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Posted by Bhupinder Kaur Chhabra
August 20, 2016
SEO provides an opportunity to develop your own little niche within your local community. Many local businesses get trapped into thinking that writing a blog isn’t really their cup of tea. Well… It’s for bloggers. Unfortunately, they couldn’t be further from the truth.
Today, content is so implausibly important from some perspectives like driving traffic to your site, attracting new customers by converting the site visitors into leads, authority building and obviously, getting found online through search engines.
The more content your create on your site, the more it’ll help you build in the long run. An article from the world-famous HubSpot – an inbound marketing magnate cited: “90% of the leads they generated every month came from the blog posts published in the previous months or sometimes, years ago.”
It’s not that only the large, savvy sites like HubSpot can benefit from creating engaging content. A recent research performed on over 500 UK B2B sites show that the top ranking sites have double amount of content than the lower ranking and average websites.
Local business owners do not get encourage to create more content. Probably, they think they’ve not got enough time, or there’s not much worth saying or they’re in a boring industry – or all the three.
Let’s confront it, creating high quality, relevant content takes time and resources, but at the end of the day, business with local content marketing strategy and framework are far better than without.
So, here in this article, you’ll find some smart ways how to convince your local clients create more content.
Services page is a critical web page where you allow the users get a detailed information about the services your business caters.
Rather than jumping into blogging straight away, first consider pushing your clients to expand their site’s services page.
Often, the local small businesses set up a generic ‘Services’ page that lists just the services they offer. This is probably because they’d have to pay a designer extra cost for extra pages. But this is not the true economy, because now they’re spreading themselves too thin.
Having some great, relevant content for every service page can help you spread the keyword on the web much wider. Each page on your site is an opportunity to rank for a specific keyword instead of getting lost in the generic ‘Services’ page.
For example, a local plumber would probably offer a dozen of services and each service can merit their own page (drain cleaning, leak repairs, emergency call out, central heating installation, radiator installation, kitchen plumbing installation etc…)
So, a good way to start is encourage the reluctant clients to develop services page for each of the main keyword services they offer to their customers.
I’m sure if you ask your clients about their business, they would take a long time talking about the services they offer with every little hints and tips that users need to know about.
And, amazingly there’d be ton of stuff they could actually use for a keyword rich content.
Only thing you need to do is encouraging them to move, and FAQs are a great way to achieve this.
The traditional FAQ pages are a bit boring, so you don’t necessarily need to think about them either although there are ways to create more impacting FAQ pages.
One of the option is to take your FAQs and search for the long tail options and create relevant blog content around them.
For example, a weight loss products manufacturing company can have a FAQ on “What are the advantages of green tea in weight loss?” but without much efforts, they can also create a relevant and engaging content for their blog entitled “5 Important health reasons to choose green tea in your weight loss regime ”.
This type of content can leave a positive impact to some extent. Remember, the first thing is the value this type of content can provide to its readers and potential clients. Thus, highlighting the frequently asked questions about a product or service and addressing concerns about it can establish a basic trust, which is what the consumers expect today.
Additionally, FAQ pages and the blog posts are excellent ways to focus on long tail keywords that speak directly to what their consumers are looking for online. This is where the brands need to pay attention.
Small businesses are a crucial part in their local community. By hosting or promoting local events, your clients’ brands can improve their standing within the community and connect to local influencers.
Now, don’t just let these events be a happening. You can use them as blog and highlight your brand story, why this town or city, what makes that place special. This is an impactful way to promote the brand and forge a connection with local customers.
Another way to use the local events is increasing search visibility by highlighting the good deeds performed by the brand. Blogging for a specific charity, local meetup, event sponsorship or even neighborhood guides.
This approach makes it much easier to reach out the users of local business community whether on a personal level or through social networking channels.
For most of the online customers today, reviews are the first thing they look for before deciding to buy anything. There are some better ways to sell your brand than to indicate your happy customers.
Data from a study shows that 60% of consumers read online reviews before making online purchases and they are now an essential thing for ecommerce websites. And the same study highlights that the reviews, on average can produce upto 18% boost in sales. This can be a huge hike for a small business.
The simple truth is that most of the small businesses have lots of good and happy customers who’d love to provide feedback if asked. And that’s the crucial point – often, they aren’t asked. All you need to do is encourage the local clients to make it as easy as possible for the customers to leave reviews or provide testimonials.
The bottom line is that encourage your clients to approach their best customers for testimonials and reviews.
For any local business, blogging should be an integral part of a long term strategy. If you see that your local clients push back, than there are many ways you can guide them towards committing the time and efforts required.
And, expanding the services page, adding more FAQ page content, getting involved in local events, driving in more user generated content are all the ways to help your consumers commit to content.
Although some clients may hesitate to blogging initially, you need to help them by showcasing an approach that is simple and delivers great results.
