Benefits of Content Marketing for Local SEO

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1. Google Likes Long-form Content

It is a proven fact that Google likes longer forms of content. And this is the reason why the top businesses for any query average about ~2400 words. The importance of content length is high. So, Google relegates content that is lesser than 500 words or so.
SerpIQ surveyed the content length of top 10 results on Google for several topics and found the below observations.
Longer content pieces are important when it comes to local markets. This is because not a lot of brands are aware of the positive effects of long-form content.
It is also true that longer content takes a bit of time to read. This increases the chances that readers can be put off and click away. It is the reason why you should also focus on the quality of content rather than just quantity.
Proven content techniques make sure that the reader is engrossed in the article. This improves readership and also encourages sharing the article.

2. Ranking For Niche Relevant Local SEO Keywords

When it comes to ranking locally, keywords are a huge consideration. And yes, much more than national SEO or search.
Here, the keywords are more specific, and you also need to account for several long-tailed keywords in your marketing strategy.
You can find these long-tail keywords using KWfinder, Keywords Everywhere extension or other free LSI finding tools.
This is where content creation can help. With other methods like email or push marketing, there are issues with it.
People might classify it as spam or ignore it. Content, on the other hand, is the proven inbound marketing technique for this kind of process.
High-quality content is the best method to rank for your keyword profile without any negatives.
You can write about anything that is topically relevant, provided you have enough research on the subject. This practically guarantees that your keywords will be relevant.
Moreover, your audience will appreciate you writing about topically relevant material.

3. Guest Posting To Improve Local Marketing Reach

One of the best uses of content marketing is the ability to run guest post campaigns.
Guest posting is the process of producing high-quality content to be posted on other relevant websites. This helps get backlinks from other, more authoritative websites.
The reason why this works well is that everyone wants content. And if you can provide it, the users are more than willing to share a link back to your website.
Take a look at the below image. It shows that the more quality links you have, the higher your position will be on SERPs.
Guest posting offers improved brand positioning in your niche. It is another tangible benefit for your website.
If you can produce compelling content for readers in your niche, it stands to reason that you have the expertise. This will make for a much better local presence for your business and improved sales as well.

Relevant : Local SEO for Businesses without Physical Locations

Guest posting can also help you network with your peers a lot easier than other methods. If the content quality is good, people will want to collaborate with you.

4. Content Provides Better Keyword Opportunities

The crux of content marketing is to make the content suitable for both human and search algorithms.
From a human standpoint, we take relevance for granted. Meaning, a person needs about 10 seconds to understand what a website is about. But it is a much more complex issue with search engines.
You need to make sure that you establish the purpose of your website. And this is where keywords come in.
Include the keywords on your webpage. Carry out detailed keyword research using tools like Ahrefs to find the best keywords for your site.
It is not as simple as it sounds. With Google improving algorithms, adding keywords without relevance could classify it as spam.
This is why you should opt to create long-form content. Here, you can talk about a specific topic at length, provided you've done the research.
Keywords occur naturally in the article, and you don't have to force-fit anything. This results in much better traffic as well as improved SEO strength for your website.

5. Creating Content That Is Aligned to Local Business

Something that you need to remember for local SEO is that simply creating content is not enough. You need to add a bit of 'local flavor' to make it relevant to your audience.
For example, let's say you're running a pizzeria. To get more reach on your website, you could do a roundup of the most popular local flavors in your area. This is bound to catch locals' interest and get you ranked for the top keywords in the area.
The best way to find out what is trending in local niches is to research your market. You can use tools that can help you streamline this.
For example, Exploding Topics is a freemium tool that helps find the hottest trending topics based on your niche.
It is important to keep your proverbial eyes and ears open to new opportunities that arise.
Local keyword trends are volatile and are subject to change quickly. It is important to keep on top of it at all times if you want your business to do well.

6. High-Quality Content Helps You Cross-Promote

With the increased number of platforms that people interact with daily, cross-promotion is more necessary than an option.
One of the most important platforms for cross-promotion is social media. It has a huge number of users and has the potential to be an engagement hub for brands. So, most brands have social media profiles or pages from which they post.
For example, here’s a brand that does the cross-promotion and gets exceptional engagement on their posts.
Of course, posting content and getting results on social media are two different things entirely. This is where high-quality content delivers results.
You need content that is aligned with the audience if you want their attention. This means that anything you cross-promote needs to be of the highest standards in terms of content and relevance.
You can use a variety of content mediums to cross-promote your website. The most commonly used are infographics or posts, which are visual. These have a better chance of being shared.

