How to Do Local Link Building for a Hotel or Restaurant

Local link building is the process of earning backlinks from websites that are geographically relevant to your business. For hotels and restaurants, these links tell search engines that your property is a trusted, established part of its local community – which directly influences how high you rank when potential guests search for accommodation or dining nearby.

A single, well-placed link from a credible local source can lift your organic rankings more than dozens of generic links from unrelated websites. The reason is relevance: Google weighs the geographical and topical relationship between the linking site and your business. A Nairobi travel blog linking to a boutique hotel in Westlands carries far more weight than a link from a tech publication in another country.

This guide walks through the most effective local link building tactics for hospitality businesses, whether you operate a restaurant on a Lagos high street, a boutique lodge in the Cape Winelands, or a hotel in a competitive US or UK city.

Step 1: Audit Your Existing Backlink Profile

Before building new links, understand what you already have.

Open Google Search Console and navigate to the Links report. Export your full list of inbound links and look for two things: which sites are linking to you, and whether those sites are geographically or topically relevant to your property. Links from local news outlets, tourism boards, and neighbourhood blogs are your strongest assets. Links from irrelevant foreign directories add little value.

Next, identify gaps. Sort your existing links by referring domain and note which categories are missing – food publications, travel bloggers, local event sites, community organisations. Those gaps are your starting point.

Structured local citation data also appears in this audit: business directories that list your name, address, and phone number without a clickable link are unstructured citations, not backlinks. Both matter for local visibility, but they serve different purposes and should be managed separately.

Step 2: Analyse Competitor Backlinks

Your competitors have already done some of the prospecting work for you.

Use a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to pull the backlink profiles of two or three hotels or restaurants that rank above you for your target search terms. Look for patterns: which local blogs link to them, which tourism boards have featured them, which food publications have reviewed them.

The goal is not to copy their links – it is to identify link sources that are clearly open to featuring hospitality businesses in your area. A local food writer who reviewed three competing restaurants is a qualified prospect for yours. A regional tourism board that lists your competitors but not you is a straightforward gap to close.

Local SEO competitive analysis is particularly useful for hotels in markets where a handful of properties dominate search results. Once you know where their authority comes from, you can build a targeted outreach list.

Step 3: Get Listed on Relevant Travel and Food Platforms

For hospitality businesses, authoritative platform listings are the foundation of a local link profile.

Start with the directories and review platforms that travellers and diners in your market actively use. In African markets this includes platforms that cover tourism and dining across cities like Lagos, Nairobi, Kigali, Cape Town, and Accra. In the US and UK, it includes TripAdvisor, Yelp, OpenTable, and city-specific food guides. In Australia, it includes platforms like Zomato and local tourism authority directories.

Each verified listing that includes a link to your website counts as a linked citation. The traffic value is secondary to the trust signal: these platforms confirm to search engines that your business is real, located where it claims to be, and operating in the hospitality sector.

Destinali, which covers 95+ categories across 32+ countries including 27 major African markets, operates a free business listing that places hotels and restaurants in front of customers searching across search engines, maps, and AI-powered discovery platforms.

Prioritise platforms where your target guests actually search. A boutique hotel in Franschhoek benefits more from a listing on a South African wine tourism site than from a generic global directory.

Step 4: Earn Links From Travel Blogs and Food Publications

Editorial links from respected travel and food writers carry significant weight and are entirely achievable without a large budget.

Invite Travel Bloggers to Experience Your Property

Contact travel bloggers and content creators who write about your destination. Offer a hosted stay or a complimentary tasting menu in exchange for honest coverage. Be clear about what you are offering and what you hope for in return – transparency builds better relationships than vague expectations.

Choose bloggers whose audience matches your guest profile. A family travel blogger is not the right fit for a fine-dining restaurant. A food photographer with a strong Instagram and an active blog is. When their article goes live and links back to your website or booking page, that link is both a trust signal and a source of direct referral traffic.

Pitch Food Editors and Local Lifestyle Magazines

City lifestyle publications regularly feature restaurant roundups, "best of" lists, and neighbourhood dining guides. These articles attract ongoing search traffic and often rank for terms like "best restaurants in [city]." Getting your property included – with a link to your website – is one of the most durable link building wins available to hospitality businesses.

Write a short, factual pitch. Include one or two genuinely distinctive things about your food, setting, or story. Editors receive generic pitches constantly; specificity gets attention.

Step 5: Partner With Local Tourism Boards and Destination Sites

Tourism authorities at the city, regional, and national level publish accommodation guides, dining directories, and destination resources. These pages often rank well for high-intent queries like "hotels in [city]" or "where to eat in [neighbourhood]."

Contact the tourism board for your city or region and request inclusion in their official listings. In many markets this is free for registered hospitality businesses. Boards in destinations like Lagos, Nairobi, Cape Town, Accra, Sydney, and Edinburgh all maintain curated guides that link to featured properties.

At the same time, look for destination websites run by local governments, convention bureaus, and airport tourism desks. These sites carry strong domain authority and their links are geographically precise – exactly the kind of local signal that improves your rankings for location-based search queries.

