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
-
Will multiple domains for the same local business hurt its rankings?
If I have a mold removal client who has domain1.com, which is several years old, and he creates a new domain2.com with the same info (reworded), but changes over the citations to domain2 will it 1. lower domain1.com's rankings? 2. make ranking either site harder since there are now 2 sites for the same thing? 3. reduce the ability for either site to gain a higher domain authority since links can now go to either
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Duplicate content for hotel websites - the usual nightmare? is there any solution other than producing unique content?
Hiya Mozzers I often work for hotels. A common scenario is the hotel / resort has worked with their Property Management System to distribute their booking availability around the web... to third party booking sites - with the inventory goes duplicate page descriptions sent to these "partner" websites. I was just checking duplication on a room description - 20 loads of duplicate descriptions for that page alone - there are 200 rooms - so I'm probably looking at 4,000 loads of duplicate content that need rewriting to prevent duplicate content penalties, which will cost a huge amount of money. Is there any other solution? Perhaps ask booking sites to block relevant pages from search engines?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate content on the same page--is this an issue?
We are transitioning to responsive design and some of our pages will not scale properly, so we were thinking of adding the same content twice to the same URL (one would be simple text -- for mobile and the other would include the images, etc for the desktop version), and content would change based on size of the screen. I'm not looking for another technical solution (I know google specifies that you can dynamically serve different content based on user agent)--I am wondering if any one knows if having the same exact content appear twice on the same URL will cause a problem with SEO (any historical tests or experience would be great). Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
News section of the website (Duplicate Content)
Hi Mozers One of our client wanted to add a NEWS section in to their website. Where they want to share the latest industry news from other news websites. I tried my maximum to understand them about the duplicate content issues. But they want it badly What I am planning is to add rel=canonical from each single news post to the main source websites ie, What you guys think? Does that affect us in any ways?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | riyas_heych0 -
Blog Duplicate Content
Hi, I have a blog, and like most blogs I have various search options (subject matter, author, archive, etc) which produce the same content via different URLs. Should I implement the rel-canonical tag AND the meta robots tag (noindex, follow) on every page of duplicate blog content, or simply choose one or the other? What's best practice? Thanks Mozzers! Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Guest blogging and duplicate content
I have a guest blog prepared and several sites I can submit it to, would it be considered duplicate content if I submitted one guest blog post to multipul blogs? and if so this content is not on my site but is linking to it. What will google do? Lets say 5 blogs except the same content and post it up, I understand that the first blog to have it up will not be punished, what about the rest of the blogs? can they get punished for this duplicate content? can I get punished for having duplicate content linking to me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Duplicate Content | eBay
My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform. I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay? Update: I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content. The question is now: should I add it or not? UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting. Anyone else have feedback?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joseph.chambers1 -
When to delete low quality content
If 75% of a site is poor quality, but still accounts for 35% of the traffic to the site, should the content be 404ed? Or, would it be better to move it to a subdomain and set up 301 re-directs? This site was greatly affected by Panda.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0