Core Website-Based Content Assets

Every page you create is an opportunity for multiple optimizations that can assist both people and search engines in understanding your content. We’ll take a look at your options first and then move on to describing page types.

In this chapter:

• The local business publishing mindset
  
• Onsite local SEO
• Basic website pages
• Location and city landing pages
• Practitioner landing pages
• CTAs
• User-generated content
• Image content
• Video content
• Blogging, vlogging, and podcasting
• Accessibility
• Internal link architecture
• Local business schema
• What about using AI to generate my content?

Primarily, the hallmark of local publishing is that it mentions locality everywhere and often. Your content about your goods, services, and company isn’t meant for the nation or the world — it’s meant for residents of your town and service area. Your first objective is to ensure that everything you publish makes it clear that what you’re writing about is taking place in a specific locale. But there’s a second publishing priority that’s almost as important.

Any time you sit down to write a new piece of content for your community, take a moment to shift your mindset towards your audience. All day long, you speak the internal language of your business within your workplace. You use professional terminology and talk a lot about what “we” are doing as a team. But, when you write for your customers, it’s time to put the focus on them.

Compare these two samples of writing as a quick exercise in preparing to publish local business content:

Limiting industry terminology, and switching from a “we” mindset to a “you” mindset, will go far towards offering content that feels like it was written with care for the customer’s needs. We’ve all seen uninspiring TV commercials from large corporations in which their creative ideas seem to be limited to depicting frustrating or funny meetings in board rooms. These ads may resonate with company employees, but, they fail to envision the customer and their life and needs. Better marketing starts with centering the customer’s questions, hopes, concerns, language, and experiences in both what you write, and how you write.

For each page of your website, you will be writing unique and optimized:

• Title tags
• Header tags
• Meta description tags
• Alt text
• URLs
• Inbound and outbound links

You can learn more about the best practices for each of these elements in the On-Page SEO chapter of Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO, but as a local business owner and marketer, you also need to keep two very important things in mind about on-page optimization:

1. In addition to following the standard best practices outlined in organic SEO guides like The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, local businesses must always remember to incorporate locality into their on-page optimization. This means that, in addition to including keywords relating to your products, services, and a variety of consumer intents, you need to be sure your titles, tags, text, and URLs feature city names or other geographic terms. Remember that you’re not trying to sell native trees, insurance policies, or plumbing services to the whole world; you are selling to people in Chicago, Seattle, or San Francisco. Make this central to your optimization of each element of the page.

2. Elements like your title tags, header tags, and meta descriptions will appear in organic search results, but these days, Google will frequently re-write them based on whatever they think best matches the intent of the searcher. You can’t stop Google from doing this, but you may be able to limit the scope of their rewrites if you get very good at matching intent in your own writing. Use all you’ve learned about your customers and SEO best practices in this work, and don’t be overly concerned about Google’s edits. As long as customers are still coming to you, you’ll be fine.

Local business websites can grow to consist of hundreds or even thousands of pages over time when a company is large or in a particularly competitive market. But even the smallest local site is a major asset. It’s your home base on the web and the one digital space in which you fully control the customer experience. The following is a list of 7 basic page varieties every local business website should start out with to meet many customer needs:

• Home page — As in the above screenshot of Rayner Landscaping, your USP/UVP belongs here, as well as a list of all the ways to contact you and your main calls to action and links. Many first-time customers will land on your home page first from the search engine results, so this is an opportunity to make a great first impression.

• Contact page — If yours is a single-location business, everything you listed in your contact ecosystem task in Chapter One goes here, including name, address, phone number, and hours of operation at the top of the page. Add a map and written driving directions, after-hours support numbers, forms, photos, and other helpful information to be sure customers, and search engines, are totally secure about the validity of your location. If your business is multi-location, we’ll be covering location landing pages in the next section of this guide.

• About page — If budget restrictions indicate that your site needs to be modest at the start of your venture, this is where your E-E-A-T proofs of expertise and trust belong, as well as your mission/vision statement and a strong emphasis on the values you’ve learned you share with customers from your customer research phase. Later, you may want to break each of these items out into a unique page, but to start, you can make a very thorough and persuasive “About” page with the overall goal of inspiring customers to trust, like, and choose your business.

