For local SEO, the competitive analysis aims at helping your business to get found in Google Maps as well as Google Organic, when search intent is locally driven. It will form part of the initial discovery phase of your local SEO project, but it should be something you keep doing.

In this guide, we’re going to help you understand what local competitor analysis is, then cover how you can go about doing it to get ahead of your competition.

What is Local SEO Competitor Analysis?

Local competitor analysis includes all businesses that rank for your target (local) keywords in maps and organic results (including the local pack).

For local SEO, the main goal of a competitor analysis is to identify why your local competitors are ranking high in the local pack, Google Maps, and Google local organic. Then, once you’ve identified who is ranking and how, you can see how to capture those opportunities yourself.

Additionally (and simultaneously), any competitive analysis should be used for other important purposes:

• Understand your target market better, i.e. your competitors’ strong and weak points, their pricing strategies, and your potential customers’ needs. This will help you make informed decisions about product development (and positioning) as well as marketing strategies.
• Identify opportunities, i.e. gaps in your market that your competitors have not yet filled. This way you can develop new products or services giving your brand a competitive advantage.
• Stay ahead of the competition: By knowing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you can develop strategies to stay ahead.
• Build a stronger brand by identifying what differentiates you from your competitors. This helps develop unique selling propositions and marketing messages that will likely resonate with your customers.

How to Determine Your Local Competitors

It isn’t as simple as looking out the window at the business down the street, discovering your local competitors can take a little more effort. You shouldn’t assume you already know who your competitors are, as the businesses that compete online could be different to the ones you see on your street.

Start with Local Keyword Research

The first step to determining your local competitors is knowing your keywords. I did a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to research your local keywords, in case you need a kickstart. Those are search queries people are using to find products or services your business is selling.

Here we are going to deal with three search engine results page (SERP) sections:

• Those that rank in Google Maps for your target keywords (with or without your target location included in those key phrases)
• Those that rank in local packs that are triggered by those keywords
• Those that rank in Google Organic for location-driven keywords (i.e. those queries that do include your target location)

Once You Know What to Search, Search Google

Your first step to identifying your local competitors is searching Google using your target keywords. If you reside in your target location, Google will personalize results based on the (precise) location, so you will likely see similar results to what your target customers will.

Additionally, you can never be sure what exactly your target audience will see when searching for those keywords:

• The key ranking local ranking factor is location, i.e. proximity to a business. Local rankings (especially in Google Maps) may look slightly different even if your customer is just a few blocks away from your current location, especially if you have lots of competitors nearby.
• Your customers’ search results may be further personalized by their search history, which businesses they interacted with, their devices, etc.

Still, this is the best first step we can get, so start making a list of businesses you have found in search results with notes:

• The keyword you were searching for
• Where it is ranking: Maps, local 3-pack, or organic
• Position for each search query (in each SERP section)
• Your location (where you were searching from)
• Number of overlaps (how many times each domain came up when you were searching for different keywords across all three sections?) The more you see a specific competitor, the more attention that business deserves in your audit!

For organic competitors, to make this step easier, turn off Google’s infinite scroll and use this browser plugin for it to pull plain-text URLs of ranking pages and number search results.

Obviously, ignore directory results (like Yelp or Tripadvisor) or note them elsewhere: These are marketing opportunities rather than competitors. 

I also tend to limit my organic competitors to about 5-10 URLs per keyword. After all, local SEO is mostly about showing up on maps. Organic competitors are not that important.

It will be more obvious why we even need them in future steps.

BrightLocal’s Competitor Analysis Tools

Whether you are using third-party competitor analysis tools or not, searching Google is a useful exercise because it gives you first-hand experience of buying journeys your target customers would have. You’ll get to interact with search results the way your customers are.

Perform Kickass Competitor Analysis with BrightLocal

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BrightLocal’s Local SEO tools let you identify your local competitors using Google Business Profile Audit and compare them using a handy dashboard. BrightLocal uses your business location and type to identify the competitors which are showing up in the local pack and/or Google Maps for the search terms and search the location you’ve chosen:

It is a nice way to verify your own list you created by searching Google and expanding it by finding more competitors.

Set Up Your Competitors in BrightLocal

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Not only that but BrightLocal’s Local Search Grid offers incredible ways to perform competitor analysis.

Create Your Spreadsheet

Assuming you are using at least two data sources, your spreadsheet will include a lot of labels, and you will be scrolling back and forth to find overlapping businesses that were able to rank for multiple queries, and even show up in organic search.

To find competitors which are ranking for several keywords, sort your results by the first column. This is where you can calculate the “overlaps”, i.e. domains that show up for many keywords and in many SERP sections.

Obviously, this spreadsheet will take some time to build. I suggest starting with 3-5 keywords at most. Once you have gone through the first batch of your competitors, you will be able to run more keywords and expand your list of competitors.

Analyzing Your Local Competitors

Compare Google Business Profiles

Google Business Profiles (GBP) include more than many people think. Take some time browsing your competitors’ profiles and note anything extraordinary or worthy of attention:

• GBP optimization tactics that you are seeing
• If the local panel is claimed
• Their business description and categories (GMB Everywhere will let you see their profile categories right within Google Maps, so you can note these when adding your competitors to your spreadsheet)
• Number of customers’ reviews and an average score
• Owners’ engagements (do they reply to comments and/or Q&As?)
• Google posts your competitor is publishing. Are they promoting special deals or seasonal offers on their local profiles?
• Images and videos they have added to their profile (and how long ago they did that)
• Attributes your competitors may be using:

Look through each profile carefully and note as much as you can. Tools like GBP Audit have much of that noted for you, so you can complete your task much quicker:

Analyze on-site landing pages

On-page signals are known to contribute to local rankings but here I suggest prioritizing pages that also rank in organic search. These are definitely competitors that are doing something right

A tool like WebCEO’s SEO content assistant tool is the quickest way to compare your landing page to your competitors’ pages and identify what is missing:

Schema analysis is another useful step here. Run your competitors’ pages through the Schema validator and note in your spreadsheet if they are using local schema, and add comments if the schema looks detailed. This is useful for finding any possible correlation between higher rankings and on-page optimization tactics.

Note Conversion Funnels

This is not part of a traditional SEO audit but being able to engage and convert customers is crucial for maintaining consistent organic visibility.

Look through each competitor’s landing page noting if there’s any conversion optimization tactic to steal and experiment with:

• Is there an online chat option?
• Do they offer an instant appointment scheduling option (if so, is it linked from the Google Business Profile)?
• Do they welcome phone calls? Are there any innovative tactics they are using, like IVR or CEH?
• Do they have a FAQ section or a knowledge base? Does it rank?

There may be many more customer engagement methods your competitors are using, and you can never tell whether any of those is effective. But it is important to be aware of all of them, as many of your customers may expect certain customer support options from you based on what they experience on your competitors’ sites.

Analyzing your competitors’ technology is important to keep yours innovating as well, so record everything noteworthy to research later.

Audit Local Citations

Local citation analysis is an essential part of any competitive analysis because local citations impact rankings. Google also relies on external citations to identify if a local business is trustworthy and if there are any red flags (e.g. customer review manipulation).

