Today’s consumers primarily use search engines to find out about local businesses and services. In the old days, you’d reach your local market through flyers, local newspaper ads, and other means. But today that’s been replaced by digital methods.
There are a variety of different strategies and tactics you can use to grow your local rankings, but one incredibly important strategy is creating locally-relevant content. This style of content will be uniquely targeted to speak to and reach your local market, not buyers across the globe.
Below we offer a few useful tips for how you can create local content that’s relevant to your local community and will help put your business on the radar of local consumers.
1. Speak to Your Community Beyond Your Business
You don’t want every piece of content you write to end up being a promotional piece for your business. These types of content are important, but you’ll still want to tie into locally relevant news and topics whenever possible.
For example, is there a local sporting event that your entire town will rally behind? Is there any compelling local news or events that you’d like to comment on or showcase on your site?
Mixing up your content is important, so make sure you create engaging content about your community and customer base whenever you can.
2. Cater to Specific Neighborhoods You’re Targetting
Chances are the town or city you live in has multiple local neighborhoods that you can target with your content as well. This will not only help with ranking for these keywords as well but will help people within those neighborhoods feel more connected to your business.
One effective style of content is the case study. Do you have any past customers you can interview and turn their success story into a blog post for your business? This can be doubly effective with ranking if you can bring in something unique about the area of the town or city they live in.
3. Write About Local Interests
Chances are your local population will have a unique flavor. For example, do you live in a mountain town where most locals are obsessed with skiing, hiking, and camping? Or, do you live in a city where it would make sense to highlight local shows and events?
The best part of this style of content is that it can cater to your interests as well. You probably live in your town or city for a reason. Here’s your chance to showcase everything you love about your city while building more local interest about your business at the same time.
4. Target Local Businesses and Organizations to Link Out
When it comes to ranking in the search engines the sites that link out to your site matter a lot. Quality and relevance of links matter much more than quantity.
To encourage local organizations, businesses, and websites to link out think about how you can create content that speaks to their needs directly.
Maybe your local chamber of commerce is putting on an event, so you decide to do a stellar write up of the event on your blog and share the article with them. If it puts them in a positive light, then chances are they’ll share the post and potentially link out to it as well.
You can do the same thing by creating local roundups of events, businesses, and invidious in the community. Think about how you can give back and provide value to organizations you’d like a link from in the future.
5. Utilize Reviews to Create Enticing Content
There’s nothing more powerful than showcasing the results of past satisfied customers. If you’ve gotten any great reviews from past clients or customers try and reach out to them and see if they’d be willing to expand upon their reviews.
You can turn these into powerful case studies that break down their exact needs, why they hired you for the job, the process, and the results you were able to get for them.
These can then be used as blog posts, downloadables, or even utilizes across any advertising campaigns you might be doing.
Hopefully, the post above has been helpful in tailoring your content strategy to address and meet the needs of your local market. If you want a team behind you to help accelerate your content and local marketing efforts, then reach out to our team today.
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