All Entries Tagged With: "local blogging"

Should You Start A Local Blog?

Local blogging is gaining in popularity. Should you start one?

Let me tell you why you might want a local blog, and it doesn’t matter what kind of business you are:

• People love doing business with other people near where they live.
• A local blog can be another way of gaining traffic to your main website or blog.
• You can use a local blog to geotarget key terms that are important to your business.
• One or more local blogs can establish you as an expert in your niche in a particular geographical area.
• Local blogs can be used to reach people you would not ordinarily reach.
• It is relatively easy to build a community around a niche local blog

Local blogging is gaining in popularity. No matter what niche you are in, a local blog can make you the local expert in that niche. You have to be careful that your niche isn’t too narrow for your local area. But you can have a local blog as well as a global blog targeting the same niche and gain traction as the local expert in your niche. That leverage will translate much easier into the global expert that you want to be.

Hyperlocal Blogging And Realistic Expectations

I love what Matt McGee has to say on his hyperlocal blog.

I’m a big believer that blogs are about as powerful an SEO tool as you’ll find right now, so our plan began with a blog.

We agree. That’s why we always recommend a blog to our clients who want to speed up their search engine rankings. Matt McGee is using a hyperlocal blog to help his wife in her real estate business. They’ve been doing it since December 2006. We’ve been doing it since April of that year and have had great success in helping real estate agents reach local home buyers and sellers. Local blogging is here to stay and business who want to reach a wider audience in a small geographical area will need to start a blog. This will be the way to communicate with potential customers in the next 3-5 years.

Matt also says this about obtaining business from his wife’s blogs:

blogging has led directly to at least three clients and closings that we know of, and indirectly to several others. Those commissions mean the blog is a success in the only metric that counts: Revenue created.

That’s a great point. You can get thousands of links and hundreds of top rankings for your keywords, but if you aren’t making money from your efforts then something is amiss. If you aren’t cranking out the revenue, however, it may not be your blog’s fault. We use blogging as a traffic driving tool. SEO, yes, but we also expect to drive targeted traffic to our clients’ blogs and we’ve done that well since the summer of 2006. We lost one real estate client who said that after one month of blogging she had more traffic to her static website than she’d ever had before. But she wasn’t closing any sales. That clearly is an issue with your static website or the agent’s own ability to close sales. The blog is doing its job.

On one final note, here’s Matt again:

There are no shortcuts when it comes to SEO success. Commitment and patience are foundational elements of longterm online success, and we’d have to slog through the tough work like everyone else.

There’s no need to be impatient. Your blog will work for you, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Learn what is important and measure the important stuff. If inbound links are important then build inbound links. If traffic is important than pay attention to your traffic numbers. Set specific goals for your blog and manage your blog toward those goals.