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You may own or manage a small business’s website. Have you ever wondered how to target a location on blog articles? If so, I’ll show you how to optimize your blog articles for search engines to improve local rankings.
Marketing Funnels 101
Before we get into talking about how to optimize a blog for local SEO, we should briefly touch on marketing funnels. This will help you get a fuller picture of how different types of website content have different goals or purposes.
Below is a chart showing the different marketing funnel stages and how they align with user intent and website content types.
| Funnel Stage | User Intent | What That Means | Website Content |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top: Awareness | Informational | They don’t know what they want, or who you are. | – Blog Articles – Practitioner Pages |
| Middle: Consideration | Informational or Commercial | They know what they are looking for, but not sure who to hire / purchase from. | – Blog Articles Service -Pages Location Pages -Service-Area Pages -Practitioner Pages |
| Bottom: Decision | Commercial | They know what they are looking for, and they want to hire you / purchase from you. | – Service Pages – Location Pages – Service-Area Pages |
I highly recommend that you read our other guide on SEO content types if you want to understand this concept in more depth.
The reason this matters is, if you create website content that doesn’t align with user intent, it may have a difficult time ranking and / or converting users. I’m sure you don’t want to waste your time creating the wrong kind of content for your goals, right?
I usually recommend creating middle and bottom funnel content first. These types of pages are service pages, location pages, service-area pages, practitioner pages, etc.
Next you’ll want to focus on your blog content to target the top and middle funnel. More often than not, blog content targets users who are closer to the top of the funnel because blog articles usually focus on educating the reader rather than selling something to them.
When to Use Blog Content for Local SEO
As I mentioned above, once you have created your middle and bottom funnel website content, you can start creating blog content.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be in this order but to me it makes the most sense to focus on creating pages that convert before creating pages that may not convert as often.
Top of the funnel content can help with local SEO in the following ways:
- Brand awareness
- Builds trust with readers
- Shows that you are an expert
- Users may convert or refer others to you even if they don’t hire you
Types of Blog Content That Works Well for Local Search
If you want to convince potential customers that land on the site that you are an expert in your field, you’ll need to educate them. And you’ll need to do it in a professional, organized matter that impresses people.
Provide a ton of value: The goal is to convince them you’re an expert and build trust so they contact you for help.
And don’t forget that the content should support your main goal, or send users to the next step via a call-to-action (CTA).
Here are some examples of blog topics that may work well for local SEO:
- {{City}}’s Best Places to {{Action}}
- {{Number}} Reasons Not to {{Action}} in {{City}}
- {{Number}} Hidden Gems in {{City}}, {{State}}
- How to Find {{Desired Outcome}} in {{City}}
- Top {{Number}} {{Business Category}} in {{City}}, {{State}}
- The Best Way for {{Audience}} to Get {{Desired Outcome}}
- {{Number}} Local Businesses in {{City}} That {{Business Category}}’s Love!
- Why {{Business Category}}’s Thrive in {{City}}
- {{Number}} Reasons {{City}} is The Best for {{Business Category}}
- Learn How to Get {{Solution}} from a {{City}} {{Business Category}}
- XX Ways to {{Desired Outcome}}
- XX {{Topic}} Tips
- XX {{Type}} Tools
- XX {{Topic}} Techniques
- XX {{Products}} For {{Audience}}
- {{Topic}} For Beginners
- The Beginner’s Guide to {{Topic}}
- The Noob-Friendly Guide to {{Topic}}
- What is {{Topic}}?
- How to {{Action}}
- Show them how to do it and they’ll see how hard it is and hire you to do it. Some people think this is a bad idea, but someone who is going to Google a solution will keep on searching until they find the answer. They weren’t going to hire you anyway. So you might as well capture this kind of traffic in order to gain them as a regular reader, someone who thinks you are an authority in the industry. They may refer others to you even if they don’t use your services. I’ve done this many times myself.
