As a local company, having a highly focused local content strategy for your website and blog is the best way to make sure you not only draw traffic to your site, but that you draw the right traffic. Creating a great local-focused content strategy can be challenging, especially if you have several different locations that each serve a particular local area.
Serving One Local Area
If you have only one location, serving a single city or neighborhood, your job will be a bit simpler. You can focus on local events, areas, and the local-specific needs that your business can fill. Local-specific needs could be seasonal, regional or promotional. A blog post on what someone should cook at their barbecue for the community festival this summer will be more likely to draw local traffic to your barbecue accessory website than one about barbecue forks.
Serving and Targeting Several Local Areas
If you have shops across the city or state, you may find creating a local strategy more difficult, especially if you have only one webpage. Rest assured, however, that you don’t have to purchase a different domain for each of your locations – but you should have at least one page on your website dedicated to targeting each specific area.
Creating A Focused Local Content Strategy
- Add a location modifier to the page’s URL and each different business’ name
- Use images with appropriate image tags and use videos of the area
- Include the physical address for each location
- Write about the local neighborhood where the business location can be found
- Write about any significant local issues or events your business may help with
- Include a section on local bylaws that may affect how people use your service or product
- Local reviews – review other local businesses to draw the attention of people looking for more info about them
- Local reviews may also earn you backlinks from the other businesses’ local websites
- Tourist-oriented information – write about different things to do while nearby
Traditional Local SEO Strategies
Aside from making it known that you’re not only an authority in your area of expertise, but also in your local area, these classic local SEO strategies are still important for great local SEO.
- Google Places
- Google My Business
- Yelp
- Bing Business Portal
- Local listing sites
- Gain local reviews
- Google+
Being active on all of these platforms will help to draw local attention, particularly when you interact directly with your existing customers. Their friends in the area will notice, and word-of-mouth is still one of the best ways to raise awareness of your business – because people will see that the people they trust, trust you.
What the Search Engines Look For
Search engines answering local search queries want to send the user to the site that will give them the most benefit. If you have great content, and combine it with an obvious authority in the local area, you’re on the right track to keeping Google happy.
What are you doing in your content strategy and online to keep a local focus?
