Building content for a local SMB's is hard, building localized content is oftentimes even harder. Sure you can host an event, push your own PR, and blog about community involvement, but aside from your own self promotion, what can you do to help build local content?
One way to develop content that will appeal to your audience, while also building local relevance is to develop local guides, or interest lists that will resonate with your audience. These can be as simple as a blog post, or as fancy as an ebook, but the goal is to build content that somehow ties back to your business, as well as your locale. Below are some ideas for different business types for inspiration, hopefully you'll be able to adapt these ideas and use them for your own business.
1. Local Hiking Guide
With Spring upon us and Summer just around the corner thoughts of camping trips, hikes, and the great outdoors are on everyone's mind. A local business that focuses on the outdoors could quickly create a local hiking guide that highlights some of the best hiking trails in their city or region. Similar guides could be considered for biking trails, camping spots, and the like.
2. Best WiFi Guide
Let's face it, for those of us on the go we're always looking for the best local wi-fi. As a local, you'll know the best spots to get free wi-fi and who has the most reliable signal. If you focus on business, travel, tech, and the like this would be a great local guide to feature on your website.
3. Best Photo Ops
Live in a scenic city or a location with a lot of great spots for photos? As a camera shop, photographer, or similar business a post of the best local spots to take photos might be of interest to local photographers and perhaps even clients. As a photographer you could even showcase your work from these locations, which might inspire or encourage new business.
4. Guide to Historic Homes
Work in travel, real estate, architecture or other home related industry? Consider a guide to some of the historic homes in your area. Every city got its start somewhere and there are sure to be some gorgeous homes from your city's past. Dig up some info on the home, share its story and capture it in a photo to share its beauty.
5. A Guide of to Things to Do In Your City
This could apply to a number of different industries, and you can make it even a bit more valuable if you can identify things to do in your city that are a bit off the beaten path. I personally leveraged this on a local news site I run when I wrote a piece on 5 Things to Do In Corona You Probably Didn't Know Existed. The focus is to give some insight on things to do in the area and give your own unique take on them.
There are a number of ways to come up with local content for your blog or website, it's just a matter of identifying what might resonate with your audience and figuring out how to make the local content relevant to your business. The key is not to simply produce something local for the sake of making it local, but instead make it local and relevant to what your business does. Still need some more ideas? Consider checking out my post on automated sources for content curation and inspiration.