• Reviews page — As quickly as you can, begin gathering first-party reviews and testimonials from customers. Only 11% of consumers trust what businesses say about themselves over what customers say, so featuring your customers’ words is one of the smartest things you can do for your content strategy. You can also link out to your review profiles on third-party websites and embed both third-party review content and calls to action to review your business on third-party sites, if allowed by the guidelines of those platforms.

• Policies pages — Some business models may need special pages with legal language and security standards, and every local business should have at least one page covering the customer protections and guarantees that you learned about in Chapter One of this guide.

• Product/service landing pages — This is where the product/service descriptions that you wrote in Chapter One will live. For maximum discoverability and transactions, your website should have a unique landing page for every unique product and service it offers. Make each of these pages as persuasive as possible with text, images, video, audio, reviews, specs, and complete information on how customers can access the offering, including shopping cart or booking buttons, or other methodologies in your fulfillment ecosystem.

• FAQ page — If questions repeatedly come up at your place of business or you find multiple people asking the same question during your customer research phase, these can often provide ideas for future unique pages of content. To start out, you can put all such frequently asked questions on a single page so that there is a resource on your site that offers instant assistance. Remember, good content reflects the words customers use when asking about aspects of your business. Use the findings of your research to make a strong and helpful FAQ page.

Location/city landing pages are among the most complex and important of all topics within the whole subject of local business content marketing. Whether you have just two locations or thousands of them, like the Lowe’s enterprise, you’ll need to put a great deal of time and thought into how to present this information to the public. Your study of this particular area of work can make a tremendous difference for your business. This section will attempt to answer the most common questions about these assets.
 

What are the two main types of city landing pages?

Location landing pages are pages on your site that market specific physical locations of your business. For example, if you have an office in Anaheim, one in Lakewood, and another in Garden Grove, your website can have a unique page for each branch.

City landing pages are pages on your website that represent locations you serve, despite not having a physical branch there. They are also sometimes called “service area pages.” For example, if staff from your office in Anaheim also serve Lakewood and Garden Grove, you can decide to develop unique pages for each of these service communities.

How should I display these pages on my website?

You have multiple options. If you have five or fewer locations, you can easily link to their respective pages from a section of your home page and from a tab in your main menu labeled “store locations.” You may also include them in the footer area of your website.

If you have more locations, however, you are likely to need either a store locator widget, like the one shown above, or a more basic store locations page that lists the links to all of your locations in alphabetical order or via some other sensible taxonomy. It is not a best practice to put all of these links in your menu, on your home page, or in your footer. If you are choosing a store locator widget, you should make every effort to ensure that the pages it contains can be indexed by Google. If your product excludes this due to the way in which the pages are generated, create a sitemap page on your website that links directly to the pages so that they can be crawled by search engines.

How many location/city landing pages can I have?

You will have as many location pages as necessary to represent each of your physical branches. Do not attempt to build location landing pages for fictitious offices, P.O. boxes, or other non-locations, or you may risk inconveniencing real-world customers.

The answer to the number of city/service area landing pages you should create is more complex. Often, service area businesses wonder if they should create a landing page for every city in a state in hopes of gaining more business that way. The danger of going with this approach is that Google has warned that websites that publish immense quantities of low-quality city landing pages may be viewed as using a tactic dubbed “doorway pages,” which violates their guidelines. A safer approach will be to create a set of landing pages for the key towns and cities you serve near your physical address, rather than attempting to write a page for every possible locale. If you do happen to serve a very large area, you may be better off indicating that with a custom map showing your statewide or multi-state service area rather than with city landing pages.

The more pages you create, the more important the question becomes about how to differentiate each page from its peers. Remember, you are creating these pages for people, not just search engines, and you must ask yourself whether you really have something unique to say on these pages before deciding whether they truly contribute to site quality and user experience.

What content belongs on location and city landing pages?

This is definitely the million-dollar question, and happily, the answer is that you have so many types of content to choose from to make each landing page unique and helpful. Consider some or all of the following options:

1. Contact + Hours —Your complete business name, address, phone number, and hours of operation belong at the top of each location landing page. Also include everything you identified in your contact ecosystem that is available at this location, including text numbers, forms, email addresses, fax numbers, etc. If the page is a city landing page for a city within your service area where you lack a physical address, simply state “Serving X Town,” and then include the rest of your contact information.

2. USP/UVP — Even if it’s the same across all locations, highlight your proposition, remembering that many customers will enter your website on a location or city landing page instead of your home page.

