Newspapers Put Less Than Half of Hyperlocal News Online
Need more evidence of the great opportunity that hyperlocal blogging offers? Consider this study by readMedia involving more than 1,000 community newspaper editors and reporters in the U.S. The summary:
Community newspapers throughout the country consider personalized “hometown” news stories about local residents as “must-publish” content, but more than 50% of it continues to live in print only and not online.
Almost 90% of respondents said they “always do their best” to include local interest stories submitted by college, universities, small businesses, and the military. The survey calls this stuff “hometown news.” And, as the chart below shows, not much of that news makes its way to the papers’ web sites.
The readMedia report suggests this could be either a problem or an opportunity for Web-only hyperlocal sites. But, as I explained last year in Why Local Blogging Works, I think it’s most certainly an opportunity. There’s a door open and if the newspaper isn’t standing there, someone else should walk right in and provide the online hyperlocal news and information that people want.
The full readMedia news release is here.
How Much Do You Care About SEO?
A question for my fellow hyperlocal bloggers:
How much do you care about SEO in relation to your hyperlocal blog?
By that, I mean:
- Have you done any basic blog SEO?
- Do you have any SEO-related plugins (if you use WordPress) or other SEO tools?
- Do you use them regularly?
- Do you write headlines or article text with SEO/keywords in mind?
- Do you track where your blog traffic comes from, specifically how much comes from search engines?
One reason I ask is that I’m thinking about doing an SEO for hyperlocal bloggers post/series. I’ve been an SEO much, much longer than I’ve been a hyperlocal blogger, so content like that would be right up my alley.
The second reason I’m asking is this interesting post at the Online Journalism Review by Robert Niles:
Student journalists need to learn SEO more than they need AP style
Needless to say, considering my background in SEO, I agree with that idea 100%. This part, especially, I think is good advice about where SEO fits in with journalism/hyperlocal blogging:
“…most SEO techniques reduce to providing clear, concise writing that stays on topic – that frequently references the key words and phrases that an article’s supposed to be about. That’s good advice for any writer looking to attract readers in a competitive environment. Unfortunately, in print journalism, with readers too long delivered through local monopoly, too many reporters and headline writers became more focused on being clever than clear.”
So, I’ll ask again: How much do you care about SEO in relation to your hyperlocal blog? Comments are open!
(via MediaGazer)
My List: 10 Cool Hyperlocal Blogs
Promise not to hate me, please? 
Blogs.com is running a series of “guest Top 10″ lists (here’s one from Marc Andreesen and one from Chris Anderson), and even though my name never belongs in the same paragraph as heavy hitters like them, Blogs.com asked me to submit a list about hyperlocal blogging.
So I did: 10 Cool Hyperlocal Blogs.
Now, a couple disclaimers:
- I couldn’t list everyone that contributes to this blog in one way or another, but I did list many of you. Either way, I appreciate everyone in this growing community we have here and love learning from you.
- I actually grouped the three Seattle blogs together and wrote one description, but Blogs.com tells me they couldn’t post the list that way for technical reasons. So you’ll see a description next to one of the Seattle blogs, but it actually is about all three.
- I didn’t submit the list in alphabetical order, but that’s how it was published.
So, as I said in the first sentence here … don’t hate me if you’re not on the list or if you think I mangled the description of your blog.
New Hyperlocal Experiment: Topic Pages
You may have heard of the phrase “topic pages” already — it’s a fairly popular idea these days in journalism circles. The idea behind a topic page is that, rather than have multiple articles or posts about the same thing all competing with one another for attention, you collate them on a single “topic page.” For examples, see how the New York Times has created dozens of topic pages.
The goal is that the topic page becomes the authoritative resource for information about the topic. And generally, by “authoritative,” we mean it’s the page that earns and holds most of your search rankings about that topic, and the page that you can always refer people to when they need information. They’re kinda like Category pages, but not quite. I’ll explain the problem I hope a topic page will solve for one of our blogs, and show how we’ve setup our first topic page below.
What Problem Does a Topic Page Solve?
Primarily, it solves the problem that — for some topics — your hyperlocal blog might have lots of great information spread across multiple articles. Secondarily, some of those articles may be old or outdated and it becomes a challenge to keep them updated for new searchers who land on them via Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
My Specific Problem
In West Richland, there’s an annual event called Hogs & Dogs that attracts more people to the city than we have residents. It’s that big. We’ve been covering it since our blog launched in 2008, and we now have more than a dozen posts about Hogs & Dogs — some from 2008, some from 2009, and some from this year.
People come to this event from all over the Pacific Northwest, and they find our blog after searching online for information. But sometimes they hit a 2008 post, sometimes a 2009 post, and rarely a current post because the new content doesn’t always rank as well as the older stuff. So, we’re forced to go back and try to update all the old posts with links to the new content, like this:
That doesn’t really scale. You can’t keep going back and updating all the old posts (the ones that get search traffic) with links to all the new posts. So, our hopeful solution is the topic page.