You can grab your competitor’s brand name or address and search it in Google to identify their major citation sources (and rankings).

You can use tools, like Local Citation Tracker, to make this step easier by grabbing and organizing your and your competitors’ citations for your further review:

Review their Backlink Profiles

Backlinks are powerful organic search ranking factors but it is always a good idea to check how your competitors are generating backlinks and what they are doing to build links from local publications, blogs, and communities. 

Competitive backlink monitoring can help you enhance your own link-building strategy as well as build some local connections which may uncover new business opportunities for you and your brand.

SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can help here. Both tools allow you to filter backlinks by a keyword in a domain or anchor text, so you can quickly find links from local publications:

Start Monitoring Your Local Competitor’s Rankings

While identifying and analyzing your local competitors can be done manually, for monitoring their positions you’ll likely need a standalone dashboard because it will hardly be possible to do manual searches on a regular basis, especially if you target more than one search query and more than a single location.

This is where BrighLocal’s local search grid will turn out to be a lifesaver. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of what searchers see in your neighborhood, town, or city and allows you to measure the share of search visibility across the map for your most important keywords:

Conclusion

Competitor analysis for local SEO takes a lot of time and effort but it can be incredibly rewarding, especially if you take time to take a thorough look at each of your competitors and record all kinds of aspects that may have moved the needle for them.

Local search is not straightforward. In many cases, you’ll find yourself wondering why Google would choose to surface some local businesses over others but a thorough analysis will let you understand more about your market than you ever thought possible. Good luck!

If you’re looking for ways to boost your local website’s local pack presence, or simply set up local rank tracking, a well-organized local keyword research process is the first step towards achieving that goal.

What are keywords?

Keywords are the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, such as Google, to find the answers or information that they’re looking for. 

Anything searched for on a search engine, whether a single word or a phrase, is considered a keyword. For example, if you were looking to buy a new pair of trainers, you might type something like ‘women’s black trainers’.

Keywords are important because they help your website to show up when people type them into search engines.

As a business owner or agency professional, you want the keywords on your or your client’s web pages to be relevant to what people are searching for so you have a better chance of ranking higher in SERP results.

Most people have some idea of the keywords they want to rank for. But it’s impossible to know everything people search for. That’s why it pays to do some research to find more relevant keywords.

What is local keyword research?

Local keyword research is a process conducted by local businesses to find the search terms that consumers in the local area use when searching for nearby local businesses, products, and services. It helps local businesses to correctly target their SEO efforts so they are more visible to local consumers in their moment of intent.

Learnings from local keyword research can heavily impact on-page SEO, as well as how pages are organized and shaped—or what we call the ‘information architecture’. It also affects how you present your business, products, and services in your offline and online marketing materials.

However, you must follow a good process when identifying keywords. Basing your keyword selection on guesswork exposes you to the risk of using incorrect terms, having to narrow a keyword base, and failing to account for all variations of relevant search phrases.

On the other hand, when done right, local keyword research allows you to:

• Understand search behavior better. 
• Deepen your understanding of your target audience. 
• Find related markets to expand into, and/or refocus your products or services to.
• Discover more ways to attract local consumers.

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Keywords in Context

Before we begin keyword research, it’s important to cover how search has changed and the context of keyword research today.

We need to keep in mind that searcher behavior isn’t fixed, and the queries people use, the length of those queries, and the context in which the searches are made are constantly changing. Because of this, keyword research is never a ‘one-and-done’ process.

Take, for example, the explosion of mobile search. Mobile devices now account for approximately half of web traffic worldwide, and Google asserts that a third of mobile searches are related to location.

Google coined the term ‘micro-moments’ to describe when people turn to their smartphones:

• I-want-to-know moments
• I-want-to-go moments
• I-want-to-do moments
• I-want-to-buy moments

Google tells us that searches for local businesses have grown by more than 80% year over year, including searches for “near me” and “support local businesses”. And searches for “who has” + “in stock” have grown by more than 8,000% year on year!

However, we also need to understand that how people find information online is fragmenting, with more using social channels like Instagram and YouTube than ever before, and searchers using conversational AI tools like ChatGPT are on the rise, too. It’s within this context that it’s important to remember that while the keywords we’ll be discovering and honing today are based on searcher activity in Google, that’s not where the story ends. The best keyword research is ongoing, and takes in a variety of platforms aside from Google.

It also means that hanging your hat on one, short exact-match keyword like ‘pest control’ may not be advised. The rise of AI may see much longer and more complex queries become more frequent.

With all the ‘what is’ and ‘why’ out of the way, let’s get to the best process for researching local keywords.

How do you use keyword research for local SEO?

Local keyword research revolves around identifying three parts of your target search queries: your core term, the keyword modifier, and your location.

You can use keyword research tools to automate the process of building long keyword lists and gathering helpful data such as search volumes and difficulty levels. 

Many tools will also offer additional features such as associated keywords, questions people ask, and changes in search volume over time. This can help you spot emerging trends and act quickly to target newly popular keywords. 

Popular local keyword research tools include Ahrefs, SEMrush, Serpstat, Kparser, and Moz.

Here are the key steps you need for local keyword research:

1. Identify your core term
2. “Extend” your core terms with keyword modifiers
3. Add your locations
4. Organize your relevant keywords by search intent

Step 1: Identify your core term

Your core term is the ‘what’ of your business. For example,

• If you are a local hair salon, your core terms are “hairdresser”, “haircut”, “hairstylist”
• If you are a law firm, your core terms are “lawyer”, “law firm”, “attorney”

You can use your own knowledge of your niche to begin generating a list of core terms. Once you have your own list, do a Google search using some of those terms and note down any keywords that your competitors are using that aren’t already on your list. 

Step 2: “Extend” your core terms with keyword modifiers

This modifier makes your core term more specific. It also makes the keyword less competitive. For example:

• “Best hairdressers near me” 
• “Find a personal injury lawyer” (keyword modifiers are in italics).

Keyword modifiers make your overall keyword strategy more diverse. They make it easier to pinpoint less competitive terms, which can be easier to rank for.

Keyword difficulty reflects the organic competitiveness of a search query. It is usually calculated based on the assumed “power” of top-ranking domains and pages.

If you’re using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs, filter the list by keyword difficulty to find less competitive terms:

Step 3: Add your locations

The location component is the name of the towns, states, counties, and communities your business is located in. For example:

• “Best hairdresser in Albany” and 
• “Find a personal injury lawyer in NY”

There are several ways to generate appropriate location-based keywords. 

If you have Google Analytics installed on your website (or other Analytics package), this can tell you which locations are generating the most clicks to act as a starting point. 

A Google search for a specific location will then show you additional destinations and a ‘people also search for’ snippet to expand your pool.

Step 4: Organize Your Relevant Keywords by Search Intent

Search intent reflects the user’s goal behind a search query.

There are three types of search intent:

• Commercial (also referred to as transactional and high intent): This is when a user is ready to take an action such as place an order or call for services).
• Informational: This is when a user wants to learn something, research their options, or find answers to their questions.
• Navigational: This is when a user wants to go to your site (these are search phrases that contain your brand or product name).