3. CTA — No page on your website is complete without a call to action. Make it clear which next steps you’d most like visitors to take from your landing page. For example, do you want them to call you, book an appointment, or shop? Your CTAs should be as bold and clear as possible.

4. Images — Photos of your storefront, interior, and “shelfies” that represent popular shelves of your inventory all help the customer get a sense of the experience they’ll have at your location, as well as being able to recognize it when they travel to it.

5. Video — This can be as simple as a welcome walkthrough of your store, or can expand to include interviews of staff at the location, how-to videos, popular inventory/service videos, videos of community involvement, etc.

6. Audio — It might just be a file of your locally-known jingle, or it could be as sophisticated as podcast episodes related to the location.

7. Map — Embed a map to further help customers understand where you are.

8. Driving/walking directions — Provide detailed written directions to your place of business from major points around town. Mention major nearby destinations to help orient the customer, such as flagship stores or landmarks, as in, “We are in the Safeway Shopping Center on Pearl Street,” or, “We are one block north of the Hagiwara Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park.” Be sure to note where parking is available and whether it is free or paid. If your community enjoys good public transportation, directions about which buses, subways, or other rides will get the customer closest to your location is also helpful information.

9. Reviews — Display and request first and third-party reviews (like those on Google and TripAdvisor) related to the location. Link out to multiple review profiles for the location so that customers can see reviews on sources they trust most.

10. Fulfillment ecosystem — Include all of the ways people can transact with you that you identified in your fulfillment ecosystem documentation, including in-person shopping, digital shopping, delivery, curbside pickup, etc. You may also want to include the payment methods you accept.

11. Premise amenities — Specify everything you provide at your location that ensures an excellent experience for the customer. This could include amenities such as wheelchair accessibility, outdoor dining, late night dining, EV charging stations, pet friendliness, and features like water stations, free parking, gender-neutral restrooms, air conditioning, a children’s play area, valet service, personal shoppers, etc.

12. Guarantees — Summarize the key points of your customer service policy and link to the complete page.

13. Specials — This section of the page can list standing offers, like a 10% senior discount on Wednesdays or kids eat free on Sunday nights, but it can also be an area of the page where you add fresh content periodically to denote new sales, deals, and coupons at the location, such as a Labor Day BOGO (Buy one get one) sale.

14. Locale-specific information — If laws, regulations, statistics, seasonality, weather, or other aspects of a community where you’re located may impact your customers and your business, you can include information about them on the landing page. For example, a contractor might include information about the maximum height of fences that are allowed to be built in a community, or a restaurant might state that it has patio dining in summer (weather permitting), but not after October 1.

15. Local guidance — Some businesses cater heavily to tourists, and their location landing pages can include or link to guides of other things to do in a particular city. For example, a B&B near a national park could offer a local birding guide. Alternatively, a business that caters primarily to families with children might offer a guide to great things to do with kids around town. A pet food store might offer a map of local dog parks. A thrift shop might offer a local retro events guide.

16. Community involvement — Whether you sponsor a local children’s sports team, donate 1% of sales to a local animal shelter, or provide food for an annual community picnic, showcase your philanthropic and community endeavors in text, images, and videos. Give customers more reason to feel good about choosing your business. Additionally, and specifically for city landing pages that represent locales you serve without having a physical location there, proof of community involvement can be the best asset for proving that you have a real relationship with a particular town. For example, a doctor in Town A may have hospital privileges in Towns B and C and can write about them. Or, a florist in Town A may do floral arrangements for event venues in Towns B and C and can showcase their work there. This approach is an authentic way to find something unique to write about for each service city.

17. Proof of E-E-A-T — Cover as many aspects of experience, expertise, authority, and trust as you can. Feature interviews with your customers on why they choose you, showcase your completed projects, such as houses you’ve remodeled or gardens you’ve landscaped, mention local awards you’ve earned, such as “Voted Best Dentist in Marin County by Marin Magazine'', and display all of your relevant credentials, such as license numbers, professional associations, memberships, etc.

18. Cross-Sales — If you’re partnering with other local businesses, include that information. For example, a caterer might be partnering with local event centers. Local event centers might be partnering with formal clothing rental shops. Formal clothing rental shops might be partnering with wedding cake bakers. Work with your peers to send business to one another from your landing pages.

19. Links — Link from your landing page to other relevant areas of the site, such as shopping carts, blogs, booking calendars, mission statements, podcasts, etc.

