How Using Location Names Helps Win Local Search Marketing
If you're trying to win the local search battle on behalf of your business, writing articles and blog posts that mention locations in your community can be play an important role in your SEO. There is almost always an audience out there searching for articles about certain locations. Referencing your business, product or service in the context of your local community can help make it relevant if you can make the connection of how it fits into people's lives and helps them solve their problems.
However, when you use a location name such as downtown Tucson, or Paradise Valley in the title of an article, you are making an implicit promise to people searching using those terms that your article will contain information relevant to that specific location. If you create a title like that in order to attract people searching for those terms, as opposed to searching more directly for the services you offer, then the onus falls upon you to ensure that your article really does contain something interesting, useful and specific and succeeds at weaving in how the mention of your business is relevant to the total picture, or your article will be rejected as the blatant SEO ploy it would otherwise be.
Targeted local search results can be improved by developing articles about your city, neighborhoods within it, tourist attractions, parks and recreation opportunities etc. Consumers searching for information about these locales will usually be served articles that including place names in their titles. Such articles are valuable to consumers who may be planning a trip to that area, or looking for a merchant, restaurant or venue in that part of town. How might your business, bar, restaurant or brand fit logically into their visit?
If you plan to try to influence your local search rankings through authoring articles of this nature, then be sure that you don't come across as trying to trick the audience into thinking they are getting one thing, when you are really being self-serving, and serving something other than what they ordered.
So, what makes an article about a location unique? Simply put that it is actually about that location in some specific way. How hard was that? For example, if your plan to write an article about Scottsdale Arizona, mentioning perhaps the charms of spending a day wandering Old Town in order to be able to throw in that your business and several others are also located in Old Town, then make sure that the meat of the article is actually based on offering unique and real insights that visitors to that part of town might find useful. If the same article and tips you offer could also have been written about Austin, Texas, then your article will probably not pass the test of being specific enough.
Before you begin writing with the objective of placing your business into a broader local context, you need to be able to articulate what makes your town or part of town unique in order succeed at the art of writing location-based articles. Once you are able to put yourself in your customers shows, identify those unique items and legitmately associate your business with them in a way that doesn't seem self-serving, then you’ll be heading in the right direction towards writing writing the useful location specific articles people are looking for that can also improve your local search rankings, and help bring new leads and customers to your local business.
Substitution Test – When you’re writing an article targeting local search, use the substitution test to confirm that your article has enough location specific information. Simply substitute any other location name in the article title and body. Does the article still make sense? If so, then your article isn’t quite unique enough to the locale.