14 (and a half) SEO Copywriting Tips to Own Local Search

Posted By JP Sherman on Jun 04

One of the things I like about VisionPoint Marketing is our complete and total commitment to the community. Our clients range from pillars of the North Carolina business and education communities to small to medium sized businesses with savvy owners who want to work with us to design amazing websites, create memorable brands and create successful online marketing, paid search and SEO campaigns.

Being a local online marketing agency that focuses its business in the Triangle and greater North Carolina area, we have a lot of experience with local SEO and I’ve collected some great tips about writing creative content with a local flavor.

Things You Should Do 

  1. Write with a local flair. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling software as a service, donuts or cars. If most of your business is local, it’s ok to use idioms or local phrases that mean something to your customers. We all know what “The Triangle” is, you don’t need to put a list of cities in your copy, there are other places to do that.
  2. Sprinkle local landmarks, events and businesses in your copy. Things like the Great Grapes Festival, the giant acorn in Downtown Raleigh are iconic things that feature our local flavor, culture and uniqueness.
  3. Use social network sites like Flickr, Facebook, Yelp, Twitter & FourSquare as ways to spread your name, add snippets of content, drive traffic and expand your influence.
  4. If you have a service that spans multiple cities, have a landing or destination page for each city that highlights your services, the people you’ve served, appropriate customer feedback and if applicable a map and contact information.
  5. Go mobile. Let me say that again… Go mobile. Raleigh and the greater Triangle area is known to be very friendly for the tech savvy and mobile connected audience. You can’t go The Pit Barbecue (see what I did there?) and not see more than half of the guests using a smartphone. Make sure that when you have a mobile version of your site, the content is short, descriptive and the value of your product immediately recognizable.
  6. Get a blog and update it frequently. Avoid using free blogging services like Blogger or Wordpress. Put your blog on your own domain, invest in the time and money to make it look good and create an update schedule for yourself. Here you can post pictures of your company outing, engage with customers, make announcements and don’t stick too close to your “corporate speak” that’s on the site. It’s ok.. we know it’s a blog.
  7. Use pictures and captions to your advantage. If you’ve got the stock-photo picture of professionals looking at documents or pointing at presentations, that’s fine (I guess), but populate your internal pages with a local flavor, caption them, make them short and include what the picture is, where it was taken and briefly describe what’s going on.

Things You Should Not Do

  1. Don’t write like this: At Raleigh-Durham-Custom-Shirt-Shack.com, we are the source for all of your custom shirts in Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, Apex and Morrisville. Come to us for all of your Raleigh, Durham, Cary, Chapel Hill, Apex and Morrisville custom shirt needs. If you write like that, quit now… or better yet, talk to us and we’d be happy to help.
  2. Don’t get too colloquial. North Carolina’s population is growing and it took me a year to figure out what a “Cackalacky” was.
  3. This should go without saying, if you’re writing content for local SEO, don’t force a local news item to fit your SEO content. While it may be interesting that Crossroads in Cary has been swarmed by radioactive lizards, it may not be appropriate to use that article to talk about your computer repair shop.
  4. Don’t trash local sports teams. Seriously… we all know what terms are used to describe fans of the "other" team, this isn’t the time or place for that debate.
  5. Don’t write content for SEO only. No one wants to read it, no one wants to look at it and the search engines figured out how to ignore it years ago. Read you copy like the real person you are, if it doesn’t pass the human test, re-write it.
  6. Don’t alienate your visitors. As mentioned earlier, NC’s population is growing more diverse by the day, so if you start writing about “the left coast”, “fly-over states” or other clever slang terms for regions, remember that these are your customers… the ones that give you money.
  7. Don’t think that no-one’s listening. If you use social media, make sure it passes the grandparent/ child test. If what you’re saying cannot be understood by these people, you should re-write it. Social media isn’t always the best place for jargon. (Also, know when and how to break that rule)

Lastly, The Half Piece of Advice

  1. Be honest, be considerate, listen to your customers and be prepared to back your statements up or take the hits if you make a mistake.

There it is, I hope that you've learned something about how to reach out to your audience through effective local-focused SEO writing.

Comments

Commenting is not available in this channel entry.