By Jeremy Rivera | Founder, Community Clean Links
Source conversations: Unscripted Small Business Podcast — Bruce Ashford Episode · Unscripted SEO Podcast — Wyatt Bonicelli Episode
The Question Every Small Business Owner Eventually Asks
There’s a moment that happens in almost every conversation I have with a small business owner about marketing. They’ve heard the pitch before — you need backlinks, you need authority, you need Google to trust you — and their eyes glaze over. It’s abstract. It doesn’t connect to anything real they already do.
On the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, I had a conversation with Bruce Ashford, founder of The Ashford Agency, about exactly this problem. He made an observation that stuck with me:
“The getting-mentioned and citation part is actually easier for us, because we’ve had our minds set on: I need to convince somebody not just to mention my business name in this context, but also give me a link from their site — which editorially is an even higher bar. So in some ways, for older SEOs like me — I’ve been doing SEO for 20 years — it’s almost easier for me to grapple with that question of creative ways to get your name out there.”
— Bruce Ashford, The Ashford Agency — Unscripted Small Business Podcast
He’s right. And the framing shift he’s describing is exactly why community cleanups work so well as a marketing vehicle. Instead of explaining domain authority and PageRank, you say: let’s get your brand out in the community and make sure the internet sees it.
That’s the philosophy behind Community Clean Links. It started with a scout troop cleanup at a local park and grew into a full white-label service for agencies and businesses who want to do real-world good — while generating real digital marketing results.
The Core Idea: Penciling Your Real-World Presence Onto the Internet
One of my foundational theories of marketing is simple: whatever your business does in the real world needs to get sketched in on the digital side. Most small businesses do good things in their communities — they sponsor Little League teams, they show up at charity drives, they clean up parks. But if that activity isn’t registered anywhere online, it never compounds.
Here’s how I explained it on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast:
“If you do a charity drive, if you’re showing up every Saturday with your trailer displaying movies for free at the park, that’s amazing — that logo at the top for your roofing company is phenomenal. Well done. But if you’re not going to the Facebook group and saying ‘hey, free movies at the park,’ or putting it on the event sites, or talking to a newspaper person about what you’re doing, or getting on the church message board — if you’re not sketching in those details of your real-world business onto the digital side, then you’re missing out.”
— Jeremy Rivera — Unscripted Small Business Podcast
A community cleanup event is one of the cleanest executions of this principle. You do something genuinely good. And then you make sure the digital world knows about it — through event listings, press coverage, social posts, and the links that follow. See how the process works. I’ve executed on this process for businesses in all kinds of verticals and niches with success. I worked with company that builds data center security walls, a few SEO agencies, a home contractor, and several SaaS companies.
Why a Cleanup Event Generates Links Most Tactics Can’t Match
When I sat down with local SEO specialist Wyatt Bonicelli on the Unscripted SEO Podcast to talk through the full process, we mapped out why trash cleanup events work so well from a link building standpoint. It comes down to a three-layer structure that most tactics simply can’t replicate.
Layer 1: City-Specific Event Aggregators
Every metro area in the United States — and most smaller cities — has organically grown at least one local event aggregator site. These are independent community calendars, local blogs, or civic websites that list what’s happening in town. Cookeville, Tennessee, for example, has multiple: HipCookville, local event boards, community pages.
These sites sit inside the local link infrastructure. A link from a city-specific event aggregator carries genuine local relevance — something you simply cannot manufacture by posting on a national platform. The first step in any cleanup campaign is doing a sweep for these sites in the target city and getting the event listed on all of them. Our Sparta, TN cleanup earned a .gov link through exactly this process.
Layer 2: National Event Platforms
The second layer is national aggregators. Eventbrite is the biggest, but there are roughly 10 to 12 national-level event platforms worth submitting to. The follow/nofollow split across these platforms runs about 50/50 — a surprising number do post followed links. More importantly, a well-documented event on Eventbrite creates a credible, indexable record of your brand’s community involvement.
A note on AI discoverability: I’ve put up events and been able to ask — within 15 minutes of the Eventbrite posting — what events are coming up, and Copilot, Gemini, and GPT can find it and reference it. That speed matters increasingly as AI-generated answers become a bigger part of how people discover local businesses.
Layer 3: Local News Syndication
The third layer is the one most people miss. Many local news outlet websites pull event feeds directly from aggregator data sources to auto-populate their community calendars. Submit to the right national aggregators, and you can end up with tertiary links on local news sites — without any additional outreach. It happens passively as part of getting the event properly listed.
As Wyatt noted on the podcast:
“The surprising part is also that many local news outlet aggregators pull from data feeds from these event sites to populate their pages, so you can end up with a tertiary layer on local news sites by doing this process correctly.”
