pools on the homepage.
Internal linking, explainedLink audits and clean-up
Every campaign starts with a pull of every domain pointing at your site. Spam, bought links and private blog networks get listed, removed where the owner answers and disavowed where they don't. A furniture retailer penalised for an offshore link builder's work recovered and went on to 140% more organic revenue than before the drop.
How we clean up a link profileHow we earned links from Business Insider, Inc and Entrepreneur
Ahead of the 2016 federal election we ran Google Autocomplete, Keyword Planner and Trends over what Australians were searching about politics, and turned it into an infographic. For the length of the campaign our outreach team pitched it to political bloggers, business writers and property sites, and kept following up.
It earned links from more than 30 domains, including Business Insider Australia, Inc, Entrepreneur and the Huffington Post. Our own site went from no ranking keywords in Google Australia to pages one to three for high-value terms. Client campaigns run on the same method, with a story built for your industry.
Read how the campaign worked
What happened after the links went in
Six campaigns where link building did the heavy lifting. Four of them started with a clean-up of links someone else had built.
Google Search 
Furniture retail · Australia How Hudson Furniture beat a Google penalty and grew organic revenue 140% 220%Google visibilityRead the case study 
Google Search 
Refurbished computers · Sydney, NSW How we grew Recompute's organic revenue 286% and organic traffic 900% 286%Organic revenueRead the case study 
Google Search 
Private car hire · Sydney, NSW How Sydney City Chauffeurs tripled their leads from the same spend 211%More leads a monthRead the case study 
Google Search 
Office technology · Australia How Konica Minolta recovered from a bad migration and grew organic traffic 84% 160%Google visibilityRead the case study 
Google Search 
Slate roofing · Sydney, NSW How First Class Slate got back to #1 for slate roofing Sydney #1slate roofing sydneyRead the case study 
Google Search 
Pool builder · Sydney, NSW How Mr Pools doubled leads and hit #2 for custom pools in two months 100%More leadsRead the case study Cleaning up after a bad link builder
Bought links, private blog networks and spammy directories are the most common thing we inherit. They work for a few months, then an algorithm update or a manual action takes the rankings and the traffic with them. Four of the six campaigns above started with a clean-up.
Pull every link
Ahrefs and Search Console, merged into one list of every domain pointing at the site. Either tool on its own misses some.
Read before you cut
A person looks at each domain. Plenty of odd-looking links are harmless, and disavowing good ones costs rankings. What goes on the list is spam, paid placements and networks that exist only to game Google.
Remove, then disavow
Site owners get asked to take the link down. Whatever stays up goes into a disavow file in Search Console, and if there is a manual action, a reconsideration request goes in with the evidence attached.
Rebuild with links that last
A clean-up leaves a gap, and earned links fill it. A Sydney chauffeur company arrived with a domain rating of zero and a profile full of spam, and went from 11 keywords on page one to 85.
We have worked with a number of different agencies in the past who promised the world but delivered lacklustre results and excuses. Local Digital have been transparent since day one and have always delivered on their promises.
Links you can check, from a team you can message
Rob HoangSEO Lead 
Kat ZhuSenior SEO Specialist
Dom HereraSenior SEO SpecialistWhat link building costs
Link building sits inside every SEO retainer, next to the content and technical work that makes the links count. The share of the month spent on links grows with how far behind your competitors you are, and the proposal shows that gap in referring domains.
Already have an SEO team and only need the links? Ask about a links-only campaign on the first call and we'll price it against your competitors' link profiles.
We used AI, scrapers and our own tools to audit the pricing of 220+ Australian SEO agencies and prepare the ultimate guide to what SEO actually costs.
How much does SEO cost in Australia? Our breakdown of what agencies chargeThe SEO Show gives away link building ideas for free
Michael and Arthur have hosted The SEO Show since June 2021, and links keep coming up: free link ideas, why a competitor with a worse business outranks you, and what to do about the links a bad agency left behind. Episode 111 has twelve link building ideas you can run yourself.
Finalist, Best Business Podcast 2022
Link building reading
How We Scored Links From The Biggest Sites On The Internet We do a lot of SEO work for clients but have never really done any for our own site. 
Michael Costin · 6 Nov 2016 
Key Metrics for Assessing Quality Links in Link Building Understand the power of quality links in SEO. Learn key metrics to assess link quality and enhance your site's authority and search rankings. 