Assigning keywords to one of these three types of intent makes it much easier to know when a keyword should be used. An information keyword, for example, may be the focus of a piece of content that shows the reader how to solve a particular problem, or answers a question.

With steps one to four completed, you now have a well-researched, relevant, and up-to-date keyword list to aid in your local SEO efforts. Keep in mind that this list should be checked and updated at regular intervals to ensure that you aren’t missing any opportunities to include new search terms within your local SEO campaign.

While you may be thinking ‘but I monitor my local competitors already’, I’m here to tell you: there is always more that you can do.

Monitoring your local competitors on social media, for example, could uncover lots of opportunities for your business. Mainly, it could allow you to:

• Identify your competitors’ social media and community building tactics
• Be the first to know when your competitor is offering a special offer or preparing for an event
• Learn from them by discovering hashtags that trigger local visibility, marketing channels that seem to work best, influencers they work with, local nonprofits or businesses they promote, efforts that drive new backlinks and brand visibility for them, etc.

Competitive monitoring is useful on so many levels, making it highly surprising that so few local businesses actually use it to its full potential.

Who to monitor?

When it comes to local marketing, this question is more challenging to answer than in any other sector, simply because very few local businesses are actually active on social media.

But, by limiting your monitoring to only your obvious local competitors, you could end up with a very low amount of data to work with.

To expand your search and make the most of your efforts, consider monitoring:

• Obvious local competitors that you are aware of
• Similar businesses elsewhere (you may not compete with them locally but there may be a lot to learn from them)
• Other local businesses in your area. This way you will be better informed on local events and trends.

To find local brands, search Twitter and Instagram using terms that describe your area—whether it’s something as obvious as your town name or a more advanced keyword, like your county or a nearby attraction.

To discover more terms to use when searching social media, run your main city or town name through Text Optimizer. This tool will uncover which local entities Google associates your city name with. Here’s an example of results for [Albany]:

Next, search for all these locations on Twitter and Instagram to find updates from the local business:

The “People” search on Twitter is even more useful because you can simply scroll through the list to find more businesses:

Once you come across a relevant local business, find them across all the social media channels they promote on their websites.

What to monitor?

Based on your goals, you can prioritize certain data—but don’t limit yourself by only focusing on a single aspect of competitive monitoring. There is a lot you can uncover in the process:

• Your competitors’ customers:
  • Happy customers: How do your competitors invite and utilize social proof? Do they use social media to facilitate Yelp or Google reviews? Are they interacting with happy customers to turn them into brand ambassadors? What are their most effective community building tactics?
  • Unhappy customers: How do your competitors react to negative reviews (if they react at all)? Are there glaring mistakes you need to avoid when dealing with unhappy clients? Or how can you avoid negative feedback itself?
• Your competitors’ content marketing strategy: How are they utilizing social media in their on-site content promotion? Look at local content they are publishing to engage customers in your immediate area (or catch an eye of those who are traveling to your area) and the optimization tactics they are using (like Twitter cards or Facebook Open Graph) to generate social media traffic.
• Your competitors’ promoters: Are there any (local) reporters, bloggers and/or social media influencers that engage with their brands and help promote them? Is there a chance you can win over to your side?
  • Try reaching out to those people and invite them to come over and/or collaborate. Hunter’s email finder and email verifier tools will help you locate their contact information and reach out. It is also a good idea to follow those people and engage with their updates from time to time.
  • Identify your competitors’ loyalty building tactics: Why did those people choose to promote your competitors? How can you find your own influencers?
  • Explore how your local competitors are utilizing social media for local PR and outreach.
• Local events your competitors are utilizing in their marketing (and how well it works for them)
• Your competitors’ sales funnel: What are they focusing on? Are they trying to generate direct sales (for example, by promoting an exclusive coupon) or are they building up their email marketing list instead? What are their primary social media calls-to-action?
• The social media updates and campaigns your competitors run that seem to generate active engagements, like shares and comments. What’s their social media strategy?

How to Monitor Your Local Competitors on Social Media

Set up Social Listening Platforms

Awario is a great platform that supports boolean search, which allows you to combine lots of business names or social media handles into one search. All you need is to use the OR operator to include as many names as you’d like into one search:

The platform also offers a few other great features, like prioritizing mentions based on sentiment and identifying influencers behind those mentions. You will also receive daily mention digests to quickly scroll through and identify if there’s anything that requires your attention. This makes monitoring both productive and effective.

Monitor Their Social Media Profiles and Bios

Take some time before taking this step. First, you need to identify who your most active and successful local competitors are so that you can focus on their social media accounts a bit more.

Visualping is a change-monitoring platform that can be used to track any page, including the social media profiles of your Twitter and Instagram competitors. It will email you an alert once a social media profile has changed.

Depending on how active your local competitors are, you can use the tool to:

• Monitor their whole profile: This way you will be alerted once they add a new update. If your monitored brand is very active on social media, this process can get pretty cluttered very quickly.
• Monitor their social media bios: This way you will only be alerted once they change their bio, link or profile picture. This is a great way to instantly know when your competitors are running a (seasonal) marketing campaign or are promoting a new landing page.

Visualping allows you to monitor the whole page or an area you select. In the example below, if you select this area, you will be notified when this business:

• Changes a profile picture or header image
• Updates their name or bio
• Changes their link
• Follows anyone or acquires a new follower

You can adjust the frequency of updates based on how many you will receive.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Facebook Updates

If you are looking for some content inspiration, you can simply scroll through your competitors’ profiles and see what they are posting.

A more productive way to address that is to use Buzzsumo, which has a cool Facebook analysis tool that allows you to:

• Compare several pages
• Filter updates by type (image, link, giveaway, video, question, and coupon)
• Sort updates to see the most liked, commented, shared, etc.
• Access reports visualizing their activity: Frequency of posting, average engagement per month, etc.

You can also save this search to easily access new data at your convenience.

Spy on Their Ads

When using Buzzsumo to analyze your competitors’ updates and their performance, refer to Facebook’s Ad Library to identify those seemingly effective updates that were actually ads.

For any selected brand you can search ads by a keyword, see the CTA they were using and the platforms that they ran ads on (Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network).

Conclusion

Monitoring your competitors on social media will help you better understand your customers and uncover great marketing opportunities.

Keep playing with your monitoring settings until you set up an effective routine which will allow you to get useful insights without being distracted by too much clutter. Good luck!

What is PR Outreach?

PR outreach is a marketing process in which a company contacts various publications in order to build coverage. It’s commonly conducted by email, although additional methods like social media messages and phone calls may also be used from time to time.

More often than not, the purpose of outreach is to gain press coverage. With that in mind, I’ll be referring to outreach targets (i.e. people you are contacting) as “press prospects”.

Define Your Goals

Depending on your goals, outreach tactics will vary. Public relations and outreach can mainly be used to:

• Generate traffic and get your local business known to prospective customers. In this case your outreach and PR tactics will be narrowed down to local publications.
• Get backlinks to rank your domain in organic search results (beyond the local 3-pack). In this case you will reach out to publications outside of your location.

