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Inspiration for Writing Posts About Your Local Area

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Whether you’re a business blogger or a personal blogger, writing posts about your local area is aninvaluable SEO method. It’s much easier to dominate a keyword related to a geographical region than one without. For instance, you know that Googling “fast-food” will give you different search results than “fast-food in Smallville.” The same is true of any other location-keyword pairing.

Writing about your region is a great way to become a local authority, capture a new audience base, and give you something fun to blog about!

Here are some ideas for blog posts about your local area:

  1. Write a review about a restaurant, museum, concert venue, movie theater, and other similar businesses. Be careful about going negative – this may help you gain some traffic, but it won’t do you any favors with the business itself. If you write a positive review for a business, you can share the post with that business and gain a new ally. A negative review will not have nearly the same advantages. Instead, leave any of your bad customer experiences out of your blog entirely.
  2. Create a roundup of similar locations or activities. Include all the events happening in December or stores that sell the best gardening supplies.
  3. Get nostalgic – if you’ve lived in the same place for a while, write about what’s changed and what’s stayed the same. Or write about your favorite ice cream store as a child.
  4. Create a bucketlist of parks to visit or restaurants to try. As you complete each item, take pictures and do a small write-up.
  5. Check out all the activities happening in your town: carnivals, farmer’s markets, parades, festivals, charity events, etc.
  6. Create a list of little-known facts about your area.
  7. Share some of your favorite haunts and locations. Talk about the coffee you are addicted to or the gym where you are most comfortable.

What kind of local posts do you write about for your blog?

5 Reasons Why Businesses Need to Start a Blog

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Business owners might be surprised that the number one method to boost your online presence recommended by SEO experts is starting a blog. Having a blog attached to your domain adds numerous benefits to your content marketing strategy, making your online presence more appealing to potential customers. It also makes you easier to find by improving your ranking on the SERPs. Here are the top five reasons why your business needs its own blog today:

  1. It boosts your SEO. A blog is another area on your website where you can insert keywords while avoiding keyword stuffing. You can write posts about your local area to help you optimize for local search, or write about your product so that your website will be found more easily for that specific item.
  2. It can help raise your conversion rates. There are lots of reasons why good blog posts can appeal to potential customers: it can put their minds at ease about products; it can demonstrate exactly how products might be useful in their personal circumstances; and it can humanize you and your company.
  3. It adds value to your social media posting. Posting consistent content to your various social media platforms is the best strategy – posting content that is valuable specifically to your audience is even better. Cut down on your marketing pleas and post some of your blog publications instead.
  4. It establishes your expertise. When your website has all the answers to your customer base’s questions, you come out looking like the ultimate expert in your field. Being able to answer all of your customer’s questions establishes trust in your product and services, which leads to increased revenue.
  5. It reaches customers where they are. Your audience is faced with advertisements on every corner of the Internet. They’ve learned how to ignore them. However, people have never been more open to reading blog posts as they are now. In fact, reading blogs has become a mini version of reading a novel before bed. Original, valuable content slips past your audience’s defenses against ads, making them more interested in your company and your product than through any other form of marketing.

For more tips on optimizing your business blog for specific keywords, read our post “Finding the Perfect Keywords to Optimize Your Blog.”

Sources:

Stuart, Ellen. “Why Your Business Needs a Blog . . . Now.” http://www.vtldesign.com/inbound-marketing/blogs/why-your-business-needs-a-blog-now/. (6 May 2014).

Rowse, Darren. “6 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Blog.”http://www.problogger.net/archives/2012/10/31/6-reasons-why-your-business-needs-a-blog/. (6 May 2014).