Creating Local SEO Content That Works (7 Solid Tips)

Do you want to significantly increase your organic visibility and targeted traffic while ensuring that you’re spending your marketing funds to target new clients and create greater revenue? The best way to do that is to write local content.

A San Diego local SEO agency shares seven tips that any size business can do:

• Understand how local optimization works
• Claim and optimize your Google My Business (GMB) profile
• Follow the E-E-A-T guidelines
• Diversify your local keywords
• Build local backlinks
• Add a schema markup
• Manage technical SEO

Learn how you and an SEO team can utilize these tips to get more leads. Ready to take notes? Let’s go!

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

1. Understand How Local Optimization Works

Though local SEO content is somewhat vulnerable to changes in search engine algorithms, the good news is that knowing how it works lets you easily adjust your brand’s content strategy.

Digital Authority Partners (DAP) has many articles to explain it. Here are some salient points:

• Local SEO content is also known as local optimization or local search.
• Improving local SEO content means optimizing your website’s content to appear in organic search results (such as Google or Bing) to attract traffic from a particular location.
• Local SEO covers many strategies, including mobile, rich snippets, keywords, and link building.

2. Claim and Optimize Google My Business (GMB) Profile

If you are a small business with limited financial resources, one of the most cost-effective local SEO strategies is to claim and improve your Google My Business (GMB) profile.

It is free, lets you take advantage of Google’s local search visibility, and can be optimized to target San Diego or California traffic through:

• Providing a consistent and accurate name, address, and phone number (NAP)
• Allowing customers to leave reviews and ratings to improve your credibility and relevance
• Uploading videos and photos to enhance business differentiation and increase engagement
• Integrating Google Maps
• Adding local keywords to the content, especially in the About Us sections, product or service descriptions, and updates

3. Follow the E-E-A-T Guidelines

Both Google and Bing, the two largest search engines, have specific rules business information must adhere to if it addresses clients’ healthcare or provides legal or business advice. If that describes your business, make sure you follow these guidelines closely. 

These rules include E-E-A-T. It summarizes the core values search engines want your articles to display: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. 

Here is how you can showcase these values in your website copy:

• Highlight your qualifications, certifications, or industry affiliations.
• Incorporate local references, statistics, and examples.
• Seek opportunities to earn backlinks from reputable local websites, organizations, or industry influencers.
• Contribute high-quality guest posts to well-established blogs or publications within your industry or local community.
• Display trust signals, such as security badges, customer testimonials, and case studies, on your website to instill confidence in your visitors.
• Actively engage with your customers by responding promptly to their inquiries and feedback.

4. Diversify the Local Keywords

One of the reasons local optimization is highly effective in driving targeted traffic is that it usually uses long-tail keywords. These are terms and phrases with three or four words, such as “San Diego beaches” or “best restaurants in Chula Vista.”

However, constantly repeating them throughout your content does not work – doing so is called “keyword stuffing.” Search engines have long disavowed stuffing keywords. Instead, a San Diego local SEO agency diversifies your local terms to expand your reach and cement your copy’s relevance to your chosen term or phrase with:

• Variations (San Diego, SD, and SoCal)
• Synonyms
• Semantic or related keywords
• Broad keywords (tourist destinations, hotels, restaurants, coffee shops)
• Competitor- and brand-related terms (landmarks, area code, business name)
• Industry-specific keywords (affordable plumbing services in San Diego)
• Customer-intent keywords (where to find organic pet food in Southern California)
• Seasonal terms (best summer activities in La Jolla)
• Trending keywords

5. Build Local Backlinks

Building backlinks, especially local ones, can improve on-page optimization. It:

• Signals to search engines that your business is relevant and trustworthy within the local community
• Enhances your relevance in a specific geographic area
• Further increases traffic

Generating diversified, quality backlinks requires a combination of several strategies, including:

• Guest blogging on local publications
• Getting listed on online directories and review sites (e.g., Yelp or TripAdvisor)
• Participating in local events or sponsoring a community organization
• Creating content for social media platforms
• Involving yourself in online discussions on forums and other niche sites
• Joining business associations, chambers of commerce, and other organizations in the area
• Making content about community events or issues that your target audience can relate to
• Partnering with influencers and bloggers for publicity and coverage

6. Add a Schema Markup

A schema markup is a structured data markup language that provides additional web page information. Using a format that major search engines recognize gives your content more context and strengthens its relevance to your chosen keywords. A schema markup can help  Google accurately rank and index your site.

Further, it optimizes your pages for:

• The local map pack, a feature that displays local businesses in a list of three or more on top of search engine results pages (SERPs). Because of your top position, you can likely get more traffic than URLs at the bottom.
• Voice search, which is predicted to grow exponentially in the coming years,
• Local knowledge graph, a search engine’s database of structured information about local organizations

A San Diego local SEO agency implements schema markup by adding and modifying specific tags and attributes to your pages’ HTML code.

7. Manage Technical SEO

Technical SEO deals with the backend aspects of your website. If done well, technical SEO can help dramatically boost your pages. If done poorly, it can hurt your online exposure and rankings. For example, you might need help getting your pages crawled and indexed. You might rank the wrong URL or for the incorrect keywords because of duplicate content.

Doing technical SEO can be complicated and challenging, and it usually includes the following:

• Fixing broken links or redirects so that Google bots do not encounter dead ends when crawling your site
• Optimizing page titles and meta descriptions
• Fixing any duplicate content issues with canonical URLs
• Ensuring the mobile-friendliness of your website by creating a responsive version or using accelerated mobile pages (AMP)
• Managing the crawl budget
• Adding and fine-tuning XML sitemaps

Summing Up

Local SEO content is a powerful tool to market your business and drive organic traffic for more leads, conversions, and sales. These seven tips can help you optimize your pages for the right keywords and get the most out of this strategy.

Working with a local San Diego SEO agency can help you dramatically improve your local SEO. DAP offers expertise and knowledge of best practices so that your website reaches its maximum potential in the search results.

Contact us for more information.