You may have both of these goals in mind, but if you’re at an early stage of reaching out to press prospects then I suggest starting with location-based outreach:

• It should be easier to figure out. Local reporters and bloggers won’t be as bombarded with emails, so they’ll be more likely to reply.
• Local link building will probably send both traffic (i.e. potential customers) and link equity, so you’ll start moving forward on both of those goals.
• This will be a good learning curve on many levels. You’ll be able to identify which PR opportunities, subject lines, email copies, etc. bring in the best results. And you’ll understand your local niche once you’ve spent time researching local press prospects.

With that in mind, let’s agree that email outreach should start within your location. But before we delve into that, let’s take care of some important basics:

Do the Basic Work First

Set up and establish your email address

One of the first questions you’re going to face is, “Where should I email from? Should I use my own domain? Should I use a free email service like Yahoo or Gmail?” These are all valid questions, and I’ve been going from method to method to come up with a winning strategy:

• Don’t ever use free email services. You lose the ability to use third-party outreach and email marketing platforms and risk losing all your data. Your emails will also look amateur and unprofessional.
• Don’t use your main email. No matter how personal and human your emails are going to look, there will always be people who will choose to mark them as spam. You don’t want that to happen to your main domain, and you’ll find it harder to reach your customers in the future.

Instead, set up a new email address on a new domain. There are tons of cheap top-level domains that will look like something coming from your brand but will help you keep this part of your marketing separate. Namify is a cool service that will help you find a great cheap domain for those purposes:

Make sure you register your email address, set up a mailing server, and start using it a few months prior to starting your outreach strategy. Most spam filters will flag emails coming from brand new domains.

Also consider using a tool called Mail Tester on a regular basis. The tool will alert you if your email might be flagged as spam and include a reason why, so you can fix it and improve deliverability.

Create your email outreach guidelines and policies

Chances are your outreach emails are going to be sent by interns, freelancers or a separate marketing team, and that’s where problems can occur. When a task is moved from person to person, some of those people may not clearly understand the responsibility of communicating on your business’s behalf.

Outreach is part of external business communication and hence should be handled very carefully. You cannot allow your brand to be misrepresented, or to have your relationships with journalists ruined.

So before you launch your outreach strategy, create a clear business communication policy and make sure everyone involved is familiar with it. Note what can or cannot be included in emails, what to do if a recipient is irritated by being contacted, and which situations should be escalated to you.

• This article details what your external business communication policy may include.
• Here’s an actual example from Nordson.com

Create or beef up your “Press” page

Not many bloggers or reporters will write an article about you or your business right away. The best you can hope for is that those bloggers or journalists will click a link in your email and give you the benefit of the doubt: “Is there really a story here?”

This is where creating an effective “Press” (and possibly also “About”) page is so important. You need to spark curiosity and trigger an action on that page. With that in mind:

• Tell your story in an effective yet concise way (add visuals, list achievements, etc.) Etsy does a good job at this.
• Add links to your previous press coverage and mentions.
• Add images and videos your reporters may use for a better article. You wouldn’t believe how often I struggle to find any screenshots or even a high-resolution logo to use in my article when I am reviewing a tool.
• Include a way to contact you instantly. I like it when businesses let you schedule an interview call with them right away. Add Appointfix links into your emails and allow press prospects to instantly book a call with you.

Find Local Journalists and Bloggers

There are lots of ways to find niche and/or local reporters, and at some point you’ll have exhausted all of them and will need to find more. Here are some main sources to get you started:

Google

Google is obviously the first source I turn to. Play with all kinds of combinations of your locations (your city, cities and counties nearby, your state, etc.) and anything from [blog] to [magazine]. Then start a spreadsheet and list all the sites that seem active:

Twitter

Twitter is a great way to discover active bloggers and reporters, and the best thing is that you can start building relationships with them right away! Start by following those people, retweeting their tweets and commenting on what they have to say. These activities will help on many levels, mainly:

• You’ll understand what those people are most interested in (so you will be able to adjust your PR strategy accordingly).
• You’ll start building connections with those people who will later be more likely to respond to your email.

To find local bloggers and reporters on Twitter, try Twitter’s native search feature: simply switch to the “People” tab when searching Twitter:

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo offers several tools to find local bloggers and reporters. Their content search feature allows you to find journalists covering your location. Keep the “Journalists” filter active, and search for multiple locations including neighboring cities, counties and your state:

Buzzsumo also has a powerful Twitter search feature allowing you to find tweeting journalists:

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of the most misunderstood social media networks: some people ignore it completely, while some overuse it. I use LinkedIn as a connection discovery tool. You can open your chosen publication profile page and find reporters you are connected to:

Take note of your common contacts to get introduced and start building those relationships!

Coming Up with Outreach Ideas

Connecting to those bloggers and reporters earlier will help you better understand them and what would make them curious enough to cover your business and/or link to your site.

So spend some time listening to them, interacting with their updates, and monitoring their content. This will give you ideas on how to approach them in a more effective way.

Here are a few examples of community PR opportunities to use in your outreach:

Local charities you’re supporting

Is your company partnering with or supporting a charity? If you time your outreach to match something trending, you may find quite a few reporters willing to cover your story. Here’s one example I got last year which piqued my interest because of its timeliness:

Local success stories

Was your CEO or business awarded for something locally? Is there another success story to tell? Here’s an email I got which definitely stood out:

Local events your business is hosting or participating in

These could include local conferences and summits, festivals, or taster events. If you’re organizing or sponsoring an event, use email outreach to get some coverage. One of the most effective ways to use events as a PR opportunity is to give away free passes to press and media representatives.

Here’s a good example of event-based outreach that got me participating!

Going Outside of Your Location

Use lessons from your local PR to expand to national publications and popular blogs.

It’s easier to do when you have some local coverage to mention in your outreach. Nationwide (or even global) outreach takes lots of time because you are dealing with a much wider pool of press contacts. But it can also be really rewarding in the long run.

Once your business manages to get featured in a large publication, you’ll see press requests coming through without you having to reach out to anyone.

Make the Most of Each Email

While not specific to local outreach, this final step is always worth mentioning: make the most of each of those emails. Don’t give up too early and lose a contact!

Follow up!

There are lots of case studies proving the effectiveness of following-up. One of them states that follow-ups result in 22% more replies. In other words, without following up, you’re losing about one-fifth of your press prospects.

If you’re using an outreach platform like Link Hunter or Pitchbox, follow-ups will be automatically included. Just don’t forget to edit the copy! Also, several studies suggest that a magic number of follow-ups is 3 (definitely not more!)

Admittedly, I usually use a single follow-up but I think every business needs to find the magic number that yields results and feels comfortable to them.

Create additional assets

Offer your press prospects diverse materials for them to cover you! This could be anything from including “insider” photos and media kits to creating entertaining videos. There are lots of tools and easy-to-use video editors to help you out.

It’s a good idea to include these on your press page as well as mention them in your follow-up email.

Create and track additional CTAs and engagement tactics for your PR leads

In the ideal world you’d want each and every person you contact to take some sort of action:

• Request more information.
• Schedule a call with you.
• Complete a survey.
• Subscribe for further updates.

