Content Marketing for Local Businesses
-
Hey guys!
As someone who works with a number of local businesses (with localized target markets) I find that developing ideas for content marketing can be VERY difficult. I like the idea of creating local guides, local event info etc, but what other ways can we create content for a localized target market? For example: I have an OBGYN client that we'd love to create content for that is related to their niche (women's health), but don't want to promote or create content for national audience. That would seem incredibly wasteful.
Would love to hear ideas on how to create targeted content for a local audience!
Thanks
-
Hi Ricky,
Egol's suggestion regarding interviews is really a good one and, if done with care, would produce some very high quality content.
Another suggestion: if the medical practice has a blog, how about a weekly or monthly roundup-type post of local women's health/fitness events? Things like marathons, free yoga classes, healthy cooking classes, free lectures on relevant topics, volunteer opportunities, breast cancer fundraisers, etc. If the blogger can set up alerts on things like this, he/she can aggregate the data and then go a step beyond this by adding something fresh to each roundup - a personal perspective on the week's/month's opportunities for better living for local women.
Just one idea, but something that could be added into the mix to improve the usefulness of the website to local women.
-
I was looking at it from more of a social media / inbound perspective. So, you might show up in the 7th-9th spot from Venice, but you wouldn't get much traffic organically - as you suggested.
One thing that have been successful for me locally is doing interviews with the event organizers. I ask them to post the interview on their social media, and link to it from their website. Most non-profits are more than happy to do that in turn for increased exposure. Running event organizers, especially for new events, are usually open to doing the same. I do this with car dealerships quite often, and pretty much everyone hates car dealerships.
You could do a mixture of local and informational content to get the best of both worlds.
-
Hi Cody,
I agree that local guides etc. won't do much in the way of building your reputation as an expert, but they are often great ways to attract relevant traffic from your target market while exposing them to your brand and brand value proposition. I know that the competition for local terms is less, but how do you put a local angle on a post relating to "What Age Should Girls Should Start Going to the Gynecologist"? If we create content like that, we'd be competing nationally. I know Google biases search to local business, but not for informational type content, right? That would leave us competing nationally vs top health sites that had content related to the topic. With Google Hummingbird I see less and less impact moving forward on creating content specifically for exact match long tail phrases.
I guess creating informational type content and publicizing the content locally could work, but I don't think we'd have a chance to attract much traffic from search doing that. It would have to be mainly a case of content publicity locally...
-
The intent for content marketing is to educate your audience, as well as demonstrate yourself as an expert in the field. Writing about the local dog park won't exactly do either for you.
I'd suggest writing about what people are actually interested in in relation to whatever your client does. You can get ideas for content by going through different Women's Health Forums, and Yahoo Answers.
Just doing some quick research I see that there are tons of searches for long tail variations of "How often should I go to the gynecologist." When you boil that down to just your city there is far less, but it is still something women have shown interest in. Just off the top of my head I would suggest writing content for things like "What age should girls start going to the Gynecologist," "What to expect at your Gyno examination" and "When should you go to the Gynecologist."
One of the Chiropractors I work with posted a few videos on a specific treatment he does that not everyone can do a while back. He has had people travel great distances to get that treatment from him, and it even helped him get a foot in the door to be a Chiropractor for some of the Winter Olympic athletes. All from creating content he knew his readers would like to see.
-
Women's health issues can vary geographically. Those of concern in your area can be different from those in other areas.
In most communities there are a few physicians, professors, social service workers, who are experts on this type of topic. They might be found at universities, hospitals, physicians offices, home health providers, county/city government.
You could develop a content plan that includes interviews with several of these types of professionals, each sharing his/her expertise on one or more issues in your area. The physicians or administrators at your client's office might be able to help select these people for a number of topics. Perhaps they would want to do the interview instead of you because they are conversant on these topics and familiar with these people.
The professional being interviewed can be a source of the questions because they know the issues and know what message they want to get out. This might even be done by questionnaire, asking them to identify a few important issues and elaborate. IMPORTANT: Each interview should conclude with "where to get help / more information" on the issues covered.