How to Target a Location on a Blog to Rank Locally
So let’s say you’ve chosen a topic for a blog article and decided which local keywords you’d like to go after. Here’s how you can make sure your local blog content targets a location.
These are the places in the content that you will want to make sure include your target keyword + the location name that you are targeting.
- Page Title
- URL
- Main Heading (h1)
- Subheadings (h2, h3, etc.)
- Paragraphs
- Internal Links
Take a look at my keyword targeting cheat sheet before moving forward.
On-Page Optimizations for Local Blog Content
Here’s how that would look for a blog article with the target keyword of “best grass for shade” that is targeting the entire state of Florida.
| Element | Example |
|---|---|
| Page Title | The Best Shade Tolerant Grass To Use In Florida | Natural Green |
| Meta Description | Which Florida grasses are shade tolerant? Read our guide to find the best Florida grasses that grow just fine in the shade! |
| URL | /learn/the-best-shade-tolerant-grass-to-use-in-florida/ |
| Headings | The Best Shade Tolerant Grass To Use In Florida First, How Much Sun Does Grass Need? Best Shade Tolerant Grasses for Florida Yards Is There A Full Shade Grass Species? How To Get Grass To Grow In Shade in Florida Adjustments To Help Shaded Grasses Alternatives To Shade Grass What Kind Of Grass Should You Grow Under Shade Trees? FAQs About Shade Tolerant Grasses |
| Content / Copy | The target keyword + location should be mentioned in the copy several times. |
| Internal Links | Find other pages on the site that mention the keyword or similar phrases. For example, if another page mentions “shade tolerant grass” link from this phrase to /learn/the-best-shade-tolerant-grass-to-use-in-florida/. Include the location term in the anchor text if possible. |
Some marketing companies out there will allow you to purchase content from their content library. What they essentially do is write an article one time, and then sell that one article to all of their clients.
That means you are not getting unique, original content. And you’ll be competing with all of their other clients that they also sold that content to.
What’s even worse, is some of these marketing companies also use a canonical tag to say that their original article is the main / most important one. Search engines will then devalue any other pages that are copies of this content.
Below is an example of a marketing company that sells content from a content library:
And here are examples of the same blog article that they sold to several of the clients. They are all essentially competing with each other:
- https://www.plymouthvet.com/services/dogs/blog/discovering-heartworm-disease-dogs
- https://www.lombardvet.com/services/dogs/blog/discovering-heartworm-disease-dogs
- https://www.countrysideveterinaryclinic.org/services/dogs/blog/discovering-heartworm-disease-dogs
- https://www.bocaparkanimalhospital.com/services/dogs/blog/discovering-heartworm-disease-dogs
My advice: Don’t use marketing services that syndicate content or reuse content across all clients.
Local SEO Blog Content Checklist
In conclusion, here’s a simple checklist for creating blog content for local search:
- Decide which product or service you want to promote. If you take this into consideration when creating local content, you will increase conversions.
- Come up with some topics that would allow you to promote this product or service in the blog article. For example, if you want to promote your Organic Lawn Fertilizing Service, you could create an article on “Organic vs Synthetic Fertilizers”. At the end you’d include a CTA for your Organic Lawn Fertilizing Service.
- Use this list of topics to perform local keyword research to see keyword volume and keyword difficulty
- Make sure to choose a location to target (if applicable)
- Look at the local SERPs to see what other top ranking pages are doing
- Create a Content Brief so that you can map out all of the headings
- Write the article, post it on the website, and optimize the content
If this is too difficult to pull off, or you don’t have the time, we’d be happy to do it for you!
Local SEO Blog Content Experts
In conclusion, if you take time to plan out your blog content and optimize it correctly, it can be highly valuable for local search.
At CONTENTAMIGO we focus on creating stellar local SEO content. If you need assistance finding the right keywords to target on a local level or need blog articles created, we’d love to help! Just place an order!