7. Improving On-page Time For Your Website

An aspect of content creation rarely discussed in local SEO circles is improving dwell time for brands. If you can create content that is enticing and powerful, you'll find that people stay on your website longer.
Dwell time is a serious metric for SEO, and you need this on your side when you're targeting local rankings.
Another fact with content is it also reduces bounce rates for your website. Lower bounce rates can improve your SEO metrics and have a telling effect on your rankings.
You have to keep a tab on the bounce rate of each page using Google analytics or Pingdom to see how well the content is performing.
Content is the one thing that can help you stay relevant to your audience. You can leverage this too much better website metrics for your brand. But you need to ensure that your content creation process is of the highest standard.
Your aim as a content creator should be to offer value and facts. These can go a long way to ensure that people flock to your website.

8. Customized Landing Pages For Targeted Traffic

Landing pages are an aspect of local SEO that has never really changed.
A landing page aims to push the user down the conversion funnel into becoming a customer. And because it is simple, it works.
But today, the buyer is a lot more empowered. They have a lot of choices available, and so they take their time to choose.
Getting them to become customers is a lot more difficult now.
Take a look at this landing page of a food delivery business. It has an easy UI for hotels, delivery partners, and customers.
This is why brands are moving towards hyper customized landing pages.
These pages are customized to most aspects of customer preference. This can help get customers invested in your ideas. And the thing that enables these landing pages to work is content.
You need the highest content standards when you are creating a landing page. Here, quantity is not important as quality and creativity.
A landing page needs to convince a potential lead to become a customer as quickly as possible.

9. Partnerships With Other Brands For Local Events

When it comes to modern local SEO, collaborations are an aspect that works well today.
Both big and small brands have been collaborating to get the best out of their respective marketing processes. This can be a great way to attract consumers to both brands.
For example, Apple and Nike collaborated to bring out the product that combines targeted sports and music audiences.

Relevant : Grow Your Local Business using Local SEO Services

Content here forms a common ground for the partnership. Brands rely on optimized content deliverables that can produce a cohesive campaign.
Even big brands such as Google have been working with smaller online brands and influencers. A good example of this is Google's Instagram campaign for their Pixel smartphone.
Google Canada collaborated with Photofied, an influencer on Instagram, for their campaign. This became a huge hit with the locals. And this was made possible with quality content creation in the background.
Content can help bridge brands together for a more powerful marketing campaign.

10. Empowering Your Customer Base

Probably the most important part of a content campaign is the ability to help your audience.
People appreciate that brands are trying to help them learn about different aspects of the niche. They understand that it enables them to make better purchase decisions.
Content forms the platform from which people can learn. You can use content marketing to get them to choose better products or services.
Take a look at the below website, which creates content on products to help the audience choose the best suitable product
The key here is to keep it as objective as possible. As we have discussed before, today's customer is a lot more informed than before.
They can discern between simple marketing speak and content that offers value. This is why you should spend time creating informative local SEO based content. These also have a good chance of being shared.

11. Improving Brand's Local Reputation

A brand's quality is generally linked to the kind of content they share on their website or social feed. Top brands usually share top content; that is how it generally works.
For local SEO, if you need to improve your brand's credibility, the first thing you need to do is look at your content marketing pipeline.
Making changes to it can effectively improve your local SEO and brand reputation.
As a brand, it is important to set and exceed expectations in the local market.
You need to make clear the type of content that your customers can expect from you. Here, you need to stick to a particular delivery style that can work for you and your audience.
An example of this would be Nike. Nike is a brand that is synonymous with sports and inclusiveness.
Their home page and products on various ecommerce platforms depict the same.
If you've checked their feed, you'll notice that they follow the same narrative for most of the images. They are all created to inspire you to improve yourself.

12. Keeping You Competitive In The Local Market

For local brands, the market is a highly competitive place. Here the shifts in market trends are much quicker than national SEO.
This means you need focused local SEO to keep ahead of your competition. And one of the key parts of a high-performance SEO campaign is content marketing.
Google algorithms have become a very complex beast. Today, it is not as easy to reverse engineer it and guarantee results. The best way to become better than your competitors is through content creation.
Regular content can help your business stay ahead of the pack. And it is practically a guaranteed method that has no downsides.
High-quality content has always delivered the goods for brands of all sizes. And most SEO agencies these days are focusing on content management as a quick method to get rankings.
One example to look at is Hubspot and its content creation tool. Hubspot creates over 400 blog posts over four months to get 300% more leads.

