If you want to be the best tennis player in the world, you may start out trying and soon find out that it’s hopeless—that other people blow right by you. However, if you want to become the best plumbing contractor in Bemidji, that is probably doable by two-thirds of you.
– Charlie Munger
For local SEO, businesses must focus on the cities of their physical offices before all else.
Relevancy here means not just keywords and links related to your industry but also for your locations.
Proximity of the business address to the searcher is still the main factor for the local map pack or Google My Business listings at the top. The organic results, most often below this pack, are influenced by local factors too. Going further, GMB profiles and third-party review sites are vital, if not more important than your own site, but this is another discussion…
If you serve customers at your office or at their location near yours, earn an interview or promotion in that local news source before you prioritize a one-liner for a guest blog on Forbes.
Here’s a good litmus test for the value of a backlink: could this, if SEO didn’t exist, generate leads itself?
Be the biggest fish in your small pond!