adminSuppose you are looking for a way to promote your business in Lexington. In that case, content marketing should be one of your main options when putting together your strategy.
To sell your products or services, you need two aspects that content marketing gives you. The first is having the reach to reach the audience that is looking for what you offer. The second is the credibility you gain by creating valuable content for your target audience, helpful content that shows you are an expert at what you do.
This article will present a proposed strategy to succeed in your content marketing locally in Lexington, Kentucky. However, with the same principles, this strategy can also apply to many other locations.
Because we have many clients from Kentucky, we have a better understanding of SEO and the competition for different industries in the state.
It is essential to mention that Kentucky is still fertile ground for those businesses that want to do content marketing, unlike other regions. The faster you start generating the content, the better your chances of getting a good ranking on Google.
The safest and most effective strategy to follow focuses on helping the customer, solving their doubts, and improving their lives even long before buying from you.
Identify your target audience in the city.
To create engaging content, you first need to know whom you are talking to. Next, you must know your audience’s characteristics, needs, problems, and motivations.
If you do not know your audience, you risk generating content that does not connect with them, which is of no benefit to your business. The idea is to create content that the public wants to consume and even share with others.
Your content should be relevant to the city of Lexington so that when people search for specific events or locations in the region, your content stands out from the others that are more generic.
In this specific case, we know that the city of Lexington is the world’s horse capital. Many businesses revolve around this industry, so you can use related terms to expand your reach in the search results and be more relevant to people looking in this city.
The best way to know what your audience is looking for is to analyze your current customers. Nobody better than your clients to understand the needs they have and the problems they seek to solve.
Use city-specific keywords
Usually, when people search for a product or service, we first do it locally. To indicate that we are searching locally, we use the name of the city or region.
Suppose you use words specific to your location, in this case, Lexington, Kentucky. You will automatically exclude all those results that do not contain those words or phrases. The vast majority of results do not have these words because they are aimed at general or specific audiences in other cities.
You may think that this does not apply to you because you want to get clients from anywhere in the country and not just from Lexington, Kentucky. However, it would help if you considered that ranking in Google for other cities or nationally is much more complicated. If you try to cover the entire market, you will end up not covering anything.
You can also use keywords with areas of the city, events, celebrations, or characters of the city that indicate which city the search refers to. In Lexington, you could also use Keeneland, Blue Grass, University of Kentucky, Jacobson Park, etc.
People use many terms so specific that sometimes the results that Google returns are not very relevant or general to the public. Those searches are what you want to capture because they are many together. The competition is very low, so ranking your pages is much easier.
Create new content constantly.
Most businesses do not create content because being consistent in it is very difficult.
The content you generate will be of little use to you if you make a piece every two or three months. It is also not feasible to post content every day, but you should set a goal to post one piece of content each week for at least six months.
The content marketing race is a race of endurance and not speed. You will see the results in the medium and long term, so you should not be discouraged if you know that you do not see any change during the first months.
Once your audience finds you, if your content is of quality, they will return to your site expecting to see new publications. But, on the contrary, they find the same content as a few months ago; they will realize that it is not updated not very relevant.
Use news or events that are happening in the region to create content. They should not necessarily be events directly related to your business. However, you must find a way to connect the news with your industry or economic activity.
Create different content formats
Not all audiences are the same, so you must create different formats to distribute your content through various media.
You do not necessarily have to create different content for each distribution medium. Still, you can convert an article, for example, into a video or perhaps audio. You will see that the interaction with these different formats occurs differently depending on the medium where people find it.
Usually, those who search in Google expect to find mainly content written with images and perhaps some video. Those who search YouTube are looking for a video. Those who listen to podcasts are looking for audio that allows them to listen to your content while doing other activities.
The more presence you have on social media, the better your content marketing strategy. When the public recognizes your brand, they start searching by its name, making your content much more effective, just like your SEO.
Get mentions and backlinks from local businesses.
Your customers and suppliers are the best options to generate backlinks quickly.
If your business is B2B, most customers will have a website from which they can link to your website. The backlinks can be from any page, but the closer it is to the top level, the greater the backlink value.
It is best to have those backlinks within an article or blog post, so in many cases, you will have to offer them the creation of that text where you will include your backlink.
Non-profit organizations can also be a good source of backlinks. This is because they tend to have a good PageRank and are usually accessible to place backlinks to companies that help them.
Consider that this strategy will be much more potent if it is done with businesses within your locality. It is far better to have 100 backlinks from companies and pages located in the Lexington, Kentucky area than to have backlinks from pages scattered all over the United States.
Register your business and website on Google Maps
Maps are the primary way to tell search engines where you are located and to whom you want to target your content.
We usually think of Google Maps because it is the largest; however, Bing Places for Business and Apple Maps for Business will help you boost your content locally.
On the maps, you can not only put your location and contact information, but it can also be a place to interact with the audience in the form of reviews and comments. The more reviews you have from people located in the Lexington area, the greater strength you will be giving to your presence in that location.
eLink Design is a national web design, application development, SEO, and business consulting firm, founded in 2001 that specializes in custom solutions for over 800 clients around the country. With this blog, we hope to provide insights into what we are working on, areas where we think we can help shed light on problems we hear, and sometimes just cool things we have come across.
