What Content Should I Publish For A Local Audience?

You hopefully already know that creating excellent and high-quality content on your website is essential for SEO purposes and for conversions of visitors into leads and, ultimately, customers.

What you might not know is that if you are a local business and you are trying to attract local customers, the types of content you need to create are different. By different, we mean different than the sorts of content a company that operates nationally or globally might publish on its website.

On that note, what we often come across is a local business that has a great product or service that local customers adore, but when you look online, their website and content try to make it look like they are a bigger outfit than Apple.

Now, there is nothing wrong with having the ambition to grow your business as big as possible, nor is it wrong to make your website look as professional as can be. However, when your audience is a local one, apart from answering the questions they ask on Google, you want to be speaking to them via your content, not a global audience that might not even know your town or city exists.

So, let us look at the sorts of content you should be creating for your local business, and more importantly, how content that resonates with the local audience is more likely to turn them into your paying customers and clients.

Here are a few of the main types of local content you should consider using on your website.

Testimonials and Reviews From Local Customers

Whichever town or city a person lives in, any review or testimonial they see from someone else who lives there seems more applicable, than one from someone who lives thousands of miles away.

As a business owner, not only should you be encouraging your customers to leave reviews and testimonials, but they should include the local town or neighbourhood so that other local residents identify with it.

Local Events and News

Anything which you can publish on your website that relates to local news or events will add further to making a connection with local people. Your blog is an ideal platform to use for this.

As well as being excellent locally focussed content, in terms of SEO, it does your local rankings no harm, as keywords such as the names of your city or town will be appearing naturally throughout your website.

Create Blog Posts Specifically For Your Local Area

What most business owners who use a blog normally do when creating the title for a post is something like the following:

• A pet shop owner might write ‘10 Great Tips For Keeping Your Dog Fit’
• A wedding dress store owner might write ‘5 Unusual Wedding Gift Ideas’
• An accountant might write: ‘How To Ensure You Never Pay More Tax Than You Should’
• A gym owner might write: ‘7 Ways To Fine Tune Your Muscle Tone’

Undoubtedly, time and care would be taken over the writing of these blog posts and anyone reading would get a lot of useful information from them. But they are missing one vital ingredient for a local audience…they do not have the local area, town, or city in the title.

Looking at those titles, they could have been written by anyone, anywhere in the world, and therefore, they do not immediately appeal to their local audience.

How about changing them as below?

• ’10 Great Tips For Sydney Dog Owners To Keep Their Dog Fit’
• ‘5 Unusual Wedding Gift Ideas You Can Buy In lower north shore’
• ‘How North Sydney Taxpayers Can Keep Their Taxes Low’
• ‘7 Ways Cronulla Gym Enthusiasts Can Tone Their Muscles’

Now we admit they may not be the best blog titles ever created, but you can hopefully see that if anyone in any of those towns and cities saw them, it would grab their attention. Again, the SEO aspect also needs to be pointed out as keyword phrases like ‘Cronulla Park Gym’, in the title of that blog post will help that gym rank for that search term.

Multimedia

Videos, images, audios, and infographics, which show and highlight your local area are all fantastic ways to include local content on your website. There are so many ways these mediums can be used that you are limited only by your imagination.

Specific examples include videos showcasing your products and service, video testimonials and reviews, and images of your staff to name but three.

Wherever possible find a local angle to include in your multimedia, with local landmarks, local events, local dignitaries, and even local celebrities all great ideas for making your content undoubtedly local.

About Us Page

Do not forget to verify your local credentials on your ‘About Us‘ page. Many visitors to your website will go there to find out more about your business, so if you mention you, your staff or anyone connected with the business is local through and through, it is yet another connection with them.