No, I don’t mean casing in the traditional law enforcement sense. I’m referring to writing local case studies- telling your local business success stories to your audience to gain search traction wherever you offer your services. By writing about the benefits of your products and services in a local sense, you’re sending signals to Google that you serve those areas (meaning you show up more often in those areas) and you’re proving to your audience you do great work.
Start With the Case Studies You Have
Are you keeping a record of your best business experiences with clients? These stories are a great place to start when developing a plan to produce content which will raise your visibility in search. You can either develop static case study pages which are designed to be more fleshed out resources or you can write brief blog posts to sum up your local projects and get the word out.
Write about the success you’ve had locally. For example, if you’re an HVAC company who performs commercial maintenance for buildings in Houston, TX, make sure to mention exactly where you’re located. Whip up a draft using an outline like this:
- Present the problem, where it was located and the name of the business you served. You can link to your products and services here if you need to clarify.
- Walk through your proposed solution. Bonus points if you can explain why your solution is unique to your local area.
- Discuss the results of your implemented solution. Are local residents going to benefit from the changes in any way?
Make sure to add any pictures you’ve got of your project to give your page or post some visual appeal and tag these images with words describing the local area. Check out our latest case studies if you need some inspiration.
Sponsor and Participate in Local Events
Are you active in your community and charitable causes? Nothing beats great local press for building goodwill with your customers and exposing your brand to wider audiences. If you want to optimize your site for local search, taking the initiative to write about your participation in local events is a powerful way to tell search engines where you matter and where the people you serve live.
Don’t forget to ask for links back to your website from the event organizer’s page. Decide where you’d like this link to go first (I suggest linking to your ‘About Us’ page) and make sure it’s in your volunteering or sponsorship terms to get this link. Reciprocate by writing about the charitable event you participate in and link back to the event’s main page.
These are just a few of the tactics you can use to push local signals to search engines when optimizing your content. Once you’ve got your logistics in order- such as properly listing your business name, address and phone number on your website- writing about local events and business is the way to go.
Want to learn more about building your business through local marketing? Sign up to test-drive local marketing solutions through Roundpeg provided by Constant Contact:
