4 Valuable Tips to Build Your Local SEO Content Strategy

Promoting a local business in search engines has its peculiarities, and you will never rank high in the search results if you fail to consider them. This article explains who needs local SEO and why, as well as how to make an effective content strategy for this niche.

What Is a Local SEO Content Strategy?

To better understand the concept of a local SEO content strategy, let’s first define what a general SEO content strategy is.

An SEO content strategy is a roadmap that a business uses to achieve its goals through website content. This strategy is aimed at increasing traffic to the website. It’s worth noting that the SEO content strategy includes both blog articles and service pages.

A local SEO content strategy is essentially the same as a regular SEO content strategy but focused on a narrower topic and has a geographical reference.

If you are a business owner with a physical presence in one or more cities, and your target audience is residents of these cities or counties, SEO for local businesses is exactly what you need. Restaurants, hotels, law firms, car dealerships, and many other companies need search engine optimization tailored to the specifics of their business and a particular area.

If you provide legal services in Chicago, you need to promote yourself for Chicago-related keywords rather than trying to cover the general “legal services” query. Firstly, not all users who enter this query are looking for a lawyer in Chicago. Secondly, it will be hard to rank for this query because it is too general, which means high competition.

The main advantage of local business SEO is a much better chance to rank at the top by promoting your business for more relevant queries. For example, there may be several hundred thousand lawyers in the United States, but there are only 200 people who provide services in your city. It is much easier to compete with two hundred people than with two hundred thousand.

Thus, a local SEO strategy allows businesses to compete only with other local businesses in their niche and attract relevant leads. However, whether you go for in-house SEO or hire an on-page and off-page optimization agency, you need to follow several essential steps to make it successful.

Step 1. Choose Your Subject

You need to decide what general topic you want to create content on. You also need to make sure that the topic of your content matches the topic of your business. That is, if you provide medical services, your content should strictly correlate with medicine. If you run a law firm, you should write about everything related to law. Only news websites can afford to post content on any topic. If your website is not one of them, choose a topic relevant to your business.

When it comes to local businesses, remember that the content for local SEO should be relevant to your area.

Step 2. Choose Topics for Articles

To choose the topics you can write about, we first recommend you conduct a competitor analysis. Find 3–5 competitors with high-quality blogs and write down all the topics you would like to write articles about. The same goes for service pages. 

Note that local businesses’ blog articles often fail to convert well. Exceptions apply when you have many offices across the country and don’t really care where your clients come from. If you have a small business and operate in one area, your primary source of lead generation will be service pages customized for a specific area. Therefore, when analyzing competitors, we also recommend you pay attention to the structure of landing pages (what services your competitors have pages for, what locations they target). For example, competitors may have service pages for different districts of the same city, different cities, or different states. If you have the same geography of service provision, it would be great to set up the same pages (though you should first check if these keywords have any traffic via Ahrefs or any similar tool).

Step 3. Choose Keywords

This stage is one of the most important. You need to choose the proper keywords for your article. You can use Ahrefs or any other tool that helps you choose keywords. However, if you have a new website without any expertise and trust from the search engines, we do not recommend choosing highly competitive keywords for your content plan.

You can check the keyword difficulty via Ahrefs in the Keywords Explorer section. For example, you want to write an article about the Mediterranean diet. You enter the “mediterranean diet” keyword into Ahrefs and see that this keyword brings a lot of traffic. Still, it has high competition due to its keyword difficulty score of 86 (an Ahrefs metric that shows how difficult it is to rank a page at the top for a particular keyword phrase).

For your reference: keywords with a keyword difficulty score of up to 30 are the easiest to promote, 31 to 70 are hard to promote, and 71 to 100 are super hard to promote.

Instead of this complex keyword, we can use the Matching Terms section of Ahrefs and find a less frequent and complex keyword there. For example, we can write about the advantages and disadvantages of the Mediterranean diet and choose the “pros and cons of mediterranean diet” keyword, which has a keyword difficulty of 12.

Step 4. Create Your Plan

For your convenience, you can create a file in Google Sheets to enter all the data related to the content plan for your website. This file should contain the following fields:

• page status (in progress, posted, etc.);
• main keyword (as well as keyword difficulty and volume);
• link to the competitor’s page (as an example);
• priority.

Speaking about the page priority, we would like to note that the keywords that can convert a reader into a lead and have no high competition should be a priority, according to Ahrefs (as a rule, these are service pages). Conversion keywords that have high competition are better to be assigned to the second priority group. However, keywords that are more informative (most blog pages) and have poor conversion rates should be assigned to the third priority group.

You can also add a publication date to keep track of how quickly you are filling your website. We recommend writing at least 3–5 articles per month on average, depending on your niche and resources.

Tips for Building an Effective SEO Content Strategy for Your Local Business

An effective local SEO content strategy for local businesses is somewhat similar to any other content strategy applied in other business areas but given unique features. So, when creating a local SEO content strategy, you need to:

1. Add location-specific keywords to each page;
2. Write local-SEO-focused content that will be relevant to your area;
3. Publish on local websites and directories;
4. Publish news in your GMB profile.

Let’s analyze each of these steps of creating an impactful local SEO content strategy in more detail for better understanding.

Add Local Keywords

When we say “location-specific keywords,” we mean that the keywords for which you promote your website pages should have the name of the location where you provide services.

