Content Challenges Facing Local Business Owners

If you own a Local Business you might tend to think that all you need to do is get a blog set up, state your opinion and publish it on the web in the form of a blog post. While you can certainly do this and it won’t hurt, there are certain techniques you can implement to ensure you get the best search rankings possible.

Keyword Density Factors

When writing content for the web, whether it goes on a website or a blog, you need to write it a certain way for it to be the most effective. You should go after 1 keyword phrase for every blog post you write. For example if you own a Hair Salon in Carlsbad, CA., a good keyword phrase might be Carlsbad Hair Salon. When writing for example you can refer to your salon as Mary’s Carlsbad Hair Salon verses just Mary’s Hair Salon. Writing just Mary’s Hair Salon won’t pull up results for folks searching for a Hair Salon in Carlsbad, CA.

Many times what I like to do is write my blog post on paper and proofread it first. I make sure the keyword phrase I use is in the title tags, meta tags, keyword tags and is “sprinkled” in the content at least one time for every 100 words of content. So if I write a 1,000 word blog post that keyword phrase will be mentioned within that post 10 times or so. It might be mentioned 7 times or 12 times, but it will be somewhere in that 1 percent keyword density range.

It’s amazing the high percentage of Small Local Business Owners who don’t even have their own blog yet. Keyword Research is the topic for an entirely different article, but with your own blog you can start killing your competition by writing blog posts around long-tail keywords that represent the type of business you run and where you run it.

Blog Post Syndication

There are two different schools of thought on this, so I’m not going to try to convince you which one is correct, but what we do and what has worked for us in the past is that we will write a relevant blog post. We will leave it on our blog a few weeks until google finds it. Then we will take the same article and submit it to all the top article directories. This will build lots of extra backlinks to our blog with the author bio.

An author biography is a short statement of who you are and what you’re offering on the internet. You are allowed to place two hyperlinks back to your website or blog in your author bio. I usually send one to a landing page to collect leads and the other to my main site for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) reasons. The other thing I like to do with an Author Bio, which is a great strategy for Local Business Owners, is to send one link to the main page and the second link to an inner page or the actual blog post. If you’re a Small Local Business Owner and pay one of your employees to make just one blog post per day, this is a great use of their time if you are paying them by the hour.

There are tons of other methods you can use to get links and more customers, Jeff and I tell all our clients if you just follow the one blog post per day rule in addition to what we do for you, your competitors will be so far behind you within a year or so that they won’t have a clue on what they will need to do to catch up to where you’re at now. They will always wish they would have hired us to get them started before you did.