20. Page navigation — If you end up using lots of the recommended elements in this list of options, your location landing page or city landing page could be quite long, so you may want to provide a secondary menu of jump links at the top of the page so that visitors can skip to the section they are most interested in.

As you can see, there is no shortage of options for making each of your location or city landing pages an extraordinary reference for both customers and search engines! 

If your local business is like West Portal Family Dentistry, with multiple public-facing practitioners who can be contacted directly by clients, you have the option of creating a unique page on your site for each partner. For example, a law firm with five attorneys could have five practitioner landing pages, and a chiropractic office with three partners could have three landing pages. These are most frequently the pages the practice will link to when creating unique local business listings for multiple practitioners, and here are 7 excellent components each partner should have on their respective page:

• Direct contact information
• Photos of the practitioner and their workspace
• Proofs of expertise and trust (accreditations, license numbers, degrees, etc.)
• Proofs of experience (customer reviews of the practitioner)
• Biographical information
• A unique USP/UVP for the practitioner
• A clear call to action (book, call, fill out a form, etc.)

The practice needs to decide the degree of control each practitioner will be given over customizing their page with text, video, and image content, and how the work of keeping these pages accurate and updated will be delegated so that the overall brand is protected. When done well, these pages can generate a tremendous amount of business for the organization, and a creative approach can make a particular practice really stand out in the local landscape.

Sometimes, customers know exactly what they want to do on your website, but often, they need a little guidance to take important actions, and you have the opportunity to prompt them to explore the actions you most want them to take. These calls to action (CTAs) can take the form of buttons, links, spoken cues in audio and video media, tooltip popups, walkthrough wizards, and more. No page is complete without a call to action, and any time such actions include words, they become part of your content publication and marketing strategy. Make use of the following tips:

• Try to include at least one CTA high enough on your page that customers can see it without having to scroll (i.e. above the fold). You can have more than one CTA per page and place them at the beginning, middle, and/or end of a page. Just avoid being intrusive with too many CTAs that could feel like an interruption to what the customer is doing, and go easy on popups.

• Keep CTA text short and actionable, such as “Take This Course,” “Add to Cart,” or “Download for Free.”

• Experiment with whether first or second-person CTAs work best for your audience. Do you get more clicks when a button reads “Reserve My Seat” or “Reserve Your Seat”?

• Button colors should contrast with the rest of the page and have some white space around them for maximum visibility.

• CTAs should always be honest and guide visitors to the action they expect.

• CTAs should be tested periodically to see if edits can improve performance.

Because 89% of people trust what customers say about brands over what brands say about themselves, effective local business content marketing strategies center customers’ stories. We’ve already covered how your website should feature reviews directly from customers, as well as embedded third-party reviews, but this is not your only option for boosting the persuasion factor with user-generated content (UGC).

Look at the above example of how The Vermont Country Store has embedded a snippet of UGC from Diane in Virginia right within the image of a product being sold. It’s so effective, seeing this praise at the same time as seeing the product. Excerpts from reviews and testimonials can be used like this and also featured in your Google Business Profile updates (formerly called “posts”) and in images on your listings.

Another option is to interview, film, or record your happiest customers to tell the story of work you’ve completed for them or anecdotes of why they are loyal to your brand. Long videos can go on your site and YouTube channel. Shorter videos are great for uploading to your Google Business Profile and social media profiles.

Another bright idea is to hold a contest in which customers submit stories, art, recipes, slogans, photos, poems, jokes, or other original media related to your locale or industry, which can then be showcased on your website and social media profiles to build a sense of vibrant community, and even grow the number of keyword phrases your rank for.

Finally, don’t overlook the power of turning polls and surveys of your customers into original UGC-based content on your website. Pick a topic that will pique the curiosity of your local audience and that relates to your business, and then publicize your findings on your website and social profiles. In all of its forms, UGC is an amazing tool for proving that yours is a customer-centric business.

For local businesses, image marketing may be one of the areas of overall content marketing with the greatest growth potential. It’s an area in which Google has made some of the biggest strides and most serious investments over the past decade. They can now understand so much about images, including entities within them, color patterns, logos, clothing styles, and even prohibited content.

If you are in a competitive market and similar businesses in your town or city haven’t yet embraced the power of local business images, we recommend that you listen to this Duct Tape Marketing podcast interview of local search expert Mike Blumenthal and pay particular attention to these seven points:

• Images can occupy up to 36% of mobile screen space in Google’s results.

