5 Steps to Design a Super Local SEO Content Strategy

With the intense competition facing all online businesses, each business must maximize every cost-effective strategy. These include local search engine optimization (SEO) content that brings you closer to the right audience.

However, how do you exactly do it? A San Diego local SEO agency usually follows a five-step plan:

• Identify the target audience.
• Audit your existing content marketing strategy.
• Match the keywords with the ideal market and their customer journey.
• Strengthen the backlink profile and authority with topical clusters.
• Keep track of your performance and fine-tune the plan if needed.

Below, we detail each step to help you improve your local SEO content strategy. Ready to take notes? Let’s go!

Watch this video to learn about the Digital Authority Partners approach to local SEO!

1. Clearly Identify the Target Audience

The outcome of local SEO optimization remains the same regardless of the tactics used: increased organic visibility that boosts traffic and decreases marketing costs in the long run. For this reason, you should focus on your audience and identify who it is you are writing for. 

Unlike regular SEO, local search has a narrower, more specific market. In this case, these are people living, visiting, or working in a specific geographical area, say, San Diego. For your content to matter and convert, it should consider their demographics, culture, and language.

Further, if you have a specific niche or want to attract a select group, you must break down your market into different segments. For example, if you are a yoga studio, you might focus on vegan freshmen at UCSD, millennial moms in La Jolla, or well-off boomers in Del Mar.

A San Diego local SEO agency can help you build a more accurate, updated customer persona based on these questions:

• Who is my ideal customer? What is their age, gender, location, occupation, income level, interests, hobbies, values, and lifestyle?
• What problems or needs does my product or service solve for them?
• Who would benefit the most from my product or service?
• What are the common traits or behaviors of my existing customers?
• Where can I find my target audience? Are they active on social media? Do they search for information online? Are there specific industry events or forums they engage with?
• Who are my competitors targeting?

2. Audit Your Existing Content Marketing Strategy

If you have zero content, proceed to step three. Otherwise, audit what you have first. It could be that your website copy has some challenges that are preventing your site from ranking highly in searches. Those may be:

• Duplicate content
• Plagiarized articles
• Articles with broken and dead links
• Unverifiable claims and sources
• Outdated information
• Thin content with too little useful information or data

Auditing local content usually follows these steps:

• Create a comprehensive inventory of all your existing content. Organize the content in a spreadsheet or content management system for a complete overview.
• Analyze the optimization performance of your content for local search. Ensure you have incorporated relevant local keywords, meta tags, headers, and internal/external links.
• Evaluate the relevance of each piece of content to your local audience. Ask yourself if it addresses their needs, pain points, or interests. Mark those you should remove or update.
• Check user engagement. Measure social shares, comments, and interactions to understand how well your content resonates with your local audience.
• Determine if your content consistently reflects your brand's identity. Look for consistency in tone, style, design, and messaging.
• Conduct a competitive analysis. Identify gaps or opportunities that you can leverage to differentiate yourself and provide unique value to your local audience.

3. Match Keywords with the Ideal Market and Customer Journey

Your website copy needs keywords that people use in their searches to boost your search results. For example, if you provide healthcare, you need keywords to optimize your healthcare facility’s blog posts. If you run an Encinitas-based tour company, you need more powerful keywords in your About Us section in Google My Business (GMB) profile. People will use queries or voice searches to locate you, and you want their search engine to find you and rank you highly in their search results pages.

However, gone are the days when you simply picked your business’s most popular key terms and phrases. To zero in on your target market and appear in the right local results, match your keywords with your customer's buying journey or sales funnel.

Suppose you are a pet store selling organic food in Carlsbad. Possible user-intent keywords can be:

• Awareness stage – “benefits of feeding organic food to pets,” “advantages of organic nutrition for pets,” and “health benefits of natural pet food”
• Interest stage – “top-rated eco-friendly pet food brands in Carlsbad,” “review of locally sourced pet food options in San Diego,” and “key ingredients to seek in natural pet food”
• Consideration stage – “comparing premium natural pet food choices,” “value of high-quality pet nutrition,” “nourishing grain-free dog food,” and “wholesome pet food options”
• Purchase stage – “shop for organic pet food online in Carlsbad,” “exclusive deals on natural pet food,” and “find affordable and healthy pet food options in San Diego”

4. Strengthen the Backlink Profile and Authority with Topical Clusters

You must build a solid domain and brand authority to quickly improve your search engine ranking. Clustering topics is useful in this situation in the following ways:

• Helping Google understand the hierarchy of your content
• Making it easier for search engine crawlers to discover new pages faster
• Allowing you to add more internal links that pass page rank
• Enabling you to thoroughly connect related topics and build stronger topical relevance

Here is an example of developing a healthcare topic cluster. The same methods apply to other subjects and industries.

5. Keep Track of Your Performance and Fine-Tune the Plan if Needed

Your local content may be well-optimized and compelling, but you will only know if it performs as it should if you track it. This crucial step helps answer many questions, such as:

• Are my content marketing efforts paying off?
• How can I increase my website's ranking?
• What is this local SEO project’s return on investment (ROI)?
• How does it fare compared to my competitor’s content?

Because monitoring various metrics is time-consuming and difficult, it is best left to an expert San Diego local SEO agency. However, just to give you an idea of how it works, here are some methods they use:

• Implement Google Analytics on your website to gather valuable data about your content's performance. Track organic traffic, page views, bounce rates, average time on page, and conversion rates. Set up custom reports or dashboards.
• Leverage built-in analytics on social media platforms. Measure post reach, engagement, clicks, and demographics.
• Analyze calls. If your local content includes phone-call calls to action (CTAs), consider using call-tracking solutions.
• Set up conversion tracking on your website to measure specific actions taken by users after consuming your local content. Examples of such actions include submitting a form, signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, etc.
• Incorporate customer feedback mechanisms. Use surveys or feedback forms to gather insights into how your audience perceives your content.

Regularly review and analyze the data from these tracking methods to identify trends, measure the success of your local content, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategies and improve performance over time.

Summing Up

Designing a local SEO content strategy requires dedication and effort. This five-step plan is a good start.

If you need help, Digital Authority Partners (DAP) is an award-winning San Diego local SEO agency that excels at improving local SEO for a variety of businesses. From keyword research to monitoring metrics, we build a strong foundation for your business’s success.

Contact us for a free consultation to learn how we can help you reach your goals.