Content Marketing For Local SEO

Hi. Today we’re going to talk about content marketing for local SEO. We’re going to look at who to target, where to find ideas, local content types as well as how to measure your efforts. So let’s kick off with who to target.

The first thing to do is access Google Analytics. You want to be looking at your visitor location data. This will tell you the locations of where you’re getting search traffic, but also the locations where you’re not getting search traffic. Now it could be that you have a particular location or premises in that area and thus want to create a local campaign around that. This is where content marketing can help.

Next thing you want to be doing is looking at your keywords. So access Google Keyword Planner and look at location keywords as well a variety of other locations around that area. You’ll also [need to] be including synonyms and modifiers around those keywords.

Finally, when it comes to getting your data, you want to be looking at your Google trends. So this will tell you regionalised trending data and regionalised tending terms and search volumes and search terms as well. This will give you more of an insight into the types of content you want to be creating as well.

So where to find ideas. First things first, you want to be signing up to local news and local publications and websites and so on and so forth. This will help you keep your finger on the pulse and allow you to react to any kind of news or trending topic or something that’s going on in your area. In addition to this, I recommend setting up Google alerts for any kind of localised terms. Again, as soon as you get that alert, it enables you to react to that news story or that topic and you can create a blog post or something around that.

Other ideas; I suggest signing up to Twitter and engaging and following local organisations, local companies and start to engage with them on Twitter at a local level. Also, start to analyse local trending topics and local trending data on Twitter. Again, this gives you more of an idea of the types of things that you could be writing about and creating content about.

In addition to Twitter, there are other social media profiles, such as Google+ and Linkedin. Both of these have groups and communities where you can follow, and you can look at local groups and start to discuss local content, local topics, local news, local events and so on and so forth.  I highly recommend doing that, and in addition to doing that online, you can also start to follow and attend groups (discussion groups, meet-up groups, chamber of commerce meetings) all those types of things. This enables you to really get your teeth into local issues, local news stories, local topics, whereby you can then start to create and add your stamp on it from your business perspective. You can add your stamp on it from your point of view.

So, with that in mind, what types of content can you create? Once you’ve got your ideas, what types of content do you want to be creating?

Well, first things first, whenever it comes to any kind of content you want to create, you always want to make sure that you are adding the keywords, the geographical locations, whether that’s in the title, in the Meta, or in the body. I highly recommend not overdoing it. Don’t keyword stuff. Don’t add lots and lots of locations. Don’t always target the same location. Always look to add a variety of different keywords in there, as we mentioned about modifiers and synonyms. Also looking at a variety of other areas in the same location as well.

So, different content types. Well, first things first, blog posts, local blog posts. As we’ve mentioned a lot earlier about news, topics, events, that type of thing, you can also always cover these types of topics and news and events as a blog post, as a local blog post.

Another good idea would be to create a location specific page. So this would be targeting an area that you want to target. It could be that, like I said before, that you have premises there or a location there. This is good to be found in the search engines and really drive organic traffic. If you’re doing that from an organic perspective, it’s quite possible and more than likely that you should be doing it from a paid search perspective as well. So look to create a local, paid search landing page as well.

In addition to those, I highly recommend setting up a Google Local profile. To do this, you need to secure your business place’s profile first. Then you can set up a Google local profile. What the end [goal] here is to really encourage reviews, comments, and engagement at a local level. So, wherever possible, look to engage your customers and your users to interact with you at a local level on your Google+ local profile.

If you’re going to be securing Google+, then I highly recommend doing the same for Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, Yell, Yelp. There’s a variety of these different profiles that you should be securing. It makes perfect sense if people are searching on mobile, they’ll be looking at these types of sites and these applications. Again, this is more traffic to build around your brand and create your own community around your brand.

So those are just some of the ideas. Additional ideas for content marketing for local SEO could include running competitions. You could run a localised competition whereby people could send in a comment, again, on Facebook, on Google+, because you want to be driving that traffic. You want to be driving those comments and that engagement on those profiles. We could look towards doing something like a local competition whereby they would mention what it is that they love about your local area.

To take this a step further, you could start to look to create user-generated content. So you ask your customers, your users to provide you with pictures and images of your local area and, again, with a description of why they love that particular landmark or something like that. This encourages and reinforces the idea of your location, and it’s all good stuff when it comes to creating a local content marketing campaign.

Finally, another idea would be to sponsor a local event. So not only can you create a blog post about this, so you could do a preview of the event, a review of the event. It’s also highly recommended that you actually attend the event, because this again gives you more content ideas. You could take pictures. You could interview people. But also it gives you an opportunity where you could showcase your products. You could give away freebies. Again, you could start to encourage people to visit your Facebook, to visit your Google+ profiles, to engage with you, to leave comments, leave reviews and so on and so forth. So these are just some of the ideas when it comes to creating content marketing and how that could help to facilitate a local SEO campaign.

Now, when it comes to measuring, you want to make sure that, whatever you measure, it’s specific to that particular content type. So if you’re creating a landing page, whether that’s a paid search one or an organic one, you want to be split testing that out against a standard landing page. You want to be looking at click-through rates. You want to be looking at the location of the search traffic as well.

When it comes to something like a blog post, you want be looking at search volume as well as the location of that search traffic. And finally, if it’s more social media oriented content that you’ve created, you want to be looking at comments, location of comments, and engagement and that type of thing.

So those are just some of the ideas when it comes to creating content marketing for local SEO. If you have any ideas yourself that you’d like to share, please do leave a comment in the comment section below. Which leaves me just to say thank you very much for watching, and for more information, please visit any of our social profiles coming up right now.