— Wyatt Bonicelli — Unscripted SEO Podcast
The Press Release Multiplier
One of the most underused moves in this whole strategy is the press release angle — and Wyatt’s take on it is the version I keep going back to:
“You can double down on it. You can release “Top Three Green Companies Cleaning Up X Community” and just include the other two companies that have recently done trash cleanups. Yours is at the top and you’ve got a third-party press release not coming from your client but listing them. That can get you cited in local newspapers.”
— Wyatt Bonicelli — Unscripted SEO Podcast
This approach threads multiple objectives at once. The press release isn’t a promotional piece for a single client — it’s a community story that happens to feature them prominently. That framing makes it far more publishable, and it creates third-party editorial coverage rather than paid placement. Our full-service event sponsorship packages include press release distribution to 100+ US-based outlets: TV, radio, magazines, business journals, and tech publications, including Digital Journal, Frankly Media, GoMedia, and USA News Journals.
What This Looks Like in the Real World: The Anchor Text Question
One detail that comes up every time I walk through the tactical side of this: you have choices about how you’re represented in the event listings, and each choice has SEO implications.
Option A — Brand anchor text: “This event is supported by [Company Name] and [Agency Name].” The link goes on the brand name. This builds brand recognition in Google’s entity graph.
Option B — Keyword anchor text: Instead of linking on the brand name, you describe the category — “lots of home improvement companies locally like [Company]” — and link on the descriptive phrase. This targets keyword-based signals.
In practice, a mix of both across different event listings creates a natural, varied anchor profile. The Greencast podcast goes deeper on these SEO mechanics for agencies who want to understand the full model.
The Simplest Pitch You’ll Ever Make to a Client
One of the things Bruce Ashford and I talked about on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast was the challenge of selling marketing services to business owners who don’t think in SEO terms. He made the point that pitching “links and authority” is a much harder sell than pitching “visibility.”
Here’s the version of the pitch I’ve found works:
“We need to do more to get your business visible online. Let’s get you out in the community. Let’s sponsor a trash cleanup — say that you’re behind it, send a couple of employees down, they’ll clean up the community, we make sure that’s visible online.”
— Jeremy Rivera — Unscripted Small Business Podcast
That’s it. No jargon. No domain authority explanation. Just: do something good, and make sure the internet knows about it.
For agencies, this is also a genuinely differentiated offering. Most of your competitors are pitching the same outreach campaigns, guest posts, and directory submissions. Very few are offering a white-label community cleanup program that combines real-world brand activation with a multi-layer link building outcome.
What Links Does a Cleanup Event Actually Generate?
To be concrete about this: here’s what a typical Community Clean Links campaign produces:
- Links from local event aggregators (city-specific, highly relevant)
- Links from national event platforms — Eventbrite and 10–12 others (~50% followed)
- Tertiary links from local news sites that pull event feed data
- Links from a press release distributed to 100+ US outlets (TV, radio, magazines, news journals)
- Links from Green-oriented podcast show notes, syndicating across 30+ directories with mixed follow/nofollow
- Possible links from city hall, local non-profits, churches, and nearby universities
- Content assets for your own site: event page, event listing assistance, post-event recap post with photos and video
That last point matters: the cleanup creates content, not just links. A recap post with real photos of your team in the community is the kind of authentic E-E-A-T signal Google has been rewarding since the Helpful Content era began. It’s real people, real place, real action — documented online. Learn more about how sponsoring an event works.
For Chambers of Commerce, Rotary Clubs, and Community Organizations
Community Clean Links isn’t exclusively for marketing agencies. One of the original use cases for this program was connecting Chambers of Commerce, Rotary Clubs, and entrepreneur centers with a turnkey service they can offer member businesses as a value-added benefit.
The appeal is straightforward: your members want to do good in the community. They also want digital marketing results. This program delivers both, with no SEO expertise required on the Chamber’s part. We handle the on-the-ground coordination, volunteer outreach, supplies, press releases, and SEO amplification. The Chamber or Rotary Club simply connects willing businesses to the program.
Getting Started
If you’re a business owner, agency, or community organization ready to explore what a cleanup campaign could look like for your market, the best next step is a conversation. Schedule a quick call here — we can walk through what events have looked like in cities like yours, what the link outcomes typically are, and what a white-label arrangement would look like for your agency.
You can also browse completed cleanup examples, read more on the blog, or listen to the Greencast podcast for more on how community-based marketing intersects with digital PR and SEO.
The cleanup model works because it’s honest. You’re not manufacturing links — you’re doing something real and making sure the internet reflects it. As Bruce Ashford put it on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast: “It’s not manipulation to do that. You’re not virtue signaling. What you’re doing is letting people see who you really are at heart.”
About the AuthorJeremy Rivera is an SEO consultant with 19+ years of experience, founder of SEO Arcade, host of the Unscripted SEO Podcast, and founder of Community Clean Links. He is based in Cookeville, Tennessee.