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5 Solid Location Specific Content Generation Tips to Improve Your Local SEO Ranking With
So if you have been doing or learning how to improve your local SEO for any amount of time now you are probably well aware of the Google Possum Update by now, what it is and what it's for and what it's supposed to do. And following all these updates, you should now put a lot of emphasis on your local SEO optimization. Not easy when you don't own a real brick and mortar business right? Well even if you don't own a real brick and mortar business, and you're just running a simple e-commerce site or blog, there's still things you can do to help your site/blog rank for local terms!
1. Use Your Employers or Those Around You
Google's renewed emphasis on hyper local listings are because Google wants to help people find the right business that's based near to them. And in this update, a lot of businesses and sites and blogs have lost rankings because of the Possum Update since those sites targeting local terms are ranking higher than them. And if that's happened to you, all is not lost! I'd like to share some ways with you on how you can improve and get those rankings back for local search terms using location specific content. These are some powerful local SEO tips and techniques that are easy to do and will all help in the long run.
There's a lot of website that would like to rank for local terms in Google's 3 Pack or even be one of the sites listed in the top 3 of mobile search results. And there are some things that should be taken into consideration that Google looks for when ranking sites in the top 3 of any results. Of course, site structure, on-page and off-page SEO will play a large roll. As will your site reviews and backlinks from sites that are related to you such as from related blogs or even local directories using keyword related to local search terms.
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6 Simple Reasons Why Your Local Business Needs SEO.
So even if you own a simple blog or some small e-commerce store, or a massive network of hundreds of sites all around the country, you should make an effort to think about how you can create location specific content, or even change your current old content such as blog content to location specific content. If you own a restaurant/cafe/bar for example, look to your employees and profile them, see what kind of events in the area they work and live in. What local attractions they visit, what activities they do and include these as blog posts on your blog highlighting those words in those areas in the text on the page in those posts. This can apply not just for employees, but maybe colleagues too or even friends and family. Simple!
2. Use Local Events and Attractions for Content
Whether you're a local brick and mortar business, or you're just an e-commerce site or blog on anything! You can use local events to you or in any country/county for creating location specific content. For brick and mortar businesses, use local events and attractions as content by writing about them and putting the words of the city that it's in in your titles. If you're not, you can still do this but it requires some thinking outside of the box!
Let's say you have an e-commerce site that sells RC drones. A little hobby of mine. And you want to target some people in New York. Well what you could do is search any drone flying clubs or anything drone related that's going on in New York and then write about this on your site with New York or even other areas for other cities and towns and counties and this will get picked up by the search engines for anyone that searches something like "
Drone Flying Lessons in New York". Get it? You got it! This can be expanded on for virtually any product you sell even services like
SEO services and
SMO services and the like.
Any business or website will want to expand and grow and make connections with new people and businesses. And that includes people and businesses in other states, towns and counties in their country. Although those that grow too quickly can risk loosing their local appreciation and it's important to build up a name for yourself within your areas community first before you do.
But smart businesses and their marketing teams do try and enter into new communities and integrate within them. This can lead to you networking with other sites and blogging about them as they will blog about you and be using your brand and keywords along with your city/county area etc when they do. That's why you should tap into your staffs or even your own potential to learn more about the area you're targeting to create content based on it.
You could even get your staff members or marketing team, or yourself write blog content that is aimed directly at the area they live in. Find out whether any festivals or parades are held near them. Tell them to get involved or get involved yourself and act like a journalist and document your experience with it and the things connected to it that are relevant to your area. Even if you don't have someone that can do the legwork for you, you can have them or yourself research this and use that as local specific content!
3. Use Influential Marketing
Using influential marketing this way, can not only help you generate great local content for your blog which will help your local rankings for those terms, cities, towns, states etc, but of course, getting other local businesses to collaborate on blog content with can help increase brand awareness about your business name as well. So if possible, create a list of some of the biggest local influencers for the area you want to target local terms for. That could be other sites, bloggers also targeting the same areas terms, or actual brick and mortar businesses from stores, shops, services to even the Mayor himself or other socialites!
After you've collated a list of most of them, you should try to brainstorm ways in which you can get them involved with your business. This is where you can be really clever and use Influential Marketing to rank for location specific content. You'll need to think of clever ways of "influencing them" into working with you. This could be from any reviews you could share with a local blogger or inviting them to a painting class (if your blog/site is about painting!). Or cooking if you run a cooking blog. Or a drone flying lesson 101 for beginner to intermediate drone flying enthusiasts if that's your thing whatever!
Whatever it is, it will have to be something special that they will enjoy doing and experiencing and want to write about it on their blog. And you can write about that on your blog and targeting local terms based on the area it was held in. Which you and they can share to you and your blog followers and social media followers and the like.
4. Use Check-Ins and Reviews
Here's a great tip that can increase engagement by people in your area who use your site or login to your site somehow if to leave a comment or a review on a product for example. And many other sites also do this including Social Media Networking sites like Facebook by prompting its users to check in and share their location for certain areas businesses they are using or reviewing. You could ask your sites users to check in and share their location which has several benefits for your site. Ask your users to log in when buying something or when leaving reviews. You could offer a free sample of something or even use a call-to-action while they're checking out. All that really matters is that it's a way to increase engagement and the more people engage with your site or brand name, the more people are likely to check it out and use it.
5. Reach Out Further
This might seem glaringly obvious but I say it for the sake of saying it as it can be very useful to know. But while many businesses only focus on the town or the city they are in, which of course is important to do, you can reach a much wider audience by targeting other cities, towns and states next to yours with these methods above for the content generation side of it. You could build some kind of Editorial Calendar for your local city / town. As well as for surround cities, towns and counties too. That will also help you to come up with a lot more location specific content as other towns, counties etc often have their own thing going on at different times of the year you can blog about.
This method also works well for bricks and mortar businesses especially that want to try and tap into some of the foot traffic that walks by during the day. Unless you are doing some kind of marketing of it, people are just going to really continue to just walk on by. And people look for businesses that show involvement with the community. So by getting involved with your community and the events that are taking place on the same street or in the same city/town etc, more people will come to know about your business and that means more engagement and business for you!
This also has several benefits for your business when your business is getting involved with local events. That is not just for the location specific content it can help you to generate with photos, video content etc of those local community events, but as you do, the local community will come to see your business as a valuable business within that community.
Okay that is some tips on how to increase your local SEO rankings using your own staff or community, local events and attractions to
generate location specific content and by reaching out to people in your local community and getting involved with them for the purpose of increasing your local SEO rankings!
Thanks for reading, I hope you get some insight from this into doing just that!
Let me know if you have any questions!
Or feel free to add anything, any more tips you have.
Cheers!
Mike.
CryptoGuru
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