• A Google survey found that 90% of people are more likely to purchase from businesses that have photos included in their organic or local results.

• Images impact Google rankings, and it’s important to research what images Google is currently ranking for your desired keyword phrases so that you can give them what they want.

• Take original images and avoid stock photography; one study by Tebra’s PatientPop demonstrated a 15% increase in appointment bookings for their medical clients when they made the switch from generic to custom imagery. Another study found that, in the year following a professional photo shoot for a legal firm, website visits increased by 119%, and calls to the business increased by 117%.

• Google will change which Google Business Profile images are shown to the searcher based on the exact language of their search. For example, the same listing will highlight “wedding rings” if the searcher specifies that in their search but will switch to showing “necklaces” if that is their query. Google will also surface “shelfies” (images of a shelf or display of inventory) if it believes the searcher wants a representative photo of a business’ wider stock.

• It’s a best practice to slowly drip high-quality product images to your Google Business Profile over time, as this method has been shown to have the highest impact on both visibility and increased conversions ( actions customers are taking via your local business listing).

• Images belong everywhere across your digital assets.

Now that you’ve taken in some compelling points about image publication and marketing let’s answer some of the most common local business FAQs surrounding them:

1. Where should I be publishing and marketing images for my local business?

You have so many opportunities, including all of the following:

• Every aspect of your business, including its premises, staff, vehicles, amenities, completed projects, individual goods and services, inventory shelfies, and proofs of community involvement, should be photographed for your website. If on a budget, take the best photos your mobile phone can produce, but consider investing in a professional photo shoot at different points in the growth of your business, and more often if seasonality has a significant impact on your company’s operations, appearance, and customers.

• Product and service photos should be uploaded to the “Products” tab of your Google Business Profile via the New Merchant Experience interface you’ll see when you are logged into your Google account and search for your business by name. All other photos can be uploaded to the “Add Photos” tab. Additionally, use photos to embellish the micro-blog posts called Google Updates using the “Add Update” tab. Follow Google’s guidelines on formatting and sizing your images.

• Regularly add photos to the social media accounts your customers use most to connect with your business. Use this frequently updated guide of correct social media image sizes from Sprout Social to ensure your photos are formatted correctly on popular platforms. Some businesses are more image-friendly than others and some are even highly dependent on the visual aspects of their business. The more images matter to your customers, the more social image sharing can benefit your business.

• Wherever possible, include photos in your paid advertising.

2. Will I be penalized for using manufacturers’ photos of my inventory?

No, you will not be penalized in any way if you use the images manufacturers permit you to, and in many cases, these photos may be all you need to sell your inventory in some industries. That being said, you should consider this a least-effort approach, and if you need to stand out in a competitive market, you’ll want to go the extra mile by taking multiple quality photos of your inventory to help customers fully appreciate aspects like size, color, texture, and uses. How much you invest in photography should be dictated by how important it is for you to be chosen over your competitors.

3. I sell services, not physical products; what should I be photographing?

The answer to this is easiest in industries that revolve around visible work. For example, house painters, fence builders, home remodelers, landscapers, dog walkers, caterers, and cleaning services can all photograph their work in action, including projects underway and before-and-after images.

Where this becomes more challenging is in fields like health, law, or accountancy, where you can’t typically photograph yourself in action. In such cases, you may be best off hiring a professional photographer who can bring creative ideas to showcase the positive emotions and benefits clients experience by working with you. And, of course, photos of your premises and all of their amenities as well as your staff, are as relevant for you as for any other business type and signal that your company is legitimate, trustworthy, and local. Photos highlighting your community involvement can also greatly enliven your presentation and appeal. Very importantly, don’t forget to look at what Google is currently surfacing for your desired search phrases. This can give you big clues as to what they want based on what they believe searchers want.

4. Should I worry about or welcome UGC images?

Overall, user-generated content (UGC) in the form of images is a tremendous gift to local businesses. If customers love aspects of your business so much that they want to photograph them, they become a free sales and marketing force for your brand. The rise of the selfie has been an interesting moment in marketing history, with some local brands doing all they can to offer unique photo ops on their premises that earn social shares.