13. Great Way To Build A Community

Expectations of brands have changed considerably over the years.
Selling products to customers using your brand is not enough. Your brand must also connect with the audience.
This is why a lot of brands these days have a separate team for building community.
Take a look at Hubspot, where they build community and welcome ideas from the audience to improve the brand for their customers
And the best method to build a strong brand community is through content creation.
SEO encourages community-centric operation. And when it is local, the focus is even higher.
Creating relevant content is not just beneficial for your business from a sales standpoint. It also encourages users to band together as a community that supports and exchanges ideas about your brand.
Here, it is important to encourage them to do so through custom communities online like social media. It makes marketing much easier and more effective.

Relevant : How Can You Use Social Media To Improve SEO?

You can push promotions or discounts to your target market a lot easier.

14. Better Trust Through Quality Content

You can judge any brand through the quality of its content. This is the thought that echoes through the minds of the people today.
Quality brands are synonymous with quality content. The expectations from customers about their brands are high today. This has led brands to focus more on their content development rather than other SEO methods.
Trust is important for a business. And even more so when the business is buying for local SEO. The reason is that local SEO is a lot more volatile than national.
Local SEO is where brands need to make their name before progressing. The key to gaining trust here is to keep your content authentic and genuine.
Do not try to sway facts or content your brand's way. This will end up being called out by your audience.
You should also make it a point to let your brand's personality shine through your content. Top brands have unique brand personalities that people relate to them.

15. Better ROI Through Decreased Advertising Spend

Every brand and business knows that advertising is getting progressively more expensive as time goes on. This is why a lot of companies are looking for ways to mitigate ad spend. The ideal local SEO process would be organic, that doesn't require upkeep.
Content creation can help you get maximal reach with minimal spending.
Here’s an example, the quality of content proves by ranking a website above Google itself.
And because it doesn't require monthly spending, it is a much more viable method to get local SEO performance than just relying on ads.
Compared to paid ads, content marketing offers a much higher ROI. And the best part of the content is that it continues to accrue interest and offer value indefinitely.
So if you're looking for a long-term solution for your website's local SEO, content is the best choice. It also enables quality lead generation, which you don't get with paid ads. This is also one reason why brands are increasing their content creation budget while reducing ad spend.

16. Getting Better Reviews Locally

For businesses aiming to get more local reach, it is important to get good reviews from your local audience.
Reviews have become a great source of mouth to mouth marketing. It is also one of the best forms of trust-based marketing for all sizes of brands. The more good reviews your business has, the more chances you will attract more customers.
Search engines also rank businesses with more positive reviews on top of search results.

Relevant : Reviews & Its Role in Local SEO

Customized content creation has proven itself when it comes to getting the best out of your review experience.
84% of all people say that customer reviews are likely to make them buy into a brand. This single statistic talks about the power of online reviews in the current marketplace.
Brands need to have a solid base when it comes to reviews. And it is important to understand that not all of them are going to be good as well.
Here, through content, you can build reviews to be a platform for engagement. You can use this to get even more people interested in your product.

17. Adapting Better To Google Trends

The local markets are volatile and highly competitive for all businesses. Trends can change quickly and without any warning signs.
So, keep a tab on Google trends to know what’s trending currently.
Brands need to make sure that they have a contingency plan for when there are shifts in trend. But pushing out new keywords for local SEO campaigns might not be the best or quickest idea.
By the time your SEO changes take effect, it might already be too late. The best solution here would be a content marketing campaign.
Content creation is flexible enough to have a smaller footprint. This makes it convenient for brands to tackle new keywords quickly without any downtime. And since you don't touch your existing campaign, you don't have to worry about it negatively affecting your brand.

18. Significantly Improved Local Visibility

Visibility is a huge part of local SEO. And the reason is that there are a lot more businesses vying for a smaller market. For new brands, it can be a difficult proposition to be noticed in a niche.
Local SEO campaigns are great, but they require time for results to show. This opens the doors to content creation as a much better alternative to improve visibility for all brands' sizes.
It is common knowledge now that content creation has been great for visibility. Brands that posted blogs consistently have up to 4x more index than brands that don't.
This is why most top companies like Moz, SEJournal, Hubspot, and others create content regularly for increased online visibility.
Content creation has time and again proven that it can outperform other methods of technical SEO. It also gives you a chance to include newer long-tail keywords on your website.

