The Right and Wrong Way for Local Businesses to Blog

Local businesses need to take advantage of blogging to set themselves apart from other businesses in the area and, more importantly, the national chains that have immensely more SEO weight to throw around. You need to compete somehow, and being agile, undercutting the other brands, and finding ways to stand out in the search results is the best way to do it – at least if you’re not planning to spend thousands a day on paid advertising.

The trouble is that there are a lot of pitfalls, mistakes, and other roadblocks to a successful local blogging campaign. Doing it wrong is both very easy and devastating; it can dig you into a hole that can take months or years to climb back out of. It definitely doesn’t help that the internet is full of old guides and content, many of which are outdated or are based on outdated information, so without expertise, it can be impossible to tell what is and isn’t good advice.

You don’t want to be a blogging expert. You want to run your business. That means you have to do just enough learning on what to do to do it right, or you have to hire someone to handle your blog for you. While I’m normally all for that second option – I do own a content marketing agency, after all – that’s not what I’m here for today. I’m sure you can find out how to contact me if you want to take the easier path.

Today I want to talk about how to blog the right way, specifically for local and small regional businesses where location-based keywords are essential.

• Who this guide is for: Small business owners and marketers with local, geographically-locked businesses, usually with only one or a small handful of locations. It can also apply to franchises that heavily separate individual locations and let them do their own things.
• Who this guide is not for: Large businesses with multiple locations in every city in the state or online businesses and service providers who aren’t tied to a geographic area.

For the purposes of this post, I’m inventing a hypothetical business, which we’ll call Green’s Lawn Care. It’s a lawn care and landscaping company that works in a small city and has fairly strict boundaries, beyond which it doesn’t make sense to spend half a day hauling equipment for most jobs. This is the kind of foundational small business we’re talking about with local blogging. So, what should this business do, and what should it avoid?

Let’s get started.

What Not to Do

First, let’s talk about a few strategies I see time and again in local blogs, which are almost universally a mistake.

These are strategies that will waste your time, potentially penalize your site, and definitely won’t help you excel in your field.

Mistake #1: Templated Content with Swapped Keywords

The first mistake is actually what used to be best practice in SEO. The trouble is, it was best practice all the way back in the early 2000s.

The strategy was simple. Write a blog post, probably around 500 words, maybe as much as 1,000. This post would be relatively generic. Our lawn care business might write “What is the Best Grass Seed?” or “How to Stop Moles in Your Yard” as their topics. These are simple, they have some potential value, but they aren’t local at all beyond applying to places where yards are more grass than dirt and where moles live.

Then, you would take that blog post and copy it. Each copy would have two changes: the URL and a single local keyword. The URLs would all be related to the location, so you might have:

• What is the Best Grass Seed for Atlanta, Georgia Yards?
• What is the Best Grass Seed for Savannah, Georgia Yards?
• What is the Best Grass Seed for Macon, Georgia Yards?

And so on. Each one of these would have a paragraph at the end talking about hiring the business for “City Name, Georgia Lawn Care,” but otherwise, the content would be identical.

Why is this a mistake? Well, when 2011 rolled around, Google had a problem. Search results were absolutely saturated with content like this. One of the biggest problems was that everywhere you looked, the same content filled the top 20, 30, 100 results. Often, different URLs would post the same content, rampantly stealing from each other and just changing out brand names or maybe a few sentences here and there.

This was, obviously, a problem. When the search results are useless, Google doesn’t make money, so they had to make a change. That change was the Panda algorithm update, which dramatically penalized thin and copied content. Now these 500-word identical posts would be all but removed from the search results. Many businesses folded and many more had to scramble to purge their blogs, have them rewritten, or abandoned their URLs and started over.

Unfortunately, this strategy still persists, from marketing “professionals” who haven’t updated their knowledge in a decade, and from ancient SEO information that still surfaces in search results, or just from business owners who think they invented it as a clever strategy – after all, no one else is doing it – and think it will get them ahead and save them money and time.

Mistake #2: Ultra-Generic Content with No Unique Value

The second mistake is writing content that is far too generic to be useful to anyone. For example, if our lawn care company writes blog posts like:

• What is a Lawn and How Does it Work?
• Is Mowing a Lawn Safe?
• Can You Hire Someone to Prune Your Trees?

