It’s hard to get noticed in the digital age. It can be even harder for a small business owner with limited resources.
We know that you’re probably already doing a lot of things to promote your brand locally—and we applaud you! If you’ve got a great product or service but aren’t seeing any results from your marketing efforts, it might be time to consider content marketing.
And if you want to promote your business locally and be seen in your target market, then you need content that’s relevant to them. This means creating content that speaks directly to them—whether that’s through blog posts or videos or infographics or even podcasts! Make sure that whatever content you create reflects who they are and what matters most to them.
Here are 5 tips that will help you get started:
Generating content ideas
The first step to generating content ideas is to use keyword research. If you have already done this, great! You can skip the next section and jump right into the meat of your topic.
Once you’ve got a list of keywords that make sense for your business, it’s time to start brainstorming topics about which people might want information from a local business like yours. One way is by looking at how other similar businesses are doing it online—what kinds of blog posts do they write? What kind of social media posts do they make? What kind of newsletters do they send out?
Another way is through customer service questions—if someone asks “How much does X cost in Y city?” then either they’re researching or planning an upcoming trip there (which makes them potentially ready customers).
You can also look at industry trending topics via Google News Alerts; these alerts will let you know if anything big has happened recently in your niche that might cause people search for more info about it later down the line–and there’s no better source of timely news than Google itself!
1. Keyword Research
Before you start creating content, it’s important to set your keyword goals.
Setting keyword goals is the first step in a successful keyword strategy. Knowing which keywords you want to focus on will help you create better content for those terms and get more organic traffic from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!
There are some important questions that should be answered when developing your keyword strategy:
What are the most important keywords for my business? This is where you’ll narrow down all of the possible options into a manageable number of targets.
What are the best topics I can write about right now? Once you’ve identified some potential keywords for your business, take some time off from researching and brainstorming about other possible topics that could fit within your current resources (time, people) and market (location).
Ultimately the most important this is to put yourself in the clients shoes. What’s their problem? What are they interested in? How can you meet those needs?
Here are some examples of local businesses using content marketing to get seen:
- A plumbing business posted helpful articles on how to fix your kitchen faucet, and included the company’s name in the headline. This is effective because it shows that they know their stuff. and that if you’re looking for someone who won’t just make things worse, these guys are reliable!
- A dry cleaner offered tips on how to care for each piece of clothing in your wardrobe, including what temperature setting to use when drying expensive sweaters or delicate dresses. These insights will be useful both before you drop off your clothes at the cleaners and after their return, so this tactic is bound to convert new customers into regulars!
2. Niche Down and Use Long Tail Keywords
The larger the population, the more difficult it is to rank for this area with your content marketing campaign.
This is because there are many other businesses trying to rank for this area as well. This means that if you are a small business, you will have to compete with bigger companies and brands that have more resources than you do.
If you’re trying to use broad keywords and hoping for the best, you may be disappointed. You need to niche down and look for long tail keywords or terms that are less competitive as they are more specific than the broader keywords used by other companies in your industry.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you want to rank for the keyword “home remodeling.” That’s a broad term that will attract people looking for all sorts of things related to home improvement projects. If you want to rank for this keyword, it might be better if you focused on one specific area: say, “basement renovation.” This is still pretty broad, but it gives people who are specifically interested in basement renovations an idea of what they can expect from your content—and it helps them find exactly what they’re looking for.
3. Choose Your Target Location Wisely
When it comes to content marketing, the larger your audience is, the more competitive your market will be. This means that if you want to stand out in a city of 1 million people, you need to create compelling content that resonates with them and gets them sharing it with their friends.
That’s why niche marketing is so important—the smaller the population, the less competitive your market will be. And this makes sense when you think about it: if there are only 100 people in town and they all know each other (and they’re all doing business with one another), then everyone has an incentive to help everyone else get ahead!
4. Use Exact Match Searches
To find the popularity of your topic, use the exact match search volume data. Exact match searches are good because they show you how many people search for a term in a month.
For example, if you’re looking at “content marketing,” there are over 5 million monthly searches on Google. If you’re looking into “content marketing strategy,” there are just under 2 million monthly searches on Google for that phrase—so that’s about half as popular as ‘content marketing’ (your phrase).
Also check out what’s trending or what other people have asked when they searched for similar questions. This feature can give you ideas on what else to include in your content creation process!
5. Scout Your Rivals For Keyword Ideas
Another way to find keywords is by looking at what your competitors are ranking for. This is a good idea because it will give you some insight into what people search for on Google, which means that if your competitor ranks number 1, they’re probably targeting a keyword that interests people.
You can do this by checking out their website and seeing what keywords they use in their meta title tags and meta descriptions (you can spot these under the View Page Source button in Chrome). If there’s one specific word or phrase that appears more often than others then it’s likely a good target for you as well!
Of course, there are plenty of tools out there that claim to help with this kind of analysis, but we don’t recommend using them because they’re all basically just guessing based on algorithms. Instead go directly to the source: Google itself!
This will give you an idea of what your competitors are doing and where there are opportunities for you.
Competitor analysis can be done by going through their websites, reading their blog posts and checking out Google Analytics reports to see what keywords they use and how much traffic they’re getting from them.
You should also look at the social media accounts associated with your competitors; if they have Twitter feeds or Facebook pages then these will be great sources of information regarding what types of content they produce, when they publish it and how many people interact with those posts/tweets etc.