Not all people will want to schedule a call with you or request more information right away. You want these people to still hang around and hopefully get interested in your brand in the future. This is where all of those alternative calls-to-action (CTAs) help.

Obviously, don’t include all of them in a single email. Instead, spread them out, for example:

• Invite your prospects to schedule an interview in your first email (again, using Appointfix or a similar app).
• Encourage them to request more info in a follow-up email.
• Ask your leads to complete a survey on outreach tactics in your final follow-up. I have found conversational forms work best for that.
• Include on-site CTAs to get your prospects engaged once they click an email link. These may include click-to-schedule links, a contact form, or even opting in for web push notifications to get alerted of your site updates through their browser. The idea is to get your prospects engaged through something other than an email and develop closer relationships with them.

Of course, you need to monitor all those CTAs to identify best-working ones:

• Use Google’s UTM tool to add URL parameters to the URLs you add to your emails. This way you will know for sure what is being clicked more. Always use a descriptive campaign name to be able to tell one link from another.
• Use Finteza to better understand how your prospects are interacting with your site after they click a link in the email. Finteza allows you to build and compare your conversion funnels including any specific traffic source or link, the initial landing page, etc.

Finteza makes it incredibly easy to identify best working CTAs and the most effective landing pages.

Track your mentions and links

Finally, keeping an eye on your inbound links and brand mentions is important, as not all bloggers and journalists featuring you will reply to your email.

• The aforementioned Buzzsumo has a great content alerts feature notifying of your new business name mentions.
• Google Search Console has a neat free report showing your incoming links.
• Google Alerts are free and while they are pretty basic, they’re easy to set up and use.
• Majestic has had a cool new link alert feature emailing you whenever there’s a new link to your site.

Finally, to organize those links and keep track of them, Link Checker can help you monitor your links as well as visualizes your progress:

Conclusion

PR outreach is a great way to get your local business known, and to discover new exciting growth opportunities. It takes time and effort to create an effective outreach and local link building strategy, but I do recommend keeping it in-house (at least partially) because all those contacts you build are priceless. Good luck!

Would you be willing to capture more leads and sales with your local content marketing strategy? Would you like to be able to plan your content strategy years ahead and then re-use the same plan next year?

Seasonality can help with both.

When it comes to content marketing, seasonality means planning your content strategy towards a certain date, date range or a predictable trend.

For example, if you operate a local skiing shop, these would be your seasonal triggers you’d want to prepare your content marketing for:

• A planned beginning of the season
• A planned end of the season (deals!)
• Obviously, Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays (think: “Gift ideas for skiing enthusiasts in your family”)
• Local events around Thanksgiving and Christmas
• President week activities for around your area
• A yearly local winter festival
• Yearly skiing conferences or expos (especially those you travel to)
• Your business annual anniversaries or milestones (xx years in business, xx sales, xx successful customers, etc.)
• Labor Day (start planning your winter!)
• Father’s / Mother’s Days, July, 4… (slow season, so everything would do here)

Speaking of which, this article actually got me planning a family trip to one of these destinations!

[Who said there’s no seasonal marketing for a skiing business in summer?!]

6 Steps to Plan Your Content Marketing Strategy Around Seasonality

1. Create Your Calendar

The first step is obviously to identify all the seasonal trends, holidays and yearly events you want to target in your content. If you’ve been in the business (or even in the area) for at least a year, all you need at this point is to get together with your team and create a rough list:

• You can use a shared Google Spreadsheet calendar, which also comes with some holidays already added there.
• Alternatively you can integrate Google Calendar into your WordPress dashboard (here are a few ways to do that).

There’s no need to come up with 50 key points you want to build content around, because you’ll just end up overwhelmed. I suggest planning at least two content pieces a month for your high season and at least one content asset a month for your slower season.

Google Trends will be a great help in terms of identifying the exact timing. For example, people start talking about Thanksgiving October 14-15 every year, which must be a good time to start publishing and promoting your Thanksgiving-themed content:

As you can see below, people start talking about [snow] at the beginning of November in New York, which is probably the start of the high season for a skiing business located there.

Once you have your rough list of holidays and dates, map them out on your calendar using a tool like ContentCal. Creating campaigns there takes seconds and your team will see it approaching when they use their shared dashboard:

Clicking the ribbon inside the calendar takes you to the campaign brief, which you and your whole team can keep updated with related ideas, hashtags, etc.:

ContentCal is an easy way to keep everyone updated on what’s coming and get things planned months (and even years!) ahead.

2. Research Your Keywords

In most cases, you want your content – whether it is seasonal or evergreen – to rank. This is where keyword research comes in handy. The ideal scenario is that you will find a query that somehow bridges the gap between your business (your products, special offers, etc.) and the target event/holiday.

To help you brainstorm, here’s a handy filter you can apply when researching keywords using a freemium tool like Serpstat or Kparser. Simply run your core term and use filters to research seasonality:

Kparser can be absolutely free unless you need Search Volume and CPC data for each keyword. With a little bit of copy-pasting you can generate those numbers for your chosen keywords for free using free SEO tools like searchvolume.io and on the cheap with Keywords Everywhere:

[Keywords Everywhere is the browser plugin showing search volume, competition and CPC on a variety of platforms including Google Search where it also includes related keywords and “People Also Search For”]

It is also a good idea to use local question research when brainstorming seasonal content.

3. Create and Schedule Your Content

As soon as you identify your keywords and, consequently, your content ideas, you can start working on your own article. Again, the idea behind the piece you’re reading is to show how you can get most of the work done months ahead (e.g. during your slowest season), so creating and scheduling content beforehand is a big part of it.

Text Optimizer is my go-to content writing tool, as it allows me and my writers to get a better idea of what search users want to find when they are typing a certain query into Google.

Text Optimizer applies semantic analysis to extract related concepts and entities from Google’s search snippets that get generated for your target query. Pick 20-25 terms to include in your content as you are writing it to make it better-optimized and more in-depth:

Text Optimizer refines its suggestions based on your location:

The tool also helps you build whole sentences around the concept you chose to include:

4. Create Visual Assets

There’s no single perfect format for your content, so determine your content diversification tactics when planning your campaigns.

Start creating visual and video assets to go with that content for more visual appeal and marketing opportunities.

I use PlaceIt to quickly put together visual content assets for both evergreen and seasonal content. PlaceIt offers customizable templates for seasonal videos, video intros, and more:

I think this might be the biggest collection of animated templates that you can easily customize and publish.

5. Schedule On-Site Promotion

So your written and scheduled content will go live just in time for it to catch the rising wave of the seasonal interest. You don’t have to manually publish it.

But how do you automate increased visibility across your site? How do you avoid forgetting to customize your whole site to attract more attention and get it optimized for the season?

I’ve been wracking my brains about it until I discovered Finteza, that allows website owners to manage their own advertising program. I have been using this functionality to schedule seasonal banners to my newly published content. It works as follows:

• You identify advertising zones on your site (where you want you banners to appear) and place Finteza’s code on each spot
• You create a new campaign for each of your scheduled content assets and generate banners using Finteza’s built-in tool. You can schedule each campaign to appear on a certain day at a certain time as well as set the date when the banners will disappear.

