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Hi Peter I personally love local tracking - especially for clients I have that tend to serve certain cities or areas, and don't compete nationally in their industry. If you find some of your clients or websites aren't meant to rank and perform nationally, then I highly suggest focusing on local SERP performance. Just keep in mind that adding local keywords to track also takes away spots from your overall allotted keywords you can track in your campaigns - just be mindful! You can learn more here from Moz. Hope this helps! Good luck!

If I look at the link profile of my own websites (which have never received linkbuilding services) I am shocked to see links from some awful looking sites.  I don't get excited about them because they are links from black hats and spammers who build mashup websites by slapping together information scrapped from other websites, grabbed from business directories and stolen from other sources. If I look at the link profile of almost any other site that has been on the web pulling reasonable traffic for at least a couple of years I will see the same thing.  Even the best sites on the web attract tons of spammy links without doing anything to produce them. So, I think that it is really hard to assess the links that you see pointing to other websites.  If you see stuff that looks like manufactured links... they probably are manufactured links but they are on spam sites of a type that google is not going to penalize you for. If I was in the lending space I would not be surprised by very many things.  And if a website does have really spammy link.... they might have been disavowed a long time ago.  Keep in mind that disavow has been around for a couple years or more and tons of people - especially in the lending industry - have disavowed an awful lot of links.