For example, the “legal services” keyword has a keyword difficulty of 86.

To make things easier and increase the likelihood that Google will show our page to people in the proper area, we will add the name of the city to this keyword — “chicago.”

The “legal services in chicago” query has a keyword difficulty of 28, which makes it much easier to rank at the top.

Yes, we won’t get many clients for this query (the number of users from the US who google “legal services” is 1,400 people per month, while those who search for “legal services in chicago” are only 60 people per month), but at least we will be sure to get clients to our page.

Write Content That Is Helpful for Your Local Clients

Writing content for local SEO strategy that is relevant to the location where you provide services has several advantages:

• Your clients are more likely to search for such content (rather than people from other cities);
• Google will show it to the local audience, not to everyone;
• It will be easier for you to rank at the top with such low-competitive local keywords.

If we go back to our lawyer from Chicago, he can write articles on general legal topics but with location-specific keywords. For example, instead of writing about the peculiarities of divorce throughout America, he can write an article about the peculiarities of divorce in Chicago. Thus, he will definitely reach his target audience.

In terms of content marketing for local SEO, you can also publish the following types of content depending on your niche:

• Reviews of various events (sports matches, networking events, concerts, conferences, fairs, etc.);
• Local news related to your business;
• Guides;
• Local trends;
• Case studies of your previous projects;
• Feedback from your clients.

We also recommend you set up social media accounts to increase your reach. Although they don’t directly affect SEO, you can still benefit from them.

For example, you can post announcements of your articles on your social networks to get more people to visit your page. This will also help you build your brand and increase your credibility among potential clients.

Another life hack for those who have social media profiles: if you can’t find ideas for your content plan, ask your audience what they care about and what questions they would like to get answered. You can also use your competitors’ posts to find inspiration. Posts on social media are shared much more often than blog articles, which means you can get a lot more ideas.

But remember the traditional tip for an SEO-driven content plan: occasionally visit competitors’ websites (even those located in another city/state) and see what they write about.

Publish Your Articles on Local Websites and Directories

Another way to get local links to your website and attract new clients is to post on websites in your city/state.

1. External links from local donor websites improve the ranking of your website in Google’s local search results.
2. Such publications will boost your website’s rankings and bring targeted traffic. You will more likely get new clients after publishing an article on a popular local website than on a no-name resource with articles about everything.

This in no way means that you can only get links from local websites. You can use any thematic website to boost your rankings and improve your pages, but the best results will naturally come from local donor links.

Link insertion service is another type of link building that works well for SEO for a local business. Link insertion involves getting a link from an article that has already been written and posted on another resource. For example, you can search for queries relevant to your business by adding “best” to them. Search results for such keywords are usually blog posts — they contain articles such as “TOP 10 Best Restaurants in Miami,” “TOP 5 Bakeries with Best Pastries in Florida,” etc.

By entering the “best law firms in new york” query, you will see blog articles ranking the best firms in New York City. As a rule, these rankings are not very realistic, but that’s not crucial for us. Our main concern is to contact the administrators of these websites and arrange for them to include us in these lists and link to our website. This way, you will get a link from an article that is already well ranked in Google, which means it will give our website targeted traffic and potential clients in addition to link weight.

We strongly recommend publishing on the websites of local directories. Links from local directories are taken into account by Google when ranking profiles in the local pack. A local pack is a block with a map and three company profiles that Google selects from all the company profiles on Google Maps based on your request.

All information you provide in your profiles on the directory websites should be consistent with the information on your website and Google My Business profile. When ranking GMB profiles in local results, Google analyzes the consistency of information such as NAPW (N — name, A — address, P — phone, W — website) across all websites, including directories, social media, GMB profile, and your website. If the information is consistent everywhere, you have a better chance of ranking well at the top and getting into the local pack. Good ranking and reviews are also important, but NAPW consistency is the first point you should pay attention to.

In addition to benefits for your website’s link profile, listing in directories can also drive targeted traffic to your website. And if your clients leave good reviews there, the directories will help you form brand awareness and trust.

Publish Your Company’s News in GMB

Unfortunately, few people use the features of their Google My Business profile to the fullest, but in vain, because you can also communicate with your potential clients there.

For example, you can post the latest news about your company on your profile, as well as add links to articles that may be of interest to your audience.

You can also add videos, photos, special offers, and e-commerce listings to the Latest Updates section of your GMB profile.

For example, one of the bakeries in New York City adds special offers for its clients in this section:

And here’s how a famous concert hall in New York City decided to publish a discounted Black Friday ticket offer on its profile:

By clicking on the button, clients are automatically redirected to the website page where they can purchase the tickets they are interested in.

By the way, this leads to another interesting fact: by posting links to your website pages on GMB, you can get additional high-quality external links that will improve the position of this page in the search results. Therefore, we highly recommend you post announcements of your blog articles there.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, creating a comprehensive local SEO content strategy for a local business has its peculiarities that you should consider if you don’t want to waste your time and efforts. When you create a local SEO content strategy, take into account your target audience’s interests, remember to publish on local resources, promote your social media, and, most importantly, add location-specific keywords.If you want high-quality local promotion of your business, contact the Livepage team. Our content marketing services agency will help your business reach new heights in Google’s local search results!