Their website could become a rich source of information. It could have charts/maps/time lines showing issues compared among age groups and other demographic variables. It might be referenced by government agencies, schools, health care organizations. If done superbely it would be a real white hat for the client to wear.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is my content being fully read by Google?
Hi mozzers, I wanted to ask you a quick question regarding Google's crawlability of webpages. We just launched a series of content pieces but I believe there's an issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TyEl
Based on what I am seeing when I inspect the URL it looks like Google is only able to see a few titles and internal links. For instance, when I inspect one of the URLs on GSC this is the screenshot I am seeing: image.pngWhen I perform the "cache:" I barely see any content**:** image.pngVS one of our blog post image.png Would you agree with me there's a problem here? Is this related to the heavy use of JS? If so somehow I wasn't able to detect this on any of the crawling tools? Thanks!0 -
Content From API - Remove or to Redirect ?
Hi Guys,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaddyM556
I am working on a site at the moment,
Previous developer used a API to pull in HealthCare content (HSE) .
So the API basically generates landing pages within the site, and generates the content.
To date it has over 2k in pages being generated.
Some actually rank organically and some don't. New site being launch: So a new site is being launched & the "health advice" where this content used to live be not included in the new site. So this content will not have a place to be displayed. My Query: Would you allow the old content die off in the migration process & just become 404's
Or
Would you 301 redirect the all or only ranking pages to the homepage ? Other considerations, site will be moved to https:// so site will be submitted to search console & re-indexed by Google. Would love to hear if anyone had similar situation or suggestions.
Best Regards
Pat0 -
How do I optimize dynamic content for SEO?
Hello, folks! I'm wondering how I optimize a site if it is built on a platform that works based on dynamic content. For example, the page pulls in certain information based on the information it has about the user. Not every user will see the same page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geonetric
Lindsey0 -
Yoast local landing...posts?
Hey Moz squad. I do some seo work for a multi location locksmith and garage door service. On our locksmith website - We just use regular word press landing pages for all of our different city cities. (btw if anyone has a good site architecture tips blog they know about, Send it my way!) So with our Garage door site, we bought the yoast local plugin. And it wants to make our locations Blog posts instead of pages. NOW what do you guys think. Does it matter? I know I have less control on how a blog post looks. But I'm just looking for different opinions. Thanks loves.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Meier0 -
Duplicate content but different pages?
Hi there! Im getting LOTS of "duplicate content" pages but the thing is they are different pages. My website essentially is a niche video hosting site with embedded videos from Youtube. Im working on adding personal descriptions to each video but keeping the same video title (should I re-word it from the original also? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sarevme0 -
Duplicate content on recruitment website
Hi everyone, It seems that Panda 4.2 has hit some industries more than others. I just started working on a website, that has no manual action, but the organic traffic has dropped massively in the last few months. Their external linking profile seems to be fine, but I suspect usability issues, especially the duplication may be the reason. The website is a recruitment website in a specific industry only. However, they posts jobs for their clients, that can be very similar, and in the same time they can have 20 jobs with the same title and very similar job descriptions. The website currently have over 200 pages with potential duplicate content. Additionally, these jobs get posted on job portals, with the same content (Happens automatically through a feed). The questions here are: How bad would this be for the website usability, and would it be the reason the traffic went down? Is this the affect of Panda 4.2 that is still rolling What can be done to resolve these issues? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Is this duplicate content something to be concerned about?
On the 20th February a site I work on took a nose-dive for the main terms I target. Unfortunately I can't provide the url for this site. All links have been developed organically so I have ruled this out as something which could've had an impact. During the past 4 months I've cleaned up all WMT errors and applied appropriate redirects wherever applicable. During this process I noticed that mydomainname.net contained identical content to the main mydomainname.com site. Upon discovering this problem I 301 redirected all .net content to the main .com site. Nothing has changed in terms of rankings since doing this about 3 months ago. I also found paragraphs of duplicate content on other sites (competitors in different countries). Although entire pages haven't been copied there is still enough content to highlight similarities. As this content was written from scratch and Google would've seen this within it's crawl and index process I wanted to get peoples thoughts as to whether this is something I should be concerned about? Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bfrl0