Step 6: Sponsor Local Events and Community Initiatives

Event sponsorships generate links from event websites, press releases, community organisation pages, and local news coverage – often all from a single sponsorship.

Identify events in your area that align with your brand. A boutique hotel might sponsor a local arts festival or a heritage run. A restaurant might support a school fundraiser or a neighbourhood food market. The connection between your business and the event does not need to be elaborate; it needs to be genuine.

When you sponsor an event, ask the organisers to include your business name and website link on their sponsors page. Most do this as a matter of course. If the event gets press coverage, your name and sometimes your URL – appears in local news articles, which are among the most valuable local link sources available.

Community involvement of this kind also builds brand recognition that supports long-term discovery, particularly in markets where word-of-mouth and local reputation drive a significant portion of bookings.

Step 7: Create Content That Attracts Local Links Naturally

Content that serves your local community earns links without outreach. This is the highest-leverage long-term strategy for most hospitality businesses.

A restaurant in a tourist destination might publish a neighbourhood dining guide that recommends other local businesses alongside its own. A hotel might publish a seasonal events calendar for its city, or a guide to hidden attractions near its location. This kind of content gives travel bloggers, tourism boards, and local media something worth linking to – a resource rather than a sales page.

Content created for local audiences tends to earn links from sources that pure outreach cannot reach: bloggers who link naturally to genuinely useful resources, journalists who cite a handy reference, and tourism sites that include a helpful local guide in their recommended reading.

Keep the content practical, specific to your location, and updated at least annually. Evergreen resources – a "what to do in [city] this weekend" page, a guide to the best markets near your hotel – continue earning links long after they are first published.

Step 8: Reclaim Unlinked Brand Mentions

Some of your best link opportunities already exist – they just do not include a link yet.

Set up alerts using Google Alerts or a media monitoring tool for your property name, head chef's name, and any distinctive branded terms. When mentions appear without a link, contact the author or editor and politely request that they add one. Frame the request as a convenience for their readers: a link makes it easier for anyone reading the article to find you.

This tactic works particularly well after press coverage, influencer visits, or award announcements. Journalists and bloggers often mention businesses by name without linking, especially if they are writing quickly. A short, courteous email sent within a week of publication has a reasonable success rate.

FAQ

What Makes a Local Link More Valuable Than a Generic Backlink?

A local link comes from a website that is geographically or topically relevant to your business. For a hotel or restaurant, a link from a local food blog, tourism board, or city lifestyle publication signals to search engines that your business is a recognised part of its local community. Generic backlinks from unrelated foreign sites pass some link equity but carry no local relevance signal, which is what local search rankings depend on most.

How Many Backlinks Does a Hotel or Restaurant Need to Rank Locally?

There is no fixed number. Research by Sterling Sky has shown that even a single high-quality local backlink can produce a noticeable lift in organic rankings for local businesses. Quality and relevance matter far more than volume. Ten links from respected local publications, tourism boards, and food blogs will outperform a hundred links from irrelevant directories.

Do Business Directory Listings Count as Backlinks?

Structured directory listings – entries on platforms with a dedicated form for your business information – are citations rather than editorial backlinks. They confirm your business details to search engines and contribute to local trust signals, but they function differently from editorial links. Linked citations, where a directory or article includes both your NAP data and a clickable link to your website, deliver both benefits simultaneously.

How Long Does Local Link Building Take to Show Results?

Most businesses see meaningful movement in organic rankings within two to four months of acquiring new quality links, though the timeline varies by market competitiveness and domain authority. Links from high-authority sources such as national tourism boards or major food publications can influence rankings faster than links from smaller local blogs. Consistent, ongoing link building compounds over time.

Should a Small Independent Restaurant Invest in Link Building?

Yes. Independent restaurants often have a distinct local identity – a neighbourhood, a chef, a cuisine – that gives them natural link building advantages over chains. Local food bloggers, neighbourhood news sites, and community organisations are more likely to write about an independent restaurant with a genuine story than about a chain location. A focused local link building effort is one of the most cost-effective investments an independent operator can make in organic visibility.

What Types of Content Earn the Most Links for Hospitality Businesses?

Neighbourhood guides, seasonal event calendars, curated local recommendations, and destination-specific travel tips earn the most organic links for hotels and restaurants. These resources give bloggers, journalists, and tourism organisations something useful to reference. Booking pages and menu pages rarely earn unsolicited links; informational content does.

What to Do Now

• Export your backlinks from Google Search Console and identify which are locally relevant
• Pull the backlink profiles of two or three competitors to find open link sources in your market
• Contact your city or regional tourism board about inclusion in their official listings
• Identify two or three local travel bloggers or food writers to approach with a hosted visit
• Set up brand mention alerts so you can reclaim unlinked mentions as they appear
• Publish one piece of genuinely useful local content – a neighbourhood guide or events calendar – that gives other sites a reason to link to you

Hotels and restaurants across Africa, the US, the UK, and Australia that build links methodically from locally relevant, authoritative sources consistently outrank competitors who rely on directory listings alone. Start with your audit, close the competitor gaps, and build from there.

Businesses looking to strengthen their overall local presence can create a free listing on Destinali to expand their visibility across search engines, maps, and AI-powered discovery platforms.