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Practice useful marketing for local business content success

As a small business owner, you fight big brands and a ranking system that favors them. How can you compete? Contributor Jamie Pitman shares 3 tactics to take on the competition by using smart and useful content.

Jamie Pitman on June 29, 2018 at 11:10 am

At every search conference, you hear the same click-bait question: “Is SEO dead?”

The short answer is “no,” and the longer answer is still “no,” it’s just changing. Maybe the term search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t really a good way to describe the wealth of practices and factors it encompasses anymore.

I’m convinced we’ll soon start to hear “Has content marketing been dethroned?” The argument for this, while still designed to get heads turning and tongues wagging, is particularly relevant for local businesses in the search world of 2018. As Google more firmly fits itself into the divide between a searcher and local business websites with featured snippets and the like, a more fitting question would be “Is there any point in local businesses doing content marketing?”

I’m here to tell you “Yes, it absolutely is,” and also share tips on:

What to focus on with content marketing for local business.
How it can help rankings and engagement.
How to get great results on short time frames and even smaller budgets, which is critical for smaller SEO agencies.

Ready to place that crown back on content marketing’s head? Let’s go!

Do local businesses need blogs?

According to a poll of SEOs conducted earlier this year by my company, BrightLocal, 68 percent believed that local businesses still needed to have a blog in 2018.

Sure, the figure is over half the people polled, but it’s still surprisingly low considering how many respondents are likely to be blogging for local businesses themselves. Interestingly, 98 percent of respondents believed that local business blogs should be updated at least once per month.

I would argue that what we used to call a “blog” is now just a big old bucket of content that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else on the site. This term is still relevant for many companies (and, of course, for bloggers), but I’m not sure it fits the kind of content local businesses are likely to see the most success with.

Ask yourself this: Is anyone going to link to your local restaurant’s blog about its new oven? Is anyone going to search for, click through and read a legal office’s post about a new hire? Not likely. This kind of “newsy” stuff has its place, and it used to be in the blog, but no more.

So, what should replace the local business blog? You need something that’s going to trigger those all-important relevance and prominence factors in local search. Without content, how ar…

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Jamie Pitman

Jamie Pitman is Head of Content at local SEO tool provider BrightLocal. He's been working in Digital Marketing for nearly ten years and has specialized in SEO, content marketing and social media, managing successful marketing projects for clients and employers alike. Over this time he's blogged his heart out, writing over 300 posts on a wide variety of digital marketing topics for various businesses and publications.