Content Marketing & SEO for Local Businesses

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is the "strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience - and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action." While it’s not exactly synonymous with SEO, the two are closely related, and thanks to Panda, you need to produce quality content if you want to rank highly in search results.

For small and medium businesses, it may seem like a laborious task to take on with big brands in search engine results. Fortunately, there’s a place where you can not only compete, but actually get a leg up on the giants: local search results.

Since the Pigeon update, Google has been giving preference to local businesses when a searcher’s keyword indicates local intent. In this piece we’ll go over how to create great content that will help your site rank well in local search results and will also help boost positive brand awareness and sales.

Local Keyword Research

Find Keywords to Target

Just like traditional SEO, local content marketing starts with local keyword research. Come up with a list of seed keywords as a jumping-off point. Think of these as different topics that your website covers, categories of products or services that you offer or short descriptions of what sort of business you own. For example, a business that sells above ground swimming pools based in the Boston area could come up with topics like:

• Above ground swimming pools for sale
• Above ground swimming pool installation
• Above ground swimming pool maintenance
• Above ground swimming pool cleaning

Brainstorm a few ideas for each topic. This is where you’ll start to localize your keywords. Add your geographical area at the end of each keyword. Keep your customer base in mind here: how would they search for a company that does what you do? For our pool company’s pool cleaning topic, your local keywords might look like:

• Pool vacuum boston
• Above ground pool vacuum ma
• Pool filters in boston
• Automatic pool vacuum boston
• Robotic pool vacuum eastern ma

Not sure exactly what comprises your target location? Check your analytics location report and, depending on the size of your business, filter by state, city or metro. Your main sources of traffic are the areas where your demand is greatest.

There are lots of tools you can use to help with your keyword research. Both Google Adwords and Bing Ads each have Keyword Planner tools. Enter your list of keyword ideas or, if you exported a list from one of the free tools like Ubersuggest, upload it as a .csv. If you still want to find more keywords to target, search for new keywords. Otherwise choose to get search volume and data trends.

Use this tool to weed out any keywords that don’t get enough monthly searches to be worth targeting. Avoid targeting overly competitive keywords as well; they might get a lot of searches but you’ll spend too much time trying to rank for them. Make sure you check local traffic as well. A keyword that gets a lot of traffic globally might not be that popular where you live. There’s no real ideal number when it comes to search volume. It really depends on the nature of your industry.

Competitor Research

Do a quick bit of competitor research to get the lay of the land, starting with your most valuable keywords. When doing a Google search, use AdWord’s Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool. Search history and geography could be skewing the search results you see, so this tool gives you a view of the true first page of search results.

Go through the first few results and note how they use the keyword. What are their title tags and meta descriptions? Look at section and category names as well as blog topics and titles. These will likely contain the keywords they are trying to rank for.

Creating Local Content

Writing local guides is a great way to generate content for your pages that associates your site with both the three most important factors in local content marketing:

• Keywords: This is pretty obvious. Guides, top 10 lists, how-tos and other types of content allow you to use your keyword several times naturally throughout the page.
• Niche: Using synonyms and latent semantic keywords will help search engines learn that your site is related to not just a keyword, like pool vacuums boston, but the entire topic: Above ground swimming pool cleaning supplies.
• Locale: You want search engines to learn to associate you with your specific area so they know that your pages are relevant to anyone searching for swimming pool supplies in the Boston area.

A good place to start looking for content ideas is your customers’ questions. What are the most common things they ask before, during and after a sale? Check local forum discussions and question-and-answer boards online for the most frequently asked questions. Searchers are more likely to click through to your site, and convert, if you’re able to address their questions and concerns from the very start.

The type of articles you write will depend on your niche, but there are a few basic formats you can mold to fit your needs:

Local ‘Best of’ Lists

If you’ve ever searched for a local product or business, you probably used a keyword a lot like "what is the best (company) in (my city)?" If you haven’t, your customers are. These can be lists of people who do the same thing as you, or offer products/services that are tangentially related to yours. For our swimming pool company these could be businesses that sell and install swimming pools, but they could also be lists of companies that make and/or sell hot tubs, diving boards, ladders, pool toys, covers, cleaning supplies or swimwear.

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by Maria Lopez via SitePoint