19. Chance To Bring In New Visitors

Every business reaches a point of stagnation, where their new customer numbers begin to plateau. This is especially prevalent in the local market, where the audience is limited.
One reason this happens is that your business is just not reaching out to new people.
Approaching a limited demographic can limit your sales potential and revenue. So what is the solution to getting more people interested?
Content marketing has shown to be able to reach out to people beyond your traditional demographic.
A well-known example is a collaboration between Mercedes Benz and Loki The Wolfdog. Even though they are a premium car manufacturer, MB was having trouble reaching the 30 - 40 demographic.
They paired up with famous Instagram celebrity Loki and opened their doors to a whole new market. With the right content creation strategy, the possibilities are endless.

20. Increased Brand Authority Locally

Brand authority is an important metric when you consider local SEO. The more authority a brand has, the more leverage it has when it comes to drawing business.
Focusing on localized content helps brands gain relevance in the niche. And it can help gain traction, especially with niche relevant queries.
For example, Netflix operates in over 190 countries by securing country content and providing localized content as per the audience’s interests.
Content marketing is an important step when you are looking to improve your SEO metrics. There is a multitude of ways you can increase your brand's hold over your niche.
Let's talk about a brand called Monetate. They are a digital optimization platform that focuses on content creation. They started with a three-person team in 2011, and with just content, they were able to grow their traffic to 255%.
Regular quality content posting can have a huge impact on your business metrics, including authority.

21. Content Works Well As Social Proof

Digital marketing today is not just about crunching numbers and getting backlinks. This is the age of social proof and mouth to mouth marketing.
This is why most companies put up what their customers are talking about their brand as a matter of proof and credibility.
And this is an area where quality content can help you gain the upper hand.
Social proof is associated with top brands in the market. They all have enough reviews and testimonials in their repertoire to present their case to the clients. And this is usually done through multi-million dollar campaigns.
The advantage content offers is that it is not as expensive to work with and is suitable even for smaller brands. Here's where we pull up a smaller brand - Cressey Sports Performance.
Eric Cressey is perhaps one of the best strength coaches globally.

• He helps athletes and celebrities get fitter and stronger.
• He puts actionable blogs on his website, which gets a lot of traffic.

This is a great example of content being able to offer social proof.

22. Improved Chances At Viral Marketing

Marketing has always been evolving over the years. But of late, the process has gotten considerably faster. This is because of the improved connectivity of people all over the world.
Mobile traffic has been growing rapidly in recent times. It now accounts for more than half of the total traffic on the internet. This has given rise to a new type of marketing method - viral marketing.
Viral marketing refers to the quick surge in popularity of any specific asset created by a company.
Being a giant globally, Apple launched the “ShotOniPhone Night Mode” hashtag campaign to promote the brand. It went viral with millions of photos shared on various social media platforms.
Brands sometimes gain millions of new customers overnight if the viral campaign has gone well. Here too, the key is content marketing. It can give you the best chance of something going viral.

23. Easiest Way To Monetize Local Marketing

When it comes to monetizing local traffic, content marketing offers the best way to do so.
For several smaller companies, monetizing can be up to 50% of their total revenue. So, this is an important part of their bottom line.
Established companies like The New York Times are dependent on monetizing their content as part of their strategy.
Take a look at one of their content monetization through allowing retargeted ads.

Relevant : Step-By-Step Content Strategy For SEO

The common part of all these companies is that they rely on the content as a platform. There are several ways you can monetize your website with content.
You could opt for lead magnets as part of your marketing process. They have a great track record of delivering the goods.
Targeted ads are also a path you can take with quality content. And finally, membership is also an option. You could use content to leverage monthly membership fees as part of a deal.

24. High-Quality Content Promotes Itself

In a local market, promotion can become a difficult issue because of the competition. Every local business is vying for a piece of the market.
To stand out from the crowd, you need to create assets that are actionable and shareable. And this is where content marketing can help you out.
You can create content pieces that are good enough to be shared by your audience. This requires time and research to get done, of course.
Here’s an example of such content which the audience will refer to and share with others.
But once you get this done, it stays relevant for several years.
A good example of this is the Skyscraper Technique page by Brian Dean. Even after half a decade, it is still relevant and draws views.

25. Adaptable To Any Niche Or Local Market

We've touched on this aspect of content marketing for business earlier. It has a unique ability to be niche independent for marketing. And this is a powerful aspect of content because You can scale it to any industry with minimal changes.
With the right amount of customization, content marketing can get your business the numbers you've been looking for.
From soft drink moguls to industrial giants, every company all use content to get their message through. And today, over 70% of marketers rely on content marketing to improve their brand's metrics.
Google updates now focus on content quality rather than other aspects. This makes content marketing the best place to invest your time and money in the coming year.
Are you looking to improve your local SEO rankings through content marketing? Get in touch with our local SEO experts to know more.