These aren’t valuable. There are a few reasons for this, some more nuanced than others.

The first and the biggest is that I intentionally chose titles here that aren’t questions someone is reasonably likely to ask. They’re all obvious, or nonsensical. No one is going to Google to ask what a lawn is, and most people know that mowing a lawn is as safe as any machinery operation can be, and of course you can hire someone to provide a service. These are informational queries but not information anyone is likely to be searching for.

Another reason why these topics aren’t valuable is because they aren’t geographically relevant. What does our small business stand to gain from writing about how lawns work? Now, you could make it more relevant by adding geographic keywords and writing about specifics of the local kind of grass, laws about water usage, and so on. But that’s not what happens with small blogs most of the time.

The other issue with generic content is that the more generic it is, the more likely it is that another blog – usually one of your biggest competitors – has already written about it. They’ve probably written about it in a lot more detail and with more information than you can typically provide, too.

Mistake #3: Content that Isn’t Relevant to Your Business

Similar to the previous, a mistake that a lot of small businesses make is trying to cover content that isn’t relevant to their business. This doesn’t even necessarily mean the content is generic; it’s just that it’s not useful.

For example, if our lawn care company published content like:

• What the Presidential Election Means for CityName
• How to Build a Simple Pine End Table
• The Proper Way to Serve a Gin Martini

The only one of these that could possibly have some relevance to our lawn care company is the first one, and then only if some repercussion of the election has a knock-on effect on lawn care, like pushing the agenda to ban gas-powered leaf blowers. If that’s the case, a much better title could be developed.

The other topics are simply irrelevant.

Ask yourself this: if you want to know about serving alcohol or building a table, would you want to learn from a lawn care professional, or a bartender and a carpenter? In recent years, Google has even codified this more in their E-E-A-T algorithms; they want to promote content that is backed by expertise, experience, authority, and trust. In other words, they want relevant content written by experts, not generic content written by someone who has no connection to the topic.

What to Do Instead

Now that you know the biggest mistakes, let’s talk about what you should do. Looking at the mistakes above, and the comments I’ve made on them, you can probably already see somewhat where this is going. But, to make it easier – and since I’m mostly talking to people who aren’t marketing experts – I’ll pin it down as a process for you.

Develop personas for your typical customers.

The first thing you need to do is spend some time thinking about who your customers are. Not specifically – don’t think about Dave down the road and Martha up the lane. Think about the kinds of people they represent. What are their income brackets, their hobbies, their education level, and their self-sufficiency? These are people who come to you to hire your services (or shop at your store, or what have you), so they all share a need, but the reason they have that need, the way they find you, and the approach they take can all vary.

You’ll likely have different groups of customers, which we call buyer personas. For example, you might have an elderly individual who can’t handle the work themselves and just wants it done for them. You might have people who need extensive but one-off landscaping jobs but handle maintenance themselves. You might have larger corporate clients who need simple lawn care and upkeep across numerous business properties.

Here’s a great guide on developing buyer personas. It’s a long read, but worthwhile to give you a crash course on why they’re important and how to make them.

Understand user intent in search queries.

The second step is to put yourself in the shoes of the personas you developed. Think about what these people need from your business and what they might search for to get there. You can find a lot of this information from your existing website, using Google’s search console information to see what kinds of queries are referring people to you.

The goal here is to figure out what keywords are bringing people in. These generally won’t be local keywords, at least not necessarily. If you search for lawn care, you’re going to find local results because Google makes assumptions about the nature of the query and personalizes it based on your location. Note that this doesn’t mean you can ignore local keywords, only that Google might assume them.

So, for our lawn care company, you might have queries like “hire lawn care” or “get my lawn mowed” or “tree trimming” or what have you. All of this is coming from the top of my head, so don’t quote these if you’re an actual lawn care company. Seek out the data for yourself.

Note that the goal here isn’t just to find the keywords that are already bringing people in. After all, you’re already using these keywords, possibly well enough, though you might still be able to improve. You also need to find keywords you don’t use, but that could bring more people in. That’s how you drive your future content.

