Local SEO and Content Marketing: Creating a Scalable Strategy
In past articles, we’ve discussed how Google has made fresh content the most significant factor in improving a site’s rankings, but there’s little denying that creating regularly fresh and relevant content is laborious. This becomes especially true if you are a company with multiple local locations, each with its own website, that you need to regularly update in terms of web content, blog articles, social posts, and more creative campaigns. However, when you have a content idea that you know will do well, how do you scale that out so that your local branches benefit from the work of your content marketing team?
Firstly, it’s important to understand what we mean by scalable. While fast production and low cost are often synonymous with scalability, it doesn’t mean that quality is guaranteed and in all likelihood, the quality will dip considerably if your just focused on lowering costs and increasing turn-around. Instead, a scalable content strategy will see the rate of traffic growth increasing while the cost of creative stays steady.
A scalable content strategy also needs to promote regular new content that is high in quality and tells your brand story. Whether this means producing thirty versions of a similar piece of content or focusing on one big piece is almost irrelevant. This is because to create a truly scalable content strategy, you need to audit your different local audiences and find out what distinguishes them and what commonalities they share. If you own a law firm with offices throughout the state of California, it is likely that certain content pieces will be received different depending on the particular market whereas if you’re in Boise, you might find less variance.
By going into Facebook Insights and seeing which content did well and where it did well in will allow you to start to get a clearer overall picture of your audience and how location affects their reaction. This holds true for all of your data, be it from social, your site, or IRL. After all, in content marketing, your brick-and-mortar store is itself a piece of marketing and thus surveying your customers digitally and face-to-face will give you considerable insight into what kinds of content your audience responds to.
Once you’ve settled on your goals and the rules to abide by in terms of the content your company deems on-brand, it’s time to audit your existing content and start either eliminating poorly performing pages or combine several into a single optimized URL that includes the city or two you’re targeting. From there, start researching the topics that do well in your targeted areas by looking at tools like BuzzSumo which ranks articles based on how many shares they got.
From there, start creating local landing pages that actually provide meaningful content to users and aren’t just doorway pages. Engage with your local community, list local events that relate to your brand story and appeal to local knowledge in your content.
Once you’ve determined the type of content pieces you believe will get results and the topics you want to cover and monitor, it’s just a matter of systematizing your team’s workflow to ensure that every local landing page is regularly updated with compelling local content and maintained. Of course, you might find content pieces that appeal to more than one area; that’s fine! But don’t miss out on your chance to have that content perform well on each page and thus retool it enough so that it’s not duplicate. Obviously this is time-consuming work, but once you’ve established your over-arching guidelines, then you have the protocols in place to expedite the work and keep your content fresh and updated!
