Local SEO: Letting the links come naturally

Yes natural backlinking is advisable because Google tends to do something bad if it notices a website's backlinks questionable. The idea is to have quality backlinks over quantity, nevertheless the quality of content & user experience are important.

Even local markets are competitive. If you're in a city that has over 250,000 people in it, and you're not making efforts beyond what you're mentioning, you could find yourself not in the top 3 first page on google where the money is. And every day it gets a little more competitive.

While what you're saying sounds great on the surface, reality indicates that it's just not going to be enough if there's any degree of money to be made from the key phrases one is after. Small business owners are getting pretty internet savvy these days, and some of them are pretty dam competitive in their markets, with their online presences.

Altruism and following rules is a great. But I'm not going to count on competitors to be altruistic or assume that they will follow the rules and take the high ground, when there's perfectly good money to be made wallowing in the ditch with the others from time to time.

Back links as a by product of local branding from customer reviews? Most small business customers don't even know how to make a hyper link. And what review sites let them leave back links? Where do you get this? Any examples?

If you've got something solid that works to get good high PR contextual back links from customers I'm for hearing all about it.

If you want to wait for blog writers to find and use your business. Then be motivated out of altruism to post a glowing report about you on their blog with a back link that's great.

In the meantime me and my clients will just outrank you and take the money by utilizing a PBN built with high PR sites to get our contextual backlinks from.

And I don't put a lot of stock into what Matt Cutts tells me. He's the chief propagandist at google

Best of luck with it!

I read the reviews on their local ads. None of them have back links posted though.

I certainly don't go searching for blog posts on other sites when I want to review a business. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp. They all allow people to leave reviews and those are fine with me.

Sorry to hear about your PBN going down. I would advise maybe taking a course on how to build them. There are a few very reputable members here that sell quality courses that are very detailed on how to do it the right way. I invested heavily into it and have between 15 and 20 now that are very strategically done. I put my own twist on it and am realizing some fantastic success with it.

Oh, and another thing. About your other thread on the google carousel. The way you rank in the top spot there is by getting more citations than your competitor has. Go to Bright Local and they'll give you a one month free account. Run the citation report on your site and it will tell you where all of your citations are currently at and also allow you to run 6 reports per month. Run one of them on your top competitor to see how many they have and who they're with. Then just create more than they have and you'll out rank them.

Or you can just pay Bright Local 3 bucks per to create the citations for you. I just did it for a Fishing Charter Service last week and he's already appearing in the carousel with the logo from his Google+ Local ad.

You're welcome.

Don't forget to tell your client that the citations are $10 bucks per. That's what I do so if I pay 30 dollars for 10 of them. I charge the client $100. Use the white label report published at a link and put your logo and brand on it so that they don't see it's white spark. Don't want them going there and cutting you out by doing it themselves.

And there's nothing wrong with making a fat profit... Nothing at all.

I may do a moz local thing for my next client and see how it works out. If the listings are verified and accurate with links, pics, keywords, and categories I'm good with it.

How is the other employee getting along with Bright? Any advantages to them over Moz?

Another avenue you might look into is a video that Mike Friedman produced that shows you how to use scrape box to uncover NAP directories that may otherwise not show up in a conventional way. Gives you access to local directories you may otherwise not even be aware of. You should check it out. The meat and potatoes starts at about the middle of the video but the whole thing is worth watching.