If you can inspire customers to upload photos to your website and local business profiles, it’s a great move towards winning on the “experience” factor of E-E-A-T, and one recent study proved that if you can encourage patrons to include photos in their Google Business Profile reviews, those reviews will enjoy higher visibility on your listing for a longer time.

However, UGC images are an area you need to monitor because they can become detractors from your success in any of the following scenarios:

• If you haven’t been active in uploading photos to your Google Business Profile and other listings, and customers are uploading poor-quality photos, they are telling the full visual story of your business, making your company look unprofessional. The best protection against this is to be sure you are uploading lots of fantastic images that counterbalance any less-than-perfect UGC.

• If some aspect of your business (such as cleanliness) lacks excellence and a customer photographs it, your listings can become a source of embarrassment and result in lost reputation and revenue. While you can flag photos that violate Google’s guidelines in hopes of removal, the best protection against negative customer photos is continuous quality control on your premises so that customers aren’t distressed.

• Unfortunately, underhanded competitors may resort to image spam, uploading images to your listings in hopes of damaging your reputation. Because of this scenario, you need to either manually check your listings often to examine third-party photo uploads or choose the much easier path of subscribing to software like Moz Local, which alerts you any time a new image is uploaded as well as any time you receive a new review. If an image violates Google’s Restricted and Prohibited Content Guidelines, you can make a strong case for its removal. If the image is causing serious problems, you may even need to resort to seeking legal advice. If, however, you are unable to achieve removal of the spam, you may need to go back to the first tactic mentioned of adding lots of great photos to your listings to diminish the impact of one or two negative ones.

5. What is the difference between visual search and image search?

If you’ve heard both of these terms lately and wondered if they are the same thing, it’s important to understand the distinction.

Image search happens when people use words to search for an image, and visual search happens when people use images to search for an image. The former has been around for many years and is one of Google’s most popular offerings. You can click on the “images” tab in search results to access this media and study the types of photos Google feels are most relevant to any keyword phrase.

In visual search, it’s Google’s Vision API that is making a big name for itself. You can test it out by dragging one of your company’s photos over to this page and you’ll be given information about what Google’s AI can “see” in your image, as in the example of a photo of an ash tree:

Checking to see how Google’s AI understands your most important images is a good habit to get into, and early studies have shown that very small differences in local business photos can completely change Google’s understanding of them, as in this much-cited example of whether Google can identify a dentist in this photo. If you’re starting to recognize that images could be a major competitive difference-maker for your business, we highly recommend checking out Aircam.ai’s multiple real-world studies on how conversions can be increased with image marketing.

While there isn’t anything really new you need to do differently to meet the rising tide of visual search (other than constantly improving the quality, clarity, and breadth of your photos), it’s important to know that some platforms and businesses are now allowing customers to search by uploading photos instead of by typing words. You can see this in action on a site like Ikea’s.

For example, when I upload a photo of a color-coordinated rainbow bookcase I like, Ikea shows me inventory it thinks I would like to purchase.

This sophisticated technology is not likely to be the norm for most small-to-medium local business websites, but it’s always important to understand new trends in searches, and visual search indicates that photography is becoming more important than ever for your business.

There’s a good reason YouTube is considered the second most popular search engine in the world, after Google (which owns YouTube). It serves more than 2 billion logged-in searchers per month, plays over 1 billion hours of video every day, and Google can now parse video content just as it can image content. Meanwhile, Instagram claims that 91% of respondents to its survey watch at least one video on their platform per week, Facebook stated in 2021 that its users now spend nearly 50% of their time on the platform watching videos, and at last count, TikTok had captured 150 million monthly US viewers.

With statistics like these, it’s plain to see why nearly all local businesses should incorporate at least some video content into their marketing strategy. Basic best practices include:

• Embedding videos on key pages of your website, including home page, product/service landing pages, city/location landing pages, and about pages
• Providing text transcripts of videos
• Providing closed-captioning (a.k.a. subtitles) on videos for accessibility purposes
• Uploading all your videos to your brand’s YouTube account
• Uploading some short videos (30 seconds or less) to your Google Business Profiles under the “Add Photos” tab of the New Merchant Experience
• Uploading videos to whichever social platforms your customers use most, be that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X(formerly Twitter), etc.