Arthur Fabik · 20 Jan 2026 
Link Building Techniques in the Modern SEO Era As we say on our SEO podcast, link building is everyone's favourite topic. That's because links really work. Michael Costin · 13 Feb 2024 
Types of Backlinks You Need to Know in SEO Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks. It’s a term you’ve probably seen everywhere, but the difference between quality and quantity is often misunderstood. 
Dominic Sergi · 14 Nov 2025 
Anchor Text 101: Your Essential Guide to Optimising Link Text In search engine optimisation, anchor text is a term you'll frequently encounter. 
Robert Hoang · 29 Jan 2025 
The Ultimate List of 53 Australian Directory & Citation Links Do you run a local business? Here's a quick SEO tip that will take very little time to implement and will have a positive impact on your business. Michael Costin · 8 Jan 2020 From first call to first report
Free SEO audit and proposal
Send us your website. We crawl it, check your competitors and come back with the pages to cut, keep and rebuild, plus a price. If SEO is the wrong tool for your business we'll say so and suggest what's right.
A 90-day plan
Month one is foundations: technical fixes, tracking, the keyword map and your SEO strategy. Months two and three are the build: new pages, rebuilt pages, content and the first links.
Build, every month
Pages, content, links and technical work, on a schedule you can see on the project board. Questions go in Slack and get answered by the person doing the work.
Report on leads
Calls, forms and sales from organic search, this month against last. Then we adjust next month's plan based on what the phone did.
The rest of our SEO services
SEO services, Australia-wide
The parent page: the full campaign, the pricing, the team and results from every state.
Read moreSEO agency Sydney
The Parramatta office, and what a campaign looks like in the most contested market in the country.
Read moreSEO agency Gold Coast
Our Queensland team in Burleigh Heads, working from Coolangatta to Southport.
Read moreEcommerce SEO
Category pages, product templates, filters and links for online stores, reported as organic revenue.
Read moreWant to know what your link profile is missing?
Send the website over. The free audit pulls every domain linking to you and to your top three competitors, flags anything harmful, and shows the gap in referring domains, read by a person before it comes back.
Common link building questions
An outreach team earning links to your website from other sites, so Google trusts it more. A good service finds relevant sites with real readers, gives them a reason to link, and reports every link it lands. A bad one sells you a spreadsheet of links from sites nobody visits.
Cheap packages sell a fixed number of links a month, and those links come from sites that exist to sell them. Ours is part of the SEO retainer, which starts at $2,000 a month with content and technical work inside it, because links pointing at a slow site with thin pages are money spent twice. We audited what 232 Australian agencies charge and published every number. What Australian agencies charge →
Yes. Every link comes from outreach to a real site that people read, placed inside the content, with anchor text a person would write. That is the kind of link Google rewards, and we spend a fair share of our week cleaning up the other kind for new clients. Black hat tactics to avoid →
Enough to close the gap to the pages already ranking for your terms. We pull the referring domains for the top five results, compare them with yours, and set the monthly target from the difference. For a local service business that can be a few dozen good links. For a national store it runs into the hundreds.
A link counts once Google recrawls the page it sits on, which takes anywhere from days to a couple of months. A Sydney pool builder's main term went from page two to #2 inside two months, with local citations laid first and niche links after them.
Yes. Links from local sites, such as your council, chamber of commerce, suppliers, local news and community groups, lift both the website and the map pack. Consistent citations on the major directories back up your Google Business Profile. Our Google Maps service →
Digital PR is one way of building links: a story, study or expert comment pitched to journalists and publishers. Link building covers that plus guest content, citations, reclaimed mentions and internal links. Digital PR earns the strongest links and takes the longest. Our digital PR campaign →
Yes, and four of the six case studies on this page started that way. We audit every linking domain, remove or disavow the harmful ones, and file a reconsideration request if there is a manual action. Then the rebuild starts. How the clean-up works →
Most clients get it inside an SEO retainer, because links to a site with technical problems or thin pages go to waste. If your site is in good shape and you already have an SEO team, ask about a links-only campaign on the first call.
Yes. The monthly report lists every link with the page it sits on, that site's traffic, the anchor text and the date it went live. You can click through and check each one.
Yes. They are earned placements on other people's websites, so they stay live after you go. There is a three-month minimum, then month to month with no notice period. Read the Very Fair Terms →