For any locally-oriented campaigns, you can also set the location of site visitors who will be able to see the banners. This comes in very handy when running hyper-local promotions:

Finteza will also provide detailed analytics on each of your campaign performance, clicks, traffic sources, etc. helping you identify what has worked particularly well and how to build on this success next year. It will also help you avoid ineffective campaigns and get more focused, going forward:

Another tool that I keep running on my site to help with seasonal content engagement is Alter, which adds a smart marketing bot on my site that gets to know the page visitors and helps them keep engaged.

Alter is an AI-run marketing bot that is there to guide your users around the site 24/7.

It can improve your seasonal content conversions, but it’s also essential to set up an effective customer relationship management routine to nurture those leads as they come in. Here’s a good list of CRM software to choose from as well.

6. Schedule Social Media Promotions

Finally, you can go ahead and have your team schedule tweets and Facebook posts to promote your seasonal content when it’s live. ContentCal can come in handy here, too: it can schedule tweets, Facebook and Linkedin posts and even Instagram updates months ahead of time. You can also add multiple team members and moderators to diversify your feed while still maintaining consistent quality.

Encourage your team members to keep an eye on the campaign briefs to include:

• Noted hashtags
• Pre-created visual assets
• Mentioned brands and influencers

Takeaways: Planning Your Local Content Marketing Around Seasonality

Targeting seasonality is a great way to increase content marketing engagement. It doesn’t mean you should always be involved in creating and promoting seasonal content. You can plan and schedule most of the work ahead of time (e.g. during your quietest season) and handle incoming leads when it goes live.

• Create a list of local events and global holidays you can time your content to
• Use Google Trends to identify the best timing
• Create campaign briefs using ContentCal
• Research keywords using Kparser
• Create and optimize content using TextOptimizer
• Create seasonal promo videos using PlaceIt
• Schedule on-site promotions using Finteza and Alter
• Promote using all your available channels including social media (don’t forget your hashtags!), Google My Business posts, email blasts, etc.

Next year you’ll be able to re-use most of your calendar, create even more engaging content (based on your accumulated data and experience), save time on hashtag research and even update some of your old content for it to work again!

Don’t overdo it with the latter tactic, though: Google doesn’t like sites to re-publish the same content with the new date again and again. You do need to create more articles or introduce substantial edits to your existing content.

Are you using seasonality to create a better-organized, more effective content marketing strategy for your local business? Let’s discuss in the comments below?

With new technology, new ways of searching, and new tools processing data, your optimization strategy should innovate.

Question research is one of those newer tactics that should become part of your search optimization routine.

Why Research and Optimize for Questions?

1. Niche questions help you understand and consequently serve your target customer better

Question research can give you a great deal of insight into your target audience’s struggles and how to serve them better. Questions are easier to relate to than keywords, so building content around questions is much easier than building content around keywords. By nature, questions are much more inspiring than keyword matching which makes them the perfect content ideation source.

2. Niche questions help you optimize for featured snippets and consequently voice search opportunities

As we already know, most queries triggering featured snippets are questions. Optimizing for questions means optimizing for featured snippets.

Furthermore, including questions in your content is also a great way to optimize for voice search because people tend to talk to a smart device in full sentences (more often than not, those are interrogative sentences).

Question research and optimization helps you optimize for both featured snippets and voice search.

3. Niche questions streamline your customer support and local marketing management

Question research helps local businesses create a unified resource of all relevant questions, which makes customer support much more productive. It also makes in-house training and outsourcing easier because having a well-organized knowledge base can become the perfect training material.

The goal is to turn your website into an ultimate resource, so that your customer is more likely to find their answers there, rather than going around the forums to ask their questions there.

How to Research Niche and Local Questions

Before we start getting tactical here, let’s categorize questions that may potentially be useful for your local business:

• Location-based questions: These are generic questions around your location that could help your business be discovered even when your target customer isn’t necessarily interested in your product or service just yet. These questions build local brand familiarity and leads, and sometimes direct conversions too.
• Business-based questions: These are actual questions your current or future customers are asking about your business and products.
• Competitor-based questions: These are questions people are asking about your competitor(s). These are useful for many research purposes, from gaining competitive advantage (learning how to build a better product/offering) to learning to avoid your competitors’ mistakes.

Based on the types of questions we are researching, here are some tools and tactics you can use to collect the data:

Tools for Researching Location-based Questions

Depending on what it is you are doing, your specific question research may vary a bit, but this can generally be approached as the local keyword research you are already doing.

The easiest tool to start your research is Text Optimizer, which utilizes semantic research to analyze Google search snippets and extract related concepts and questions. Simply put your location in TextOptimizer’s “Topic Ideas” tab and scroll through the popular questions it’s extracted:

Other sources of question-based keyword research include:

• The ‘Questions’ section inside Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer
• The Answer The Public tool
• The ‘People Also Ask’ report inside Featured Snippet Tool
• Serpstat’s ‘Questions’ feature

Depending on how large your target location is, you may want to use as many tools as you see fit. If you use a lot of sources and hence generate a lot of (similar) questions, use Serpstat’s keyword clustering feature to classify them by relevancy and then form an actionable plan on how to implement them (as well as how to more easily identify those that match the local business best):

Serpstat groups keywords based on how many overlapping URLs rank for each specific query, making it easy to make sense of long keyword lists

Tools for Researching Navigational (Brand- and Competitor-focused) Questions

There are several ways to collect questions around your and your competitors, and it’s a good idea to use all that apply:

• Your company’s own customer support emails (encourage your customer support and sales teams to record these using a shared document)
• Your online reviews and customers’ questions
• Your online competitors’ reviews and their customers’ questions
• Twitter question monitoring, especially for bigger brands. Type [“business name” ?] (with the space in between) in Twitter’s search box to get the real-time feed of all questions around you or your competitors

How to Optimize Your Local Business Site for Questions

Now that you have a good list of questions that relate to the local business you’re working with, what exactly should you be doing with it?

I’m glad you asked. Here you go:

Step 1: Get Organized

Running the clustering analysis is the first step to getting those questions organized. The next step is to create an actionable content roadmap, detailing what to do with each group.

When organizing my keywords or questions in order to put together my content plan, I use the following labels:

• Search intent (informational, commercial, navigational, or a possible mix). Search intent determines both the page type (e.g. article or a commercial landing page), the call-to-action (a ‘Buy Now’ button or a lead generation form) and the on-page content tone
• Content action (whether it’s going to be new content or part of existing content)
• Content types. Possible content types when it comes to question optimization include:
  • Article: This is usually the best choice for generic location-based questions
  • FAQ / Knowledge Base / Help Center section: This is usually built based on brand-focused questions (both around your own brand and your competitors). It’s a good idea to keep building this section up on a continuous basis. This will provide the customer services team with a central point of truth to refer to.
  • Product Q&A: This is a good tactic to get your money-page featured in Google
• Seasonality, i.e. if there’s need to time this content asset better:

For seasonal content you can use a spreadsheet to plan that out right away.

Step 2: Optimize content for questions

Now that you’ve created your content plan, how do you actually optimize your articles? Because featured snippets and voice search are both so important for Google search visibility, making sure your content is optimized for both is very important.

