Top 7 Content Creation based local SEO ranking factors that can impact your business

72% of people performing a local search, visited a store within 8 km from their point of search. 

46% of all the searches on Google are local.

Many local businesses do not understand the significance of local SEO and lose out valuable leads to their competitors. You have to take care of local SEO ranking factors such as 

• Claiming your NAP (Name, address and phone number) citations in reputed local directories
• Claiming Google My Business account and similar accounts in other search engines such as Bing, and Yahoo
• Getting reviews and ratings from your customers
• Producing content with relevant long-tail  keywords 
• Creating a mobile-friendly website
• Localizing the schema markup of the websites

However, optimizing your content for searches with local intent goes a great way in ensuring that you climb up the local search rankings and improve visibility. 

7 Proven Content Creation Tips to Boost Your Local SEO Rankings

1. Write Content That Appeals to the Local Audiences

Creating content with local intent helps you to capture the interest of the local audience. Not many businesses concentrate on this niche and hence, you will have an advantage over your competitors. 

To generate local content ideas, you have to interact with your target audience face-to-face and virtually. You can use tools such as Facebook’s audience insights to conduct an extensive audience analysis of your audience’s demographics. This information will help you to curate the content that appeals to your audience and motivates them to visit your store or contact you. 

To ensure that your content pops up whenever your prospective customers are searching for something you offer, it is essential to use the right long-tail keywords. You can use Google keyword planner to measure the search volume for different keywords shortlisted based on customer interaction, competitor analysis and other keyword generation tactics.  This will help you to create content using the right keywords with local intent. 

2. Invest in Local Link-building

Generating local links is one of the critical local SEO ranking factors. You have to focus on creating linkable content with local statistics. This generates opportunities for local link-building as the local bloggers and media will reference the statistics from your website or blog. 

For example, if you have a real estate company, you can post the latest statistics about rental statistics, property prices, etc., which are most sought after by your local audience. The more up-to-date and relevant your local statistics are, the better your local search ranking. 

Apart from writing content with local statistics and research, here are some helpful tips for local link building

• Target structured and unstructured citations
• Get affiliated to the local business associations of your industry
• Leverage your relationships with existing vendors, clients, and friends 
• Donate your services or money to the local charities 
• Use the job openings in your company to get links from the job websites and directories

3. Consider Guest Posting in Local Blogs

Apart from creating local intent-based content for your own website, publishing guest posts on other local websites helps to boost your local SEO. Guest posts help to improve your reach as you can reach a newer set of audience apart from your own audience, showcase your industry expertise and earn backlinks from these websites. 

For example, you can write weekly columns for your local newspapers, trade magazines, etc.  contribute to other websites from your industry that accept guest posts, write content for educational websites, and so on. 

4. Host or Sponsor Local Events

Hosting local events in your city helps to position yourself as a local community leader. Events help to draw the local crowd to your business and also generate valuable local links from event planners, event partners, local bloggers and local media. 

For example, if you have a restaurant, you can host events on special days such as valentines day, Mothers day, friendship day, independence day, Fathers day, etc.  You can also host weekend events by inviting local standup comedians, music artists, poets, etc.  

5. Build a Local Community on Social Media

Social media plays a significant role in promoting local businesses. It can be effectively used to build a local community of loyal followers. These followers not only engage with your content by liking and sharing it, but also promote your products and services. 

You have to choose the social media channels that are popular among your local target audience and create company pages on them. Moreover, you have to actively engage with your followers by replying to their comments. You can also use your social media to promote events, advertise promotional offers, and discount sales to your local audience. 

6. Encourage User-generated Content

User-generated content is one sure shot way to increase audience engagement. Most small businesses fail to use this simple tool. User-generated content can be in many forms such as photos, videos, reviews, etc. It helps you to create social proof that builds trust in the audience and increases conversions. 

Encouraging your followers to share content helps to promote new products launches, and also creates hype in social media that increases user engagement. 

Starbucks is one good example for businesses that effectively use user-generated content. Here is an example of how they announced the new addition of their pumpkin spice latte with user-generated content. 

Advantages of user-generated content

• Helps to keep the content on your website relevant and  fresh
• Strengthens your SEO with right keywords and links
• Aids in the identification of the long-tail keywords used by your audience
• Boosts Social Media Optimization (SMO)
• Appeals to both search engine bots and manual evaluators

7. Optimize Landing Pages With Local Content

Optimizing your landing pages for local search helps your target audience to find you easily when they search for the products and services in your niche. As Google is gravitating more towards the user intent of the search rather than just plain keywords, creating local landing pages has become a crucial task. 

Here are some simple tips to optimize your landing pages for local search

• Identify where your website visitors are coming from this helps you to curate the content accordingly
• Optimize the meta data, title tags and metatags of your landing pages
• Optimize your landing pages for mobile searches
• If you have operations in multiple cities, create different landing pages for each city. You can look at the landing pages of Airbnb for different cities, for example. 

If you want to attract customers to your store and increase sales, it is crucial to focus on local SEO. Creating local content that appeals to your customers, and draws relevant backlinks is one of the major tasks to boost your local SEO.  In order to do this, you have to focus on other local SEO ranking factors such as optimizing your landing pages for local search, creating guest posts, encouraging user-generated content, and hosting local events and contests. These steps will surely ensure that your customers can easily find you and reach you.