It’s become evident for some time that blogging can help your business with its SEO and make it easier for potential clients and customers to find you. Content marketing has been king for a few years now, and business owners are waking up to the fact that building a reputation for expertise in an area through highly informative content will attract customers both nationally and globally.
Until recently, not a lot of talk has centered on blogging as a method of increasing local SEO results. But now business bloggers and forward-thinking company owners have been discussing the ways that blogs can be used to attract local customers as well as people from across the country and overseas.
Organic and home grown
One thing that’s become obvious to business owners is that organic search results overwhelmingly trump paid searches. In other words, people looking for, say, organic grocers in San Antonio are much more likely to click on websites that appear in the regular search results than on the ads along the margin.
This has been known to be the case on a national scale, but business owners are starting to realize the impact it has on local business, as well, so they’re opting for strategic and informative content over pay-per-click ads.
To keyword or not to keyword
Locally speaking, it seems that keywords — including how, when, and how often to use them — are one of the most highly debated aspects of blogging and SEO in general. This is true on the global scale, as well.
As it turns out, most business blogs and professionals agree that it’s best to include keywords, but not to focus so much on them. With Google increasingly penalizing black-hat SEO techniques (and guest blogging attracting more scrutiny for using them), it seems that on-site SEO via blogging and content is still one of the best methods to attract local, as well as global, customers … and least likely to be penalized or audited by Google.
A similar rule book
The rules of local SEO are similar to those of global or national SEO. It’s still important to use keywords strategically, but it’s just as important not to stuff an article or blog post with them.
Providing informative content that does not directly sell a product or service is also useful, as is allowing and promoting community engagement. Link building is still in but, as always, link farming or purchasing inbound links is still out.
What marketers can do
While the rules may not be much different between local and global/national SEO, how marketers may go about it is. After all, if a marketer is going to target a local area, something about the region should be included in the content.
A few ideas of topics that seem to help business owners connect locally through a blog include:
-
local events
-
community projects
-
local politics (in a neutral way)
-
profiles of interesting people in the community
-
discussion of local charities that are doing good work
Of course, relevancy is still key, so business owners should select ideas that they feel are related to their business. For instance, an insurance salesperson could write a post about a local fire safety conference, or talk about the fact that it’s wildfire season and offer suggestions on to how to protect a person’s home.
2 Comments on "How Businesses Use Blogging to Increase Local SEO"
I believe, it’s really crucial part for a brand, company, or business either to have a blog included along with their site as because it’s the major part of it.
I believe, it’s really crucial part for a brand, company, or business either to have a blog included along with their site as because it’s the major part of it.
And perhaps, according to me keyword researching is really an important task as because it’s always not matter of getting visitors but getting right kind of audiences whom we can convert into loyal readers followed by clients.
Thanks Jennifer Gretson for the share 🙂
– Bishal Biswas