The best way to ensure your page appears in both featured snippets and “People Also Ask” boxes is to create a clear content structure using H2 and H3 subheads:

• H2 subhead: Parent question #1
• Followed by the concise on-point answer…
  • H3 “subtopic” question #1
  • Followed by the concise on-point answer…
  • H3 “subtopic” question #2
  • Followed by the concise on-point answer…
• H2 subhead: Parent question #2
• etc.

A structure like this helps Google to quickly locate the answer and feature it as a list in a featured snippet.

Another good tactic is to evaluate the best possible format that could satisfy each question query best. For example, if the question is something like “What are the most affordable things to do in XX?”, it is quite clear that the search user would expect a list in the answer, so that’s what you should create.

Genuinely trying to provide the best possible answer goes a long way in featured snippet optimization.

Step 3: Go the Extra Mile by Implementing Schema Markup

While it’s been made clear structured markup is confirmed not to influence Google’s rankings and their featured snippet algorithm, implementing schema markup is still a good idea (even if one specific type isn’t yet officially supported by Google).

Schema.org helps Google understand your site better which is always a good thing.

When it comes to question optimization, the three solid schema.org types to implement are:

• HowTo schema
• QAPage schema
• FAQPage schema

All are already being routinely utilized by Google in order to provide better-structured answers to their users.

Using schema.org markup is easier than you may think (there are a variety of advanced plugins that can handle that for you, and for larger brands, scalable solutions like Schema App are perfect) and even while it may not improve your rankings, it won’t definitely hurt.

Have you been optimizing local business websites for questions? Please share your tips and results!

Every year the methods marketing and SEO agencies use to generate leads changes ever so slightly. The need for a solid strategy remains the same, but between algorithms from Google and the overall attitude and expectations of customers, finding the right balance is complicated. Learning from missteps remains a way of finding what works for you, but nothing beats having some solid ‘go-to’s that never steer you wrong.

To me, the way forward has always been content. Whether I’m trying to increase traffic flow through SEO tactics, creating links and connections via influencer marketing, engaging one-on-one via social media, or just giving my user base something of value through my expertise, content is at the center of every effort.

With this in mind, I truly believe that content generation and expansion is the best way to generate the most effective leads, including local leads. This is true at every level of the sales funnel and for every kind of product, whether you are selling a tangible item, a service or yourself as a brand.

Understanding The Content Drive Funnel

So, how do we apply the sales funnel concept to content? It’s simple:

• Top: This is where you begin to create content that is ‘all-encompassing’ on a topic. For instance, you might target the commercial-intent keyphrase “chicago lawyer” but take a more generalized approach in your content marketing, e.g. create comprehensive guides on Chicago-specific legal matters, history of Chicago legislation, etc.
• Center: This is where you begin actively engaging your readers, tying them up to your brand. You’re narrowing your focus and offering more specialized information about your chosen topic. It’s within this area of the funnel that much of your authority is being built. You’re showing your user base that you are trustworthy and able to provide what they need.
• Bottom: Specificity is the name of the game at the bottom of the funnel. The top two levels have filtered down to this base in order to provide a platform for expanding on the best products, brands, and services you can recommend. In other words, you have them paying attention, now it is time to catch them.

To sum up:

Targeting these funnel segments requires some tools to help you create the best local lead-generating content possible. Some of these are apps, others are just general forms of content that get the job done. All of them should be on your must-use list. (For the sake of focus, I’ll only list tools helping with the top two parts of the funnel, as the bottom totally relies on your product.)

Start with Top-Funnel content

This is probably the most important part of the funnel (from the content marketing perspective) because it determines your brand discoverability. Your top-funnel content needs to ensure that your content will be discovered.

1. Discover region-specific informational queries with Serpstat

I’d like to make it clear right away that we are not going to talk about local rankings here (i.e. Google Maps results or the local three-pack). Your site content targets informational queries (read more about those here) which can only trigger non-local results and that’s where we want to extend our discoverability to, so it’s important that we target organic rankings, e.g.:

As I mentioned in my previous article for BrightLocal, Serpstat is a great keyword research solution because it provides advanced filters allowing you to filter “toponyms”, i.e. keywords that contain geographic names:

This is a great option as it informs local keyword research and helps you to identify patterns and trends to follow when crafting your content.

2. Monitor your content performance, especially in important region(s) with Rank Tracker

Another great way to improve your ranking for region-specific informational queries is to monitor where you currently stand. Monitoring rankings is also a great way to keep an eye on your competitors.

BrightLocal Rank Tracker is a multi-feature, position-monitoring tool that lets you monitor both your organic and local rankings.

3. Monitor local hashtags using Cyfe

Hashtags help discover content and discussions that are missing from Google, providing you with the opportunity to extend your content reach outside the scope of your competitors. I particularly like using hashtags for content brainstorming and niche research:

Cyfe is a great hashtag monitoring tool which offers an unlimited number of widgets, so you can create one huge dashboard, all monitoring and archiving your chosen hashtags:

4. Capture leads on your website with LeadGen widget

Email marketing is the third most influential form of outreach on the planet. Writing well-formed content via email is a fantastic way to reach your audience and build a solid communication chain that gives you access on multiple levels. An email reaches their work inbox but it also reaches their mobile device (because who doesn’t have their email connected through their phone these days?).

BrightLocal’s Lead Gen widget is a great way to offer free local SEO reports and build lead-generating email communications from there. It’s easy to install, very affordable, and offers quite a few display options.

5. Discover more leads with Leadberry

Apart from people using your opt-in forms to sign up, there’s another way to claim your in-content leads:

Leadberry takes your traffic (through the Google Analytics API) and gives you a rundown of each visiting company. Using various business databases, including Linkedin, Leadberry gathers contact, business, and social data for you. This way you can also identify local businesses to reach out to.

You see who the visiting companies are, how they found your site and what content they are spending the most time. It is amazing for collecting in-content leads and developing topic-focused lead nurture campaigns. Seeing that a potential client is spending a lot of time on your site’s ‘social media’ section? Why not hit them up with an email all about your social media offerings or content?

Engage your leads further with Middle-Funnel content

Content is not as effective in driving direct sales right away as it is in building loyalty and engaging your future customers further. Here are a couple of solid content asset ideas that will engage your readers and turn them into your brand ambassadors:

6. Create an online course with Uscreen

I fell in love with creating courses a couple of years ago and I still find them immensely popular to this day. People want to learn, and when you have something that you can teach, it provides you with a valuable tool to engage your email subscribers and readers even further.

Uscreen is a great platform allowing you to easily create, host, and take full control over your course. You can use your custom domain, brand your course and, most impressively, create a custom mobile app for your course to enable you to reach your students through push notifications:

7. Run regular webinars with Join.me

Another great way to engage your audience further is to run weekly or monthly webinars or software demos. You can handle this internally or hire existing niche influencers with the required experience to do it for you (the latter might be more effective in terms of engaging more people, as people tend to prefer to interact with people they’re already familiar with).

Join.me is probably the most affordable option out there, but definitely not the only one. Join.me offers screen-sharing, annotating, and more.

