Creating local content involves picking the right local content types for your business, creating them, and then marketing them.
Local content types include blog content and social media content covering topics that have local intent, such as local guides, local event coverage and community spotlights.
Marketing local content involves building local backlinks, making appearances in local media, hosting or taking part in community events, and collaborating with influencers and other local businesses.
You should also create local pages on your website, especially location pages.
Create Local Content Types
Local content types include:
- Written Content
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- Customer stories
- Case studies
- Helpful blog content
- Local guides
- Community spotlights
- Local news coverage
- FAQs
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- Social Media Content
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- Short-form videos prioritized for TikTok and Facebook Reels but also published to Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts
- Long-form video guides published to YouTube
- Live event coverage
- Behind the scenes videos
- Demonstration videos
- Comedic content
- Video podcasts published to YouTube with clips published as short-form videos
- Image-based Facebook posts
- Image-based Instagram posts
- Instagram stories
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- Audio Content
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- Podcast
Written Content
The goal with written content is to use blog posts to attract visitors to your website from multiple traffic sources, including search engines, social media, email and even other websites (backlinks).
Normally, this would mean establishing yourself as an authority in your niche through extensive topic coverage that targets users who speak the same language as you and live in the same country.
However, as a local business, your content marketing strategy must involve tactics that attract local users to your website. This means you must also establish yourself as an authority in your area.
To do this, connect with your local community through your content as much as possible.
Source: Baker Brothers
Your blog should be home to helpful written guides related to your niche, customer stories, case studies using real data you’ve collected, local news coverage and community spotlights, which are anything in your community you want to draw attention to (events, attractions, causes, people, organizations, etc.).
Longer articles and even ebooks should be used for local guides.
You can also create a dedicated FAQ page (or FAQ section on your homepage, About page and service pages) filled with answers to real questions you’ve received from customers.
Social Media Content
“Social media content” is really code for “short-form video content” these days, particularly videos published to TikTok, Facebook (reels), Instagram (reels) and YouTube (shorts).
Videos that are three minutes-long or less do enough to get your point across while being short enough to keep your audience’s interest.
However, “social media content” might also refer to regular Facebook posts, Instagram posts and YouTube videos.
For local businesses, TikTok and Facebook are your best bet. These two platforms often include videos from local businesses in organic social media feeds.
For short-form videos, publish comedic content, behind-the-scenes content, tutorials, and demonstration videos.
Source: @loganscandies on TikTok
Publish long-form video guides to YouTube along with video podcasts, if you make either, and publish clips from both as short-form videos.
If you attend events in your area, do your own live event coverage by livestreaming on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Audio Content
A podcast that covers community events and other local news coverage is a fantastic way to market your business while connecting with your community.
Publish episodes to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Buzzsprout and RedCircle.
Publish video podcasts to YouTube. Then, create clips from it, and publish them as TikToks, Instagram reels, Facebook reels and YouTube shorts.
It’s worth noting that you can create clips from audio-only podcasts by using stylized subtitles displayed over relevant images instead.
Use Local Content Marketing Strategies
Effective strategies include:
- Local backlinks
- Local media appearances
- Influencer marketing
- Collaborations with other local businesses
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
A large portion of content marketing is promoting the content you create.
You can certainly use all of these marketing strategies on their own, and you should, but you should also use them to market content. A useful, well-written and well-researched piece of content that’s unique gives you a consumer-friendly resource to offer as an incentive instead of promoting your products and services.
The trouble is deciding what content to promote.
This is easy with email marketing and social media marketing as you should be promoting every article you write to these sources.
Just be sure to follow the unwritten rules of every platform you publish content to.
Facebook is a great example. The platform decreases a post’s visibility if it has a link in the post body. In fact, Meta now recommends adding links in comments instead.
If you create a short-form video for a blog post, mention the article and add a link to it on your link-in-bio page, but don’t purposefully leave important details out with a call to action instructing viewers to “visit your blog” if they want to learn more.
It’s a lot more user friendly to share everything in a single video while listing important details listed in the caption. Your viewers might even thank you for it.
Promoting Shareable Content
Again, the most challenging thing about running an effective content marketing campaign is coming up with content that’s worth promoting on other websites.
The most effective content format is written content that’s based around original data.
Take BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey, for example. It’s a document that contains results from a series of questions BrightLocal asks consumers about online reviews.
BrightLocal publishes a new edition every year and presents it with graphs, charts, analyses and summaries, making it easy for marketers (like myself) to extract data from.
Another example is Backlinko’s analysis of 11.8 million Google search results.
While the research was likely expensive and incredibly time consuming, there’s no denying the impact this article has had on the site’s overall success.
If you want to establish yourself as an authority in your niche, come up with a way to generate and collect original data. Then, take the time to craft an article or PDF document that showcases your data in a well-presented format.
Other possibilities include a really interesting case study or a positive action you made for your community. Maybe work you did for a customer led to something truly beneficial for them, or maybe you became heavily involved in a local event.
Whatever you come up with, promote the article/document by reaching out to local media sites, influencers in your area and fellow businesses. You’ll earn local backlinks, which are important for local SEO.
Create Local Web Pages
Local content also involves local web pages, including:
- Location pages
- Service pages
- About page filled with local mentions (local news appearances, awards, etc.)
As a local business, the most important pages on your website are your location pages. These are pages that target the cities, counties and areas you serve.
It’s up to you to determine how many location pages you need, but keep in mind that each page needs to have unique content.
Google will penalize your site for spam if you mass duplicate a page and only change out a few words or sentences here and there. It really doesn’t matter how many location pages you create if each page has unique content.
Even so, you’re better off following a few best practices like:
- Only creating a location page for each physical location you own if you’re a brick-and-mortar business
- Creating a location page for a single service area and listing every city you serve on it
- Creating a location page for each service area
- Creating a location page for each city you serve if you serve a smaller area
- Creating a location page for each county you serve if you serve a large region
The idea here is that it’s easier to create unique landing pages if you limit the number of pages you need to create.
Source: Baker Brothers
The same is true for service pages. You can either create a single “Services” page and list every service you offer on it or create a separate page for each service you offer. It all depends on how much time and money you can put into creating unique pages.
Your About page should also contain a section for local mentions, which are any appearances you’ve made or recognitions you’ve received that tie into your business location.
These include a “Featured On” section that lists local media appearances and an “Awards & Recognitions” section that lists awards and shoutouts you’ve received from organizations in your area.
If you’ve participated in events in your area, include them in an “Events” section.
Optimize Local Content
Optimizing local content is important for improving local SEO.
Do a bit of local keyword research to see what keywords you should be using on content pages.
If you use a WordPress SEO plugin, don’t worry about meeting whatever keyword density metric it recommends. Just make sure your content matches local search intent, and mention semantic keywords and topics.
The exception is if your plugin says your keyword density is too high. This is a sign that you’re over optimizing your content.
Test pages for performance and user experience, and include relevant, unique images. Even if you can’t hire a professional photographer, photos taken on your phone carry a lot more credibility than stock photos do.
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