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Blogging to Develop Your Local Market

Most bloggers think in terms of their world wide reach but focusing on this particular big picture may be overlooking the power of a blog to develop a market locally. The real power of a corporate blog is that it creates opportunities to have relationships with your customers. For most businesses the most important customers will be the ones that live near to their location and the majority of consumers would prefer to find what they are looking for in their local area. Many businesses could also be taking advantage of customers that visit their location to shop and with the current increase in mobile internet use it is important to find ways to engage this potential source of foot traffic to your business. Google reports that as many as one in five searches include a location as one of the parameters. Focusing your blog on keywords that describe your business’ location can be a good way to become more visible online.

Good SEO is derived from publishing quality content and often it is difficult for business operators to find things to write about to keep their company blog fresh. Connecting your blog to your local community gives you a constant theme that not only creates the kind of keyword rich, quality content that the crawlers are looking for but also makes a strong connection with customers in your area. Using your business location as a keyword is also a good strategy for cutting down on the competition for search terms in your niche as the smaller number of businesses in your industry that share your location will increase your ranking in the SERPs for all location based searches. Focusing on your local community can also be effective in spreading your brand awareness beyond the confines of your niche by attracting visitors to your website to read the local information that you are providing.

Many businesses rely on developing personal relationships with their customers as a long term strategy as consumers are more likely to spend their money where they have had a good experience in the past. People like to feel that they know the person that they are spending their money with and that they care about the community that they share. Focusing your company’s blog on local affairs is a great way to show that you and your business are genuinely interested in the local community and encourage the locals to engage with you on and off line.

While supporting local events can be a good way to build goodwill locally, it still isn’t the focus of your business and clever local marketing strategies find ways to link their services and products to local events and the community’s specific needs. Using the location of the business as a keyword can be as simple as incorporating it into a slogan that say that your products or services are the best, most cost effective solution that can be found at you location. Finding simple ways to connect your online copy to the sorts of activities that take place in your area is a good way to take advantage of keyword terms for those activities and community events as well.

In all of the hype about the huge reach of the internet it is easy to lose sight of its power to bring people together locally. As the search engines are moving towards looking for pages with greater relevance writing about local news and interests in your company blog should become a part of your general online marketing strategy to take advantage of it. For most small businesses having a global focus isn’t going to benefit their business very much while developing a local following will certainly generate customers.

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