Create uniquely valuable content for your region.

The next step is to create content. Your blog posts don’t necessarily have to be 5,000-word ultimate guides to everything. In fact, that would probably be overkill and a waste of effort for a small business. Someone who wants to read that much about a topic is more likely to go buy a book. That’s not to say you can’t write it, but you can divide it up into different sub-topics for different posts, make an eBook as a lead generator, or even publish something as a full book.

The goal here, though, is to make sure your content is locally relevant.

For generic topics, this might just mean using local keywords. This is similar to Mistake #1 up top, except you’re only making the one post, and it’s wholly unique and valuable on its own.

Here’s an example: “The CityName Guide to Tree Trimming.” In this guide, you can go over the generic considerations for tree trimming but also any specifics that might be relevant, like what kinds of trees are common and are more likely to rot and fall, what the average life span is for different tree species, and so on. By tailoring it to the trees your potential customers are most likely to need trimmed, and with the local keyword, you end up attracting a narrower and more specific audience.

You can also write location-specific content. “How Early Can You Mow Your CityName Lawn?” would be a guide about local ordinances that could put the kibosh on mowing your yard at 6 am in the summer, for example.

You need content that is:

• Relevant to your customer personas as specifically and narrowly as possible.
• Tailored to your geographic region and the concerns of the population.
• Unique; that is, not copied from other sources.

There are some misconceptions about uniqueness in content. I don’t have space to get into all of them, but the biggest roadblock novices encounter is the simple fact that pretty much every topic has already been covered by some brand somewhere. Does that mean covering the same topic isn’t unique? Not at all. Uniqueness is about how you present the information, the form that information takes, and the conclusions you come to. Even if you agree 100% with what a competitor has already written, you can write it in a unique way for your own audience.

In fact, using your competitors as a source of information is a huge tool in your arsenal. Something like my product Topicfinder can even make it automatic; just put in the URLs of a few of your competitors and get a deep reading on what they’re covering, how they’re covering it, and how you might be able to produce your own take on the same subjects.

Use specific local keywords relevant to the topic.

Every piece of content you write should have a local keyword in it. You’ve seen my examples already, where I put CityName in it; you should do this for everything you create, including landing pages, service pages, and content.

Here’s the thing: this narrows your target audience, which means you might potentially get less traffic. However, it focuses on that audience, so more of the traffic you get will be from people nearby.

This is why this entire guide is aimed at local small businesses and not at larger franchises or online businesses.

Generic, non-local content is great for businesses that aren’t reliant on a local sale. If the only way you can sell items or sell your services is if someone from your geographic area stops into your store or books your services, it doesn’t do you any good to publish content that is relevant to people half a country away, right?

It can feel good to get higher traffic numbers. But, if none of those people can possibly convert into customers, it’s just that: numbers. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, as they say.

If you do find that you get a lot of traffic from a specific geographic region that isn’t your region, or if you get a lot of generic traffic for content relating to a product you could potentially sell online – or even refer to someone else for sales with affiliate links – it might not be a bad idea to do so. But it’s not the core of your strategy.

It is my belief that, for a local business, nearly every blog post you write should have a local keyword in the title, the metadata, and the content. Anything less can be a waste of opportunity.

Understand the people you attract and how to capture their value.

Finally, you need to monitor the data coming in. Who is actually being attracted by the content you produce, and what are they looking for?

You can take this information and use it in two main ways.

The first way is to use their presence as positive feedback for a given topic and write more content on that topic. If a post about laying sod does well, another post about caring for it, a post about diagnosing problems with it, a post about picking the right kind of sod, and so on might all be good options for further content. The interest is there, as demonstrated by the interest coming to you.

The second way is to find the connection between the topic and how your services can be used for that topic. Users who search for how to lay sod might realize it’s a lot of work, and when you give them a convenient link to call you about laying it for them, they might decide it’s a better option than the DIY option.

It’s critical to understand who your visitors are, what they’re looking for, and how to match your services to that interest. That is the core of good content marketing.

If you need help finding better keywords for your local business, check us out at Topicfinder! We have a free trial, so you can get started today and find your competitor’s highest traffic pages.

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