Before technological advances brought us the Internet and social media, local businesses used to advertise their business in local newspapers, yellow pages or by handing out flyers with their details.
But times have changed and search engines have become the main tools to promote nearby products and services.
That means all local business owners should put in the time and effort to create quality content that gets them noticed.
However, it's not a guessing game. There are some useful tips and advice that you can follow if you have a local business and want to increase your customer base. For that reason, we created this little guide to explain how to create blog content for local customers. Welcome!
Think of the community beyond what you sell.
If you want your business to thrive locally, you need to show that you're involved in your community and know what's going on there. It depends on the niche your business operates in but you can try to include something about local news or local sports teams in an authentic way.
However, you have to be careful, as being spammy is very easy when you produce random local content. So, you have to make sure to adapt your texts to your business effortlessly. And remember that you should write not about what interests you but about what interests your audience.
You can also ask for support from local guest bloggers and contributors to post content on your website. Besides being a good idea for adding content, it can help you expand your audience to the contributor's audience.
Practices you cannot miss when creating local content.
Creating blog content for local clients also has its technical side, which means you have to implement some practices like
- Keyword research: Keyword research can be a game changer for local businesses.
If you want to leverage all the benefits that the Internet and search engines offer, be sure to add local keywords to your blog content. You should add local keywords in areas like title tags, meta description, body copy, anchor text, bold and italics tags, URLs, texts in images and H1 tags.
- Link building: Link building has also changed over the years. Getting inbound links from businesses in your community, such as chamber directories or local strategic partner pages, can get your blog and business to the top of search engines.
- Snippets: Finally, there are snippets. If you use rich snippets, you can help Google find geographic information about your business, customers and reviews. In this sense, they help users find your website when search engines refer a local place.
Include reviews if possible.
Many content creators neglect reviews but they can improve any local SEO strategy.
If you put consistent effort into getting reviews from happy customers and include them in your blog content, you can build trust among your potential customers and arouse curiosity among internet users who want to know what you offer, thus increasing the number of clicks your site receives.
Final thoughts.
Creating local content should be a priority for various reasons. For that reason, we recommend you put in some time and strive to make your local content better in order to take your business to the top. You will see results in less time than you think!