Creating a Topic Page
Here’s how we’re doing this:
1.) Not a post, but a page. Rather than create a new blog post, we’ve created a WordPress Page. You can see it here: Hogs & Dogs. It’s somewhat bare right now, but we’ll add more content about the event as we get it. The theme we’re using (Canvas by Woo Themes – aff) allows us to create pages without having them show up in the page navigation, which is nice.
2.) Permanent URL. Although the content will be updated each year, Hogs & Dogs information will always be available at the same URL: http://westrichlandrealestateblog.com/hogs-dogs/.
3.) SEO & human-optimized content. We’ve created this page primarily for human visitors, but with the understanding that most of them will find it via search engines. The keyword is in the URL. I’ve optimized the page title. And we mention “west richland” and “hogs and dogs” several times in the page content.
4.) Evergreen, easy-to-update content. The page title says “2010″ but I can update that easily when the 2011 event rolls around. The page also lists date and time info, plus this year’s big raffle prize. All of that is evergreen content that I can easily trade out next year.
5.) Link to it often. No doubt we’ll be writing new blog posts as the event gets closer, but each new post will also link to this topic page and position it as the ultimate resource about the event.
Final Thoughts
The Hogs & Dogs event doesn’t happen until June, and even though people are already searching for information now — search traffic won’t really spike until the week before the event. We basically have about two months to get this page ranking for the terms that people use on the main search engines. I’ll let you know how it goes after the event has come and gone. If it works, we’ll be doing more of these on all our hyperlocal blogs.
Your turn: Are you using topic pages on your blog/site? Are they working? If you’re not, is it something you’d consider creating? Comments are open, as always.
——–
UPDATE, APRIL 26: For an update on this, please see Update: Topic Page Experiment.
Hyperlocal News Roundup
This is becoming somewhat of a Sunday tradition, isn’t it? If it’s Sunday, must be hyperlocal news roundup day. Just don’t hold me to it every Sunday.
- 4 ways to have hyperlocal information delivered to your newsroom, paulbalcerak.com – skip the “newsroom” part in the headline, this has some good ideas on making sure you’re tracking all avenues for finding hyperlocal content
- The REAL Reason Why Bloggers Need A Mailing List, www.davidrisley.com — a good complement to my previous post, Four Reasons Why Your Local Blog Needs a Mailing List
- SacBee launches hyperlocal aggregation site, www.lostremote.com
- Print Newspapers to Survive a Decade, Sun-Times’ Tyree Says, Bloomberg — interesting to hear that from a newspaper guy
- HelloMetro Fleshes Out in 40 Markets, localonliner.com
- Hyperlocal Blogging Tips: How To Manage Your Facebook Fan Page, bloggerlens.com — great article from Steve Sherron and timely for me, too, because I’ve been setting up Facebook pages for our local blogs this week
- Interview with Matt McGee, www.gjel.com — I answered some questions last month about local blogging from a small business perspective
Enjoy the links, and as promised, I used RustyBudget to build the list this time.
4 Tips for Small Businesses with Hyperlocal Blogs
As I type this, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends is hosting an Intuit webinar called Get Fiercely Local Customers Close to You. (You can see the Twitter conversation on the #IntuitSMB hashtag.)
Anita invited me to share some tips for small business with local blogs — tips that answered this question/topic:
How to use a blog to enhance loyalty with existing local customers
That was a tough assignment because I wanted to customize my advice depending on the type of small business, and maybe even its location. But I eventually shared this list of four specific strategies/tactics that I think could apply to a lot of small businesses with hyperlocal blogs in any location.
1. Blog = Community Kiosk
Think of your business blog as the community kiosk, the place where locals go to find out what’s really happening around town — not just what’s happening at your business/store/office. You will create loyalty by becoming a trusted resource for local information.
2. Open Your Blog to Others
Don’t think of it as your blog; think of it as the community’s blog. Yes, you’ll share company news and information on occasion, but to create real local loyalty, you need to do more. You need to open up your blog to others.
Let your blog be the voice of community groups that don’t get attention from traditional media. Invite and publish guest posts from non-profits, local organizations, event organizers, etc. They’ll tell others about what you’ve done and become evangelists for you and your blog.
3. Be Visible Offline
I’ve written before about how posts on local events are some of the most popular content my wife and I write on our local blogs. What I suggest is this: Write about local events before they happen, but also attend events and then blog about them afterwards with photos. Show people what they missed. Be their eyes and ears at local parades, community concerts, etc. If you can’t blog about a big local event, find someone to be a guest blogger for you. (See #2 above.)
4. Avoid Negativity/Controversy
All this talk about being a community resource is fine and good, but it’s still a business blog that you’re running. You don’t have to blog about everything going on in town and risk alienating potential customers. I’d avoid politics on a hyperlocal business blog. I’d avoid being too critical of local groups, organizations, other businesses, and really just about anyone. You don’t have to be the town’s cheerleader who presents everything as Super-Duper Awesome, but you should skip the controversial stuff if you’re trying to build loyal local customers.
Your turn: I don’t know how many local business bloggers read this, but if you’re one, I’d love to get your thoughts on these tips — as well as your own tips for successful hyperlocal business blogging.
-
-
Featured Video
