How to Use Content Marketing in Your Local SEO Strategy?

Recently, Google announced its new core update, which is to improve search results and the customer experience. Moreover, it has tightened its belt to proactively control spammy links and the quality of content. It clearly indicates how crucial the content is.

Like global SEO, content marketing is powerful for local SEO as well. With it, marketers drive overwhelming traffic, engage their target audience, and promote anything over the internet. So, the lifeline for online promotion is content. It must be premium in terms of quality and relevancy. This means that the local audience must be engaged with the content. Once it happens, the result speaks for itself. Your content surfaces at the top of SERPs, which creates an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell.

To get desirable opportunities, integrating local SEO initiatives with content marketing can be beneficial. Here is how to maximize its benefits.

Content Marketing in Local SEO Strategy: How to Use?

Digital marketers, including SEO experts, focus on evolving unique content marketing techniques. Here they are for your reference:

1. Understand your Local Audience

Discovering customer intent is the need of the hour because it informs where the opportunities lie. Unlike random research, you need to dig deeply online and discover your target audience's intent. For automatic and rapid research, use Google Analytics or social media insights. These insights reveal their preferences, behavior, shared reviews, and search patterns.

As you study those insights, the picture of their concerns, experiences, and grievances will become crystal clear. You may utilise this opportunity by offering helpful content like how-tos, best processes, top methods, etc.

2. Create Locally Relevant Content

Local searches are on the rise. These searches are typically related to local issues, interests, behaviors, and trends. Audiences look for valuable offers and information. This will create an opportunity to reach out to them by answering blogs, articles, and impressive social posts.

In other words, the challenges that customers face can be converted into opportunities through localized articles or blogs. These contents must answer their burning questions with authentic sources and location-based keywords. These local keywords must be naturally incorporated, which attracts local visitors to your website. Their frequent visits enhance your website's visibility in local search results.

3. Optimize Content for Local Keywords

Local keywords are specific words or phrases that define a specific location, which can be nearby, a zip code, landmarks, a city, etc. Try to incorporate local keywords throughout your content while maintaining its density. Simply put, it should be in titles, headers, meta descriptions, and the body.

To discover the most appropriate local keywords, you may deploy Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs, Google Trends, and Google Search Console. Expert marketers also use competitor analysis and local directories to discover locally searched terms. With the help of content developers, locally trending keywords can be smartly used to address local customers’ grievances through informative blogs and articles. For instance, an individual searching for a nearby grocery shop will search for it in a specific area.

4. Leverage Local Business Listings

Did you know that businesses with complete and accurate GMB listings are 70% more likely to receive footfalls from local searchers? Google has found this fact.

With such a capacity to attract a massive population of customers, it can be fruitful to create and optimize your business profiles. Local directories and listings, like Google My Business (GMB), Yelp, and local business communities, can be the best online places to list. To utilise this opportunity to the fullest, publish a complete profile with all services or offerings and genuine details in at least 1500 characters in all. Ensure that you link your landing pages to the profile. This step will authenticate your profiles. Thereafter, be regular with introducing updates if you’ve made any to your profiles. Also publish new offerings, photos, and related descriptions.

5. Use Local Link-Building Strategies

A local link-building strategy really works well if it is personalized. Personalising and localizing content while integrating valuable demographics into the backlinks can enhance the visibility of the local merchant’s website. Apart from this, collaboration with location-based influencers can also achieve this result. SEMrush conducted a study to reveal that businesses with local backlinks witness 50% better local search rankings.

6. Publish Customer Testimonials and Case Studies

Customer reviews and success stories can be a big attraction for customers. Before investing, they want to know how authentic the seller is and what the quality of the offerings is. In this quest, they explore the genuine views of customers.

So, testimonials provide this opportunity. You can integrate authentic reviews and also gather ratings through C-SAT survey forms. Later, publishing them on the website can increase the footfall of customers from nearby locations.

7. Engage with The Local Community Through Social Media

Instagram, or even YouTube, bridges the gap between customers and online merchants. You may create an official account on social media and continue to add real-life experiences of served customers. Their true words would work like mouth-to-mouth publicity.

This way, many unknown talents have gained the spotlight and outshined on global stages. Their genuine success stories are influential and magnetize customers. So, this can be the most convenient alternative to reaching out to a local audience through authentic content.

8. Monitor and Analyze Your Content Performance

67% of digital marketers who evaluate their content from time to time see a higher return on investment (ROI), according to a 2023 report by the Content Marketing Institute.

This interesting statistic proves that regular monitoring of how your content is performing is rewarding. You may rely on tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and even social media insights to overview your online performance. In particular, focus on page views, engagement rates, local search ranking, etc. to measure the exact performance of your content.

9. Optimise for Voice Search

Voice search is a household activity these days. For digital marketers and local SEO service providers, it is an opportunity to generate leads by integrating location-specific keywords in a generic way.

The spontaneous queries, or queries in natural language, create the need for optimizing content according to voice search. You can create content that answers common queries that your local audience might have in mind.

10. Ensure Mobile-Friendliness

This is a crucial strategy because Google reported that 61% of mobile users are likely to enquire locally if its website is user-friendly.

An increasing number of local searches on mobile phones is an indication that users find these devices convenient to explore online. So, you need a mobile-friendly website to scale your online reach. If you have, that’s ok. You need to continue improving page load times by optimizing codes, compressing images, and following on-page optimisation strategies. This effort will certainly make your content easily accessible on widely used screen sizes.

Conclusion

Content marketing can help you lead the competition in your domain or industry. The content is the voice of web owners that attracts online visibility. So, always be authentic while creating a piece of content. Add relevancy and locally-focused keywords. Also, leverage local link-building opportunities and drive more traffic. Moreover, regularly monitors its performance almost every day.