However, Join.me does limit you to up to 50 possible attendees. If you need more (and if you’re webinarring well, you should!), you may want to try GoToWebinar, which allows up to 2,000 attendees, depending on the chosen package.

The best part of running webinars in this way is that you can use those webinar recordings to update your course on a regular basis and thus keep your current audience engaged.

I’d love to hear what you think!

Do you have a tool that you think belongs on this list? Is there a particular lead-generating content strategy that has been especially helpful for you in the past? Let me know in the comments!

For more of our favorite search marketing tools, check out our extensive resources and our Ultimate List of Digital Marketing Tools.

Content is still your best bet in this regard. You want to drive high-quality backlinks from good sources spread out among multiple websites. Thankfully getting a link from an authoritative local site is much easier than a national or international one. Not to mention the too-often untapped resource of locals themselves.

It’s even easier to get these quality backlinks with videos, for several reasons:

• Video content has been on the rise for quite a while now, so if you are not there, you give the other guys the competitive advantage over yourself
• Demand for video is rising while not many small businesses have started producing videos yet, so there’s still that nice spot to easily get noticed
• Lots of social media platforms have jumped on the video production bandwagon, including giants like Facebook and Twitter, so you have lots of channels to market and promote your videos on
• Videos have huge re-packaging potential, so your video can be turned into a new marketing campaign strategy
• Videos improve landing page click-through-rate

Now that you see the value in creating videos for your company, here are five ideas for creating effective video content for your local business, so you can start bringing in new customers.

5 Ideas for Creating Video Content for a Local Business

1. Become The Go-To For Local Guides

You know your local area, so why not show it off? You can let people know about hidden gems in your city. Recommend restaurants or things to do if you are visiting. Review hotels or the best AirBnB accommodations.

Talk about entertainment venues, upcoming concerts and events or point out hiking trails and camping spots. Making good local guides will give you traffic from both locals and those who are traveling to your area.

If you want to go a different route, try creating some videos that explain interesting facts or the history of historical spots near you.

Try to find your own unique voice and style! For example, Peace Collective, a Toronto-based lifestyle brand, post videos “to spotlight beautiful landscapes across the country as seen through the eyes of an influential Canadian.” The idea is that those videos are not about tourist destinations but rather feature well-known artistic Canadians that share their favorite things in Toronto.

You can then work with local directories and city guides like Dirjournal and Goop to work some kind of a deal for them to feature your video guides in your city section.

2. Post “Behind the Scenes” Team Videos

Are you doing a company retreat or a fun committee meeting? Are you taking your employees for your company anniversary celebration or arranging a company picnic? Those are all video opportunities.

Look at how Vent Fitness does that featuring their team events in a separate playlist.

Another cool example is Hunt Real Estate: They post videos from all their team “community days” showcasing how much they do for the local community:

It’s a good idea to brand your own hashtag for these events too: Going forward, you will be able to turn the hashtag into a company talent attraction medium.

3. Cover Local Events

A conference or event is awesome because it gives brands a chance to be seen out on the expo floor while rubbing elbows with potential business contacts. But you don’t have to go across the country for one. Make sure you are looking for local conferences coming to your expo halls.

Meetup.com and Eventbrite are two great tools to both discover and market events in your area – and Google, of course. Find your local city’s calendars of upcoming festivals and conferences and see if there’s an opportunity for you. You may not have a budget to sponsor those events but you can still benefit from them by becoming the local journalist covering the events through video.

4. Celebrate “Fun / Weird” Holidays

You’ll be surprised how many funny and goofy “holidays” that exist. Every day features at least several of them and many of them can be your content opportunity.

For example, the local Clark Institute celebrated Derby Day by creating a video collection of the artworks featuring horses:

Here’s a solid calendar of fun holidays to include into your video editorial calendar.

5. Tell Your Unique Story

There’s always a story to tell and video is the perfect format for a memorable storytelling strategy. Tell the story of how you founded the company, who inspired you and which challenges you overcame. Tell the story of your employees, how they found you and how that change their life. Tell the story of your happy customers, etc.

Stories are easily picked up by local media. Most cities have independent newspapers and websites that are totally focused on a small part of the region. You can almost always get a review from them if you send out a friendly invite to one of their writers and offer a video for free. A single review on an independent blog, a local radio station’s website or a visit from a television crew for the local news can go a long way.

Plus it will end up on social media, which will lead to more shares and more traffic. Start putting in tips and offering service at every corner and see what sticks. It might take a few months for them to get to you but it is a great opportunity that is totally worth waiting for. Once you have gotten one positive review you can usually leverage it to get more reviews from other sources.

Video Tips for Local Business Marketing

If you feel inspired now, here are just a few tips to make your video marketing campaign even more effective!

Optimize Your Video Content

• Include location name in the video name (video file name as well as title of the upload)
• Include the location name in the video description and tags (where possible)
• On Twitter, use your location name as a hashtag
• When uploading a locally-focused video, don’t forget to label its location inside “Advanced Settings” within the video editor:

Here are plenty of examples for your inspiration. Also, check out more video marketing tips we discussed earlier.

Create a Solid Editorial Calendar

This is not often put on lists for content ideas because it is considered a step in the process rather than a trick or bit of advice. But I believe it should be stated because so many people don’t do it. Having a solid editorial calendar is like having a blueprint to marketing success.

It lets you plan out the best topics and when they will be most effectively published to get the most views. It applies to backlinks because readers mean embedded links in other people’s posts as social media shares. Plan your editorial calendar at the very least four weeks in advance with enough flexibility to be able to put in unexpected posts when an event or bit of news becomes relevant.

I use Coschedule for all types of editorial calendars including video. I like the tool because I can monitor different content development stages and different team using it, including:

• When and who starts creating videos
• When and who will edit them
• When and who will upload to different channels and optimize
• When and who will spread them on social media and do blogger outreach

Research Local Keywords

I mentioned keyword research in my previous guide for BrightLocal. Basically, I run keyword research for anything I do because nothing opens my eyes on what my target audience wants like the information on which words they type in the search box.

I use Serpstat for keyword research because I think they provide the most in-depth selection of keywords. Type your city name and then play with different sections of the site to see which phrases you can target with our video campaign:

• Go through keyword selection (Try playing with filters and sorting options to find less competitive keywords)
• Explore related queries
• Search for questions

Create a Video Directory on Your Site

Your website is the central point of all your content marketing efforts. You need to find ways to showcase all you do there to create archives, earn links and refer your customers to.

No matter how much video content you produce, all of your videos should be linked to from your website. This will help videos rank higher and it will also add valuable content to your content. As an example, First Site Guide produces tons of video content but each video is a separate blog post with a helpful summary underneath. There’s also an index of all videos linked from the footer.

Mark Mitchell

Colorado Internet Solutions

"Using BrightLocal helps me win at least 20% of my new clients. I've found it to be an excellent tool to help manage my clients' website and SEO health."

4.8 / 5 from 125+ reviews on Capterra

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Moz has a separate category for their videos and they publish the full transcript of each video on their website.

We feature all our videos on a separate page where we also invite readers to subscribe to all kinds of channels where we feature them including YouTube and iTunes: