10 Content Marketing Tips to Improve Local SEO

Small businesses hoping to nail their SEO strategy need affordable local SEO services to do it right. Whether you’ve just launched your business or you’re hoping to reach out to a bigger audience, local SEO solutions can help you meet your goals.

If you haven’t tried local SEO before, we’ve put together an in-depth guide that tells you all about its importance. We’ll also discuss ten tips to help you improve your local SEO through content marketing. Read on:

Understanding Local SEO

Local SEO is a part of your overall SEO strategy designed to boost your visibility in a particular area. It’s useful for all businesses, but especially valuable if:

• You operate your business from a dedicated physical location.
• You want to attract more in-person customers to said business location.
• Your business is expanding, and you’re setting up a new location.
• You want to increase local awareness about your business.
• You want to promote your products or services in a specific geographical region.

Including content marketing into local SEO for small businesses is often ignored. Many ‘experts’ think that the content marketing approach is effective only for established brands that have a substantial customer base, but the reality is quite different.

The best local SEO companies know that small businesses are in a unique position to reap the benefits of content marketing. There’s less competition to deal with in local SEO efforts because they’re so focused on a specific area. Compared to national or even global SEO activities, local SEO enables small businesses to stand out relatively quickly.

The Advantages of Local SEO

These are some of the benefits of effective local SEO:

1. Better Visibility

Local SEO efforts help your business get discovered by potential customers. When they search for products or services that you offer, the first locations they’ll see in the results are nearby businesses. You can thank Google Maps for this and ensure that those customers come to you instead of your competitors.

2. Community Development

More people than ever before are interested in learning how they can support their local businesses. There’s an increased emphasis on shopping locally, and small businesses should be ready to seize the opportunity. 

The real-world impact of local SEO efforts helps you connect with your customers and even other businesses. You can build a mutually beneficial community this way.

1. Targeted Traffic

Going after a global audience isn’t feasible for every business model. Most small businesses see better results when they focus on the potential customers nearby. Local SEO helps this by bringing your business to the attention of people living close to it.

Your local business automatically becomes more trustworthy because your potential customers know they can visit to see your products or services in person. Your neighbors are more likely to become your customers than someone in a different country.

2. The Human Element

Local SEO enables you to bring a human touch to your service. A customer visiting your business for the first time might be unsure if they’ll return. But this lets you impress them in person.

Even if you outsource your small business local SEO, once new customers start showing up, you can win them over through good customer service and a pleasant experience.

Content Marketing and Local SEO — Ten Tips

Here are a few to help refine your content marketing for local SEO activities:

1. Follow the Trends

Local news deserves local attention. If your local SEO is built to reach out to an entire city, work the local news into your content. Keep an eye on notable happenings and significant events and write about them on your blog to build local relevance for your website.

2. Be Detail-Oriented

Search engines like content that offers value to its targeted audience. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but longer content can often signal search engines that your website has more valuable content to offer. An easy way to do this is to talk about locally important things.

3. Get the Community Involved

This is a pretty simple concept but highly effective in getting your business the kind of attention you need. If you have a few happy customers, consider sharing their stories on your website. Interview them or have an easy conversation about the impact your business has made in their life. This type of content makes your customers the focus and quickly gets the word out about what you have to offer.

4. Hype Up Your Area

Occasionally, try providing useful information about the area you operate in. This kind of content can be targeted towards visitors, newcomers, or even long-term residents. Make sure you connect it to your business in a natural way.

Do you run a bed-and-breakfast in a tourist-friendly town? Talk about local events that might attract visitors. Own a performance venue? Encourage local talent to sign up for performances.

5. Branch Your Content Out

Stuck in a rut when it comes to content? Get out of it easily by targeting niches that are related to your business but aren’t directly competing with you. You’ll be adding value for your target audience without accidentally highlighting your competitors.

6. Discuss How You’re Giving Back

If your business is giving back to the community (and it should), you can turn that into useful content for your website. Be mindful of the tone here—such content should bring attention to the causes that matter locally without making you the focus.

7. Use Local Keywords

Location-based keywords are a quick way of boosting your content within a given region. Pay attention to the keywords you’re using and incorporate both short-tail and long-tail keywords to make your content easily discoverable.

8. Connect with Local Media

Getting coverage from local newspapers and magazines delivers fantastic results for all businesses. Use this to your advantage by sending in submissions under your name.

If you manage to get published, you’ll get great local content to share on your website. As a bonus, you’ll enjoy local link building with a high authority website. Win-win!

9. Consider Guest Posting

Writing and publishing a guest post on a more established local website can be fruitful for your business. If you’ve got specialized knowledge, show it off by sharing a guest post on relevant websites.

You can also work out an arrangement to exchange guest posts with a higher-authority local website.

10. Join Forces with Other Local Businesses

There’s strength in numbers. Real-life networking with other business owners can lead to online promotional activities that benefit all parties involved. You can share each other’s content and links. This works best when all businesses are in closely related fields without being each other’s competition.

Conclusion

The tips discussed here will help you fine-tune your content marketing to give your local SEO efforts the boost they need. Local exposure is how you can generate more revenue, attract more customers, and improve your bottom line as a small business.

Team up with affordable local SEO services to give your business the competitive edge it needs.

Guest article written by: The author is affiliated with Search Berg, an award-winning SEO and internet marketing agency specializing in local SEO solutions for businesses from all industries. For queries and more information, the company can be contacted through its website.