Content is king! And that’s what the online marketing world is all about today — high-quality content that attracts potential customers and engages them.
Without high-quality and useful content, you cannot do SEO.
The same concept applies to local businesses. The level of competition is constantly increasing among local businesses, and each requires an influx of regular, useful content to stay ahead of competitors.
In this blog post, we are going to discuss at length how to create useful content for local SEO that converts well, attracts more traffic, and puts money in your pocket.
Let’s start at the beginning.
What is local content?
Local content is content having a local intent and meaning. Just like a local business serves local people, local content is meant for a local audience.
Local content serves dual purposes: it attracts potential customers that may be searching for a business like yours and push them towards conversion.
Creating local content
Creating local content is sharing a sense of community through words, graphics, and other media. The aim is to unite business and the community in a special bond for a two-way advantage. Moreover, apart from creating a sense of community, local content also informs readers and presents your business as the perfect solution to their problems.
Local content can take several shapes. Here are a few examples:
- Creating a blog about the latest football championship that happened in the neighborhood.
- Writing or commenting on the recent policy change in society.
- Supporting a new cause such as ‘Each One Plant One.
- Introducing product updates
- Announcing business or local events that your readers may find useful.
The content that converts well
The content that converts well largely depends upon the demographics and psychographics of the target audience. You will have to narrow down your efforts to the local intent and local keywords.
Here are a few useful tips:
- Use Google Keyword Planner to find out the keywords that you could use to connect and sell your product or service.
- Use analytics and previously collected data from different sources such as community surveys to get relevant insights. If you have a well-established website that attracts a reasonable amount of traffic, Google Analytics will also have a lot of useful data that you could analyze.
- Directly communicate with the audience and interview them about their expectations from a local business.
5 tips to help you succeed
Your job doesn’t end with creating a piece of content. There are many other ways you can leverage local content or facilitate local SEO. Here are 5 tips to help you succeed beyond basic content creation:
1. Promote user-generated content
In a community, people value what their co-fellows have to say. Therefore, apart from creating your own content, also promote user-generated content.
There are many ways to do it.
For example, you can pick a quote from any person in a local event that is relevant to your business and run it on your page asking people to comment on it. User-generated content has the potential of going viral — at least to an extent — because people are more interested in what people that they already know have to say about something.
2. Solve problems
Focusing on a local audience means solving their problems. Problem-solving begins with questioning.
Create a forum where people can directly ask you questions relevant to your business. You can choose to broaden your facility by adding scope to what people can ask you. Having an FAQ page is important, but you can definitely scale it beyond that.
Keep the forum public so that people who don’t ask still benefit from answers that others get. It builds authority and credibility, which ultimately results in higher conversions down the road.
3. Invite guest bloggers
People don’t want to always listen to one voice. They want variety. Give them varied opinions by inviting guest bloggers and influencers from your local market.
When local leaders, celebrities, and other notable personalities show up as guests at a local business, it works as an endorsement.
Influencer marketing is gaining more and more momentum, and it would be a good idea to use it.
4. Curate reviews
Curating reviews is important for the long-term sustainability of your business as well as spreading good word of mouth.
Reviews and testimonials are also a part of your bigger content marketing strategy. Accumulate business reviews and leverage them to attract more customers.
You can set up an automated process that asks for reviews after they have purchased something on your website. Additionally, you can also manually ask for reviews and testimonials from your existing customers.
Doing long-form case studies can also play a significant role in the success of your business.
5. Attract local media coverage
Attracting local media coverage can be extremely beneficial for your business. Consider it a part of your overall marketing strategy. Moreover, you can leverage a lot of your existing content to get local media coverage.
For example, case studies and video testimonials can be a great hook for getting local coverage. The local events that you organize are another great way to attract local media coverage.
Optimizing your website and business listings
With the techniques mentioned above, you should be able to create high-quality and useful content and generate a good amount of traffic.
However, your work doesn’t end here.
Managing and optimizing your website, listings, and content is also a crucial aspect of a successful content strategy. Following are a few tips that would help you with this.
1. Use the right NAP
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number.
For a local business, NAP is extremely important. You need to have the most accurate and latest information on your website and business listings. Moreover, make sure that the NAP information across your website is the same. Consistency is important.
2. Optimize on-page elements
Optimizing on-page elements is crucial for long-term content success. From selecting the right keywords to optimizing title tags and meta descriptions, on-page optimization covers all.
Apart from basic optimization techniques, don’t forget to add schema markups to your local content. Not many local businesses are doing this at the moment, which means it could give you an edge over your competitors.
3. Build inbound links
Link building is crucial for all types of SEO.
When building links, however, it is important to remember that the quality of links is more important than just the number of backlinks.
Farming links won’t do you any good either. In fact, it will most probably lead to a search engine penalty.
What’s next?
Creating high-quality and useful content for local SEO is a constant battle that you will have to fight. However, if you have the right strategy and mindset, things will get easier.
Keep your focus on creating valuable content that solves problems for your readers and potential customers, and you will find that creating a successful content strategy perhaps isn’t as difficult as some people make it.