Let’s answer four local business FAQs about video marketing:

1. Do I need to hire a professional videographer?

Social media influencers are making millions of dollars with little more equipment than the video capabilities of their phones, and you can certainly film plenty of good and useful videos with modern mobile devices. How professional your videos need to look will likely be dictated by your industry and community. It’s unlikely that anyone will be put off by a coffee shop or independent bookseller posting in-house video testimonials from its loyal customers, but a community credit union or law firm might benefit from a more professional video presentation. 
 

2. What should I be filming for my local business?

You have multiple options, and a creative approach no one else in your local market has taken could set you apart. Consider filming some or all of the following:

• Your exterior and interior premises
• Walk-throughs of your most important products and services, including how-tos and instructional content
• FAQs
• Reviews and testimonials from customers
• Staff interviews
• Creative videos about your town and community
• Videos of different lengths, such as 30-second videos for social sharing but longer-form content for topics requiring more depth
• Vlogs and video podcasts

If you need some inspiration to get started, watch:

• Green Building Supply’s video about the non-toxic caulk they sell at their shop in Fairfield, Iowa
• Yale Appliances of Boston’s product video explaining the features of different dishwashers
• An office walkthrough of Galt Dermatology in Fort Lauderdale
• A long-form how-to video about quilting from Missouri Star Quilt Shop of Hamilton, Missouri
• A customer review/testimonial video for a pet supply franchise
• Oregon Community Credit Union’s community involvement video
• A Hoboken popup shop owner’s vlog episode
• A viral TikTok video from a brick-and-mortar Ontario candy store that tied pop culture to treats
• An Instagram reel from a dog walker on the FAQs she experiences while accompanying her pet clients in NYC
• A professionally made short film for Type Books in Toronto

3. How do I optimize video content?

If video becomes key to your content marketing strategy, you will need to put in the time to study the quirks and qualities of each platform to understand how content rises to the top of its proprietary ranking system. Most platforms have a system based, in part, on the number of views, shares, and or subscribers videos earn, and each platform has different fields you can fill out when uploading your content.

For example, when uploading a video to YouTube, you’ll be using the findings of your keyword research to optimize its:

• Video file name
• Video title
• Description
• Transcript
• Tags

For more information on video optimization and marketing, read:

• Using Keywords in YouTube Videos: How to Get More Views
• Instagram Marketing: Six Ways to Update Your Strategy
• How to Make an Instagram Reel in 4 Easy Steps
• TikTok Marketing: The Complete Guide for Brands in 2023

4. Is live video shopping right for my local business?

Livestreamed e-commerce content has become an economic phenomenon in China, and here in the US, large brands like Walmart are experimenting with this technology on which hosts sell inventory in real-time to customers via video. While big brands obviously have the budgets to invest in very sophisticated live-streamed shopping events, the emergence of social media options like Instagram Live and Facebook Live may have made it seem like this technology was going to become a small business norm. However, that was before Meta shut down both products and TikTok Shop appears to be struggling to make a place for itself in Western markets.

If your local brand has built a substantial social following, you should keep an eye on the growth of live-streamed e-commerce, but for now, most small-to-medium local businesses will be better off investing in evergreen product videos that showcase inventory 24/7.

5. Will my local business need to invest in AR?

Another trend that’s been touted in some quarters as the “next big thing” is augmented reality (AR) — a technology that overlays text, graphics, audio, and other enhancements on real-world objects. Time Magazine says that AR is the future of digital shopping, but it should be noted that Google went all in on its Google Glass project, which has now been discontinued.

Large brands like Macy’s continue to experiment with AR and VR to help people virtually play with interior design, but the past decade has seen many such experiments come and go. Unless your business model lends itself in some special way to this technology and has a considerable budget for experiments, this is just one more trend to keep an eye on while you invest in more time-tested forms of customer service and marketing.

Blogging, vlogging, and podcasting can be brilliant choices for differentiating your local business in a competitive market where your peers aren’t making the effort. But these forms of content marketing aren’t right for every company. Let’s see if one or more of these popular formats could work for your brand, and look at some real-world examples for inspiration.

Blogging

A blog is a regularly updated portion of your website that enables you to publish and market coverage of topics in more depth than you can with a single page of your main website content. Blogs like the one pictured here from Gather & Grow can contain a variety of media, including text, images, and video, and can have interactive features, such as allowing the public to comment on your posts. If your business has built out all its basic website pages and still has a lot more to say, you may be considering adding a blog to the mix. This might be a good option for you if:

• You have a clear goal for the blog, such as more community engagement, increased traffic to your site, broader rankings for