Why Local Blogging Works
by Matt on Feb 6, 2009 in Blogging, MY BEST POSTS
Does local blogging really work?
If you’re a small/local business owner, that question may be on your mind. It’s a smart question to ask if you’re thinking about using a local blog as a marketing tool. (Business bloggers are one of the five types of local bloggers.)
When it’s done right, local blogging can be a great marketing tool. The Big Picture reasons why have to do with the way blogs help start conversations and foster connections with people, the way blogs are very SEO-friendly, and so forth. When I speak at SMX West next week, I’m going to share four more detailed reasons why local blogging works:
1. The Growing Interest in Local “Stuff” Online
One of the most surprising things I’ve learned since we started blogging last year is that people search for everything on the web. In my presentation next week, I’ll show a couple of our blog posts that attracted search traffic over an extended period of time thanks to people searching online for information they couldn’t get from the newspaper or TV. I’m constantly amazed at the ultra-long tail queries that bring traffic to our blogs. People are looking for local content more and more, and that’s one reason local blogging works.
2. The Decline of Traditional Media
TV stations are cutting newscasts and cutting staff. Newspapers are losing subscribers, shutting down altogether, or cutting back from daily print delivery to three days or five days a week. Traditional media didn’t cover much hyperlocal news and information when they were at full strength; they’re certainly not going to be doing it now. This opens up an even bigger opportunity for local bloggers to step in and fill that void as a provider of local news and information.
3. Local Web Sites are Often Lacking
This may be mostly a small town blogger thing, but local business, government, and organization web sites are often in pretty bad shape where SEO is concerned. In our area, it’s often pretty easy to pick a business we want to rank for, write about them on our local blogs, and be at or near the top of the search results for their business name. Likewise, you can take information that’s buried in a city web site somewhere, rewrite it and get traffic when local people search for that information.
4. Search Engines Love a Good Blog
A good blog has frequently updated content. It correctly uses categories and tags to create topical associations; i.e., a local blog’s categories might be cityname News, cityname Business, cityname Events, and so forth — that’s a vey SEO-friendly structure. A good blog links out regularly and receives inbound links regularly. These are some reasons why search engines love blogs. We use Wordpress, which is fairly SEO-friendly right out of the box. Add in a few different plugins, and you’ve got an SEO machine on your hands — in many cases, a machine that’s more powerful than a typical small/local business web site.
Conclusion
More people looking online for local information. Traditional media not providing it. Local web sites not optimized for online visibility. Good blogs are SEO machines.
Add these four ideas together and you have OPPORTUNITY. That’s why hyperlocal blogging, if it’s done right, really does work.
Your turn: What reasons did I miss? If someone asked you why local blogging works, what would you say?
Comments are wide open, as always.
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17 Responses to “Why Local Blogging Works”
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Right on, Matt.
Matt – Appreciate your post. Over the last 10 years I’ve worked with the local business owner. I’ve always felt that search engine optimization for local business was under rated. It seems to me its time has come.
As I get further into hyperlocalblogging myself, I can confirm many items in your article Matt. I’m constantly amazed at the longtail terms that people find my site with.
If you have a local news event, the quicker you can get it posted, the quicker you will receive traffic and outrank your competition. There is a huge interest in everything local.
Your observation about ranking for a business is so true. I feel very confident in my ability to rank for a local business or government body. Why? Because no one else is.
Unless you are actually doing a hyperlocal blog yourself, it may be hard to understand how it works. Another reason it works is because people spread your message by word of mouth. You work very hard to spread your message online and you will find that if you are developing a good product, people talk about it and tell their friends.
Thx for the comments, guys. Steve – that was really one of the big surprises for me, how easy it is to get traffic on business names, upcoming events, etc.
[...] Why Hyperlocal Blogging Works (tags: blogging local blogs hyperlocal) [...]
The fact that people search for everything on the web doesn’t surprise me. Yellow pages use is declining, and I’m pretty sure that’s because it’s easier to search google than to page through the yellow pages.
What’s more, universal search and smart phones will make it even more obvious that the internet is just as important on a local level as it is on a global level.
More and more people will be using their phones to find the businesses and services they used to find in the yellow pages. Yellow pages use will continue to decline and local searches will continue to rise.
People are using local searches to find stuff now, and that trend is just going to continue.
[...] fits in with a point I made during my presentation on hyperlocal blogging, and which I wrote about on Hyperlocal Blogger — namely, that people are searching for everything online, and our [...]
[...] decline of traditional media is one of my four reasons why hyperlocal blogging works. As TV stations and newspapers cut back on staff and production, the opportunity gets even bigger [...]
[...] Why Hyperlocal Blogging Works – Hyperlocalblogger. The answers are: growing interest in local “stuff” online, decline of the traditional media, local websites are often lacking, and search engines love a good blog. [...]
[...] am across an excellent article on the topic of local blogging, and I strongly recommend that you read it. It will provide a great deal of insight into how [...]
[...] Why Hyperlocal Blogging Works – Hyperlocalblogger. The answers are: growing interest in local “stuff” online, decline of the traditional media, local websites are often lacking, and search engines love a good blog. [...]
[...] Why Hyperlocal Blogging Works – Hyperlocalblogger. The answers are: growing interest in local “stuff” online, decline of the traditional media, local websites are often lacking, and search engines love a good blog. [...]
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[...] Why Local Blogging Works, I suggest that the decline of traditional media is a big opportunity for local blogs to succeed. [...]
[...] 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 [...]
Hi Matt, SEO’s love wordpress blogs because it’s been so easy to use them to attract long tail traffic. Have you (or anyone else reading this) noticed any changes in that since the Caffeine update? Thanks,
Mary
On some of our local blogs, traffic is way up in the past couple weeks, Mary — but I don’t know if it’s specifcally Caffeine-related. We have some recent posts that I knew would attract a lot of traffic (they’re about annual events), and I haven’t been disappointed.