Your blog is a great tool to support your local search marketing efforts. It is not just a place for you to write about your specific business services or how to’s on the topic of your blog. You can use it to spread the word about your business and its involvement in the community. You can get creative also and just write about things going on in the community. This is especially effective in small and medium size communities where the competition is less and your ability to attract readers takes a little less effort. This does take work but there are many tactics to use to increase the effectiveness.
Sponsored Events
Every event I see has sponsors these days. If your business sponsors any kind of event then you should do everything you can to get the most benefit out of it. Not only can you obtain links from event sites for being a sponsor, often times you are able to setup a booth or put up signs at the event. These are common benefits of sponsoring an event. You can take it to the next level though. Go out and put the event on various event listing sites, run some ads for the event, put out a press release about the event and how your business is sponsoring it. Blog about the event. Tell your readers everything you know and what a great event it is and why you choose to sponsor it and how they can come out and show their support too. Then share that post across your social network.
Speaking Engagements
Many industries give opportunity for speaking engagements. Military recruiters often go and speak to high school classes. I have seen lawyers speak about reckless and drunk driving. Industry experts speaking on topics at conferences. There are many opportunities. If you are an expert in your industry and speak at any meetings or conferences or even are holding a meetup for a local community you can take advantage of this on your blog. Write about your speaking engagement on your blog, give the details about it and link over to any relevant information. Put tickets up for sale or link directly to ticket sales if it is a paid event. Then share the post on your social networks, use some facebook ads to target the local community also to drive some additional traffic to it.
Community Events
You can talk about the various events coming up in the community. Since your business is focused around the local area this information is relevant to your customers. It may not be directly relevant to your business service but it could be of major relevance to a customer of yours. Give the dates, times, location, directions, sign-up links, add a photo or two of past events if it is recurring. If it is a major event can you work with the organizer to offer some kind of discount to your customers if they sign-up through a special page for your business. There are many events that go on and here are a few to consider.
- Fundraisers
- Parades
- Holiday Events
- Food Drives
- Blood Drives
Your Involvement In The Community
Sponsored events, speaking engagements, community events are all items you can take advantage of and write about on your blog and push out to your network for getting additional exposure. These are just a few of the opportunities though. Consider holding local meetups on a specific topic, host a fundraiser, participate in an event and write about it and promote it. This is where creativity gets let loose, anything you can think of that involves the local community could be put to use on your local blog to help your local search exposure. Holding a holiday party, having a Santa at your business on a certain day, doing a toy drive bin, hosting a blood drive at your location are all great examples of things that you can do and write about on your blog, promote via a press release, run ads on via Facebook at targeted readers.
How Much Is Too Much
You do not want to only write about your companies promotions or publicity on your blog. A good strategy is to run about 20-25% of your blog posts as company promotion pieces. Then an additional 20-25% of your posts as company publicity and the remainder should be targeted at industry related content. If your a plumber you might write about how to protect your pipes from the winter cold, common maintenance. A lawyer might write about what you should do after a car accident. These are not exact requirements but if you run only promotional items about your business people will get bored and stop reading your blog so by adding in pieces on your companies activities and some useful articles that potential customers can put to use themselves you keep them coming back for more.
Let The Search Engines Know What Your Talking About
This last part requires some knowledge of web design. If you are not familiar with this then your web person should be skilled in adding the following items to your site. Schema.org has various code that can be used to mark key pieces of information to make it easier for the search engines to determine what it is. Some key schema markups you want to make sure you have implemented on your site are article markup for your articles your write and post for readers. You can also markup your bio page so the search engines can better understand it is talking about a person on that page. If you post any events you can markup the various event information also. Finally you can markup your business location whenever you list your business name, address and phone number.
Your blog is a powerful addition to your businesses promotion. Implementing a strategy you can make it work for more than just posting content for your readers, you can use it to help the search engines understand what your writing about and to tell about events. If you are not writing about your community involvement then you are missing out on a great opportunity. Take the opportunity to write about the various situations we have discussed here to get more local information out about your business and to help tie it to your local area and thereby help your local rankings. If you have any questions or would like some advice on how to put your businesses community involvement to work for you then contact us at local@grantbraott.com
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