You’ve probably heard time and time again that content marketing is important in growing your business’s online presence. When done correctly, it can increase brand awareness, advocacy, and lead to more sales. The problem is many businesses are doing it wrong.

Many business owners think they need to be creating X new pieces of content per week, which simply isn’t true. Producing content for the sake of producing content is not a productive use of time and will not rank you higher in Google or drive more sales.

Sure the more quality content you can create, the more traffic you will drive to your website. But instead of focusing on quality, many businesses will push out less than average content to stick to some arbitrary publishing schedule.

Instead of posting every day or every week, you should post when you have an interesting, well-researched, and excellent piece of content to share. If you are struggling to come up with content ideas, you’re not alone. Producing creative content ideas on a consistent basis is a difficult undertaking, but not impossible.

Local content is a very underutilized type of content that you can add to your content marketing repertoire. Local content can be informative blog posts, infographics, videos, guides, or any type of content that targets an individual location. Many businesses have regions and cities where they have a high density of potential customers. Creating local content and layering this onto an existing marketing strategy can be extremely helpful in targeting these regional audiences.

The goal of this post is to explain how local content can benefit your business and how to incorporate it as part of your content marketing strategy.

4 Great Reasons Why You Should Be Creating Local Content

If you want to start integrating local content into your marketing campaigns, you need to make sure it makes sense for your business. It really comes down to one question: would you advertise locally to acquire new customers? If yes, then you can utilize local content. If no, local content probably doesn’t make sense for you.

Here are a few types of businesses it will work well for:

• Local businesses (e.g. independent insurance agencies, real estate brokers, etc.)
• Startups that launch in select cities (e.g. Uber, GoPuff, etc.)
• National brick and mortar business (e.g. Carmax, Home Depot. etc.)

Unless you are a local business, a local content marketing strategy should only be used in addition to your primary content strategy because of scalability. If your business is in 200+ cities, you aren’t going to want to create content for every one of those cities. You’re better off creating content that is relevant everywhere and then throwing in content pieces that target big cities here and there.

Let’s say you’re a new startup that’s launching a snack delivery service app in Phoenix, Arizona, similar to Uber when they launched in San Francisco. Since your target audience is only in Phoenix, creating local content makes sense in this case.

Aside from increasing brand awareness and advocacy, here are four reasons why you should consider local content creation.

1. Authority of Your Domain

It’s no secret that backlinks are one of the most important organic ranking factors, but have you ever wondered why sites like Yelp rank so well in Google with almost zero page specific backlinks? If you search for “best Phoenix dentist,” you’ll see that Yelp is the first organic listing.

This page is not ranking because of links pointing to it. The real reason it’s ranking is because of the power and trust coming from Yelp’s root domain. If you look at Yelp’s root domain in the Ahrefs Site Explorer, you’ll see there are over 500,000 referring domains!

The results show two articles about flights getting canceled due to extreme heat. Now we know we can create content that plays off the heat residents of Arizona experience.

Another awesome tool for finding content ideas is the Ahrefs Content Explorer. First, input your location keywords into the search box. Ahrefs gives you many filtering options, but I like to start out by selecting “In Title” and then sorting for “Total Shares.”

Here are some more resources to help you find trending topics:

• 12 Ways To Find Trending Topics
• 8 Ways To Find Trending Topics and Keywords

Creating Local Content

Now that we know the summer heat is a popular topic in Arizona, it’s time to create some content around it. We want to make sure our content is optimized to go viral on social media. Generally, when someone shares something on social, the majority of their friends and followers are in the same region as them. If we can get people sharing our piece of content about the summer heat in Phoenix, the majority of people viewing and re-sharing the content will also be from Phoenix.

Here are some resources for creating viral content:

• The Ultimate Guide To Creating Viral Content
• How To Create Viral Content

If you can, you should also optimize your content to rank organically. When you have content ranking, you’ll receive a consistent, passive stream of traffic. To optimize for organic rankings, you will need to conduct some keyword research around the topic idea you are thinking about covering.

Let’s say you want to create a piece of content on staying cool in the Phoenix summer heat. First, open up the Google Keyword Planner. Select “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website, or category” and then type in “stay cool in the heat.” Under “Targeting” select Phoenix, Arizona as the location you want to target.

The Google Keyword Planner is known to be inaccurate, so don’t worry about the exact search volumes. This simply validates that the term “staying cool in the heat” is searched by people in Phoenix. If you want to rank your local content organically, the Skyscraper Technique by Brian Dean of Backlinko provides a robust process to follow.

Here are some more resources to help you get started on content creation:

• Guide To Local Content Strategy and Marketing
• How To Get Backlinks With Guestographics
• The Visual Format Your Should Be Using For Link Building

Promoting and Ranking Your Content

Now that you have a piece of content targeting a particular location, it’s time to promote and rank it. There are some awesome resources out there for promoting and ranking content so we won’t be diving too deep into this.

To begin promoting your content via social media here are some resources:

• Social Media Outreach For Beginners: Finding social media pages, profiles, and groups to promote your content to is important in making your content visible. This post provides you with an outreach strategy for social promotion.
• 11 Effective Ways To Use Social Media To Promote Your Content: There are many ways to go about social media promotion. Your promotional strategies will vary depending on who your content is targeting and the type of content you are pushing. This resource will provide you with some different ideas.

If you are also planning on ranking your content organically, here are some resources:

• How To Learn SEO: To rank content, you will need to learn some search engine optimization. This resource will guide you to some of the best resources for learning the different pillars of SEO.
• Link Building For SEO: The Definitive Guide: Links are one of the most important elements in ranking. This resource dives pretty deep into building links through content marketing.

Rinse and Repeat

Now that you have a process for finding, creating, and promoting local content, you should test to see the impact it can have on your business. The more successful local content you create, the more qualified visitors will end up landing on your website. If you capture these visitors emails and use retargeting with Facebook Ads, you are on your way to increased traffic and sales.

About The Author: Cody West is a co-founder at Assisted Reach and an analytics and SEO aficionado. He counters his bad posture with yoga and is a fan of corny jokes. When it comes to data analysis, he “Excels.” You can connect with him on Twitter or via LinkedIn.

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