Every marketing director wants to know and report month-over-month traffic gains, and that’s understandable. There’s a tremendous amount of pressure to validate the funds spent on an editorial team, video editor, SEO agency, and other content expenses.
But what if your website visitors are not qualified buyers? In that case, traffic is an empty vanity metric.
This blog will discuss how regionally-focused service businesses can generate real leads and grow through a localized content strategy.
What does it mean to “localize” your content strategy?
You can enact a local content strategy by creating blog posts, service pages, and videos with regional relevance. The exact strategy will depend on your business; some businesses need clients or customers in a specific city, and others can accept clients state-wide or in multiple states. For example, if you are a business accountant in NYC, you could write a blog post entitled, “What Payroll Taxes Do Employers Pay in NY?” since those laws vary from state to state.
What businesses need a local content strategy?
Any business that offers a local service, or is bound by a geographic boundary, needs local content. Law firms, car dealerships, medical practices, schools, CPAs, and more would be in this category.
If you rely on lead generation for your business, a local content strategy is critical. You can capture prospects at all points of your marketing funnel with local content, and that can keep your pipeline full of better-quality leads.
Why does localized content matter?
Ultimately, most agencies and in-house marketers are responsible for growing revenue. Reporting huge traffic numbers can be fun, but if that traffic doesn’t convert to sales, who cares?
The only reason to chase traffic for traffic’s sake is if you are trying to make money with Google Adsense or another ad publishing platform. You would need hundreds of thousands of hits per month to make a meaningful amount of money doing this, and your car dealership, law firm, HVAC repair shop, etc. would be better off focusing only on getting local traffic that converts to clients.
Furthermore, localized content will help your website rank on Google for phrases like, “_[insert service provided] near me._”
If your blog posts and pages have content that is locally relevant to your town or state, Google will view your site as being more authoritative in your community. You will have a better shot at ranking well in the Google Local Pack and in the traditional search engine results when people search for “near me” queries.
How to write localized blog posts
Let’s start with law firms, our primary clients here at Majux. Criminal statutes and personal injury laws are unique at the state level, and your content will need to reflect that. Start by adding “In [State]” to your titles: for instance, “how to sue after a slip and fall accident in Maine.”
Then, within the content, cite and reference your state’s most recent legislation. The whole blog should be hyper-relevant to your state’s guidelines.
Car dealerships are another good example. Consider writing about how to legally register a car across state lines, for instance. Many people in the Chicago area cross state lines to Indiana to purchase a car, and a blog post entitled “How to Buy a Car in Indiana and Register in Illinois” could receive a decent volume of relevant traffic.
A third idea would be for local service businesses to write guides on complimentary services in their region. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for a CPA to write a blog entitled “The complete guide to opportunity zone tax incentives in [City].” People who read that blog would be qualified to also hire your services, and you’ve already provided the reader with value.
Another example: a local real estate business could write a guide entitled,”The Best Contractors in [City]: A Guide.” The real estate company doesn’t offer those services, so it isn’t a competitive issue, and people who are looking for a contractor may be interested in using that particular real estate company in the future.
How to write localized pages on your site
Your “posts” will be timely pieces of information that answer specific questions, and you may update those annually and write new ones on a regular basis.
Your “pages” will be relatively static, and in most cases, these will be your service pages. For instance, your main service page if you are an estate planning attorney in Chicago would have the title, “Chicago Estate Planning Attorney” or something like that. It may be your homepage.
So how do you “localize” the content on a service page? In addition to optimizing your page titles, meta descriptions, and headers (that’s a more SEO-specific discussion), you should:
- Include information on local/statewide laws in the content
- Include a section about your business location that references geographic markers, the intersection your office is located on, etc
In short, your service pages can’t be purely sales-jargon if you want to rank well on Google. You need to treat the content with the depth of a blog post, and include local signifiers in the copy.
Tracking the results of your local content strategy
Measurement with local tracking numbers
If you’re going through the trouble of writing regionally-specific blog posts and pages, you will want to show visitors a local phone number as well. With CallRail’s call tracking pools, you can show local area codes to every visitor on your website and track their referral source.
This is incredibly important when measuring the lead generation efficacy of your content marketing efforts. With a tracking pool of local numbers on your website, you can view CallRail’s reports to see exactly how many calls or texts you receive from organic traffic. You can even take it one step further and see the exact page that visitor landed on.
Track your keyword rankings
Writing locally-focused blog posts will help your site as a whole rank better in your region. For instance, a blog post entitled “how to buy a car in Indiana and register it in Chicago” will help you rank better for the phrase “used car dealership in Dyer, IN,” if that’s how you’ve optimized your site.
That said, you will want to plug your top level keywords into a tool (we like Keyword.com) that can track two things:
- Your rankings in the traditional search engine results in your zip code
- Your rankings in the Google Map Pack in your zip code
Measurement in Google Analytics
Obviously, you can use Google Analytics to track overall organic traffic growth and user behavior (conversions). You can also add a simple UTM string to your website link in your Google My Business listing to see how much referral traffic you receive from the map pack.
Beyond that, use these Google Analytics reports to dig deeper into your data:
- Use the Landing Pages report, filtered for organic traffic, in Google Analytics to see the performance of specific blog posts and pages
- Use the Behavior Flow report to see how those blog visitors move throughout your site from the blog posts
Measurement in Google Search Console
In Google Search Console, you can see the literal queries people use to find your site. You can also see data on average rank and average click-through-rate (CTR).
By examining these reports over time, you’ll identify good opportunities for:
- Additional blog posts; if you are getting a bunch of impressions for a term, but the CTR is low, you should consider writing a post directly for that query
- Opportunities for relevant PPC keywords
- Opportunities for relevant keyword lists to populate Custom Intent Audiences in Google Ads
In conclusion: focus on qualified traffic above all else
If you identify audiences of people valuable to your brand and create content specifically designed for them, your website traffic will be relevant, qualified, and lucrative. So don’t shy away from writing hyper-local blog posts that only get 15 visitors per month - if one of those visitors turns into a personal injury case or a car sale, you’re way ahead of the curve.
Adam Gingery is Chief Operating and Paid Advertising Officer at Philadelphia-based Majux Marketing. Majux is an agency that uses data-based decision making to increase revenue for law firms, eCommerce, and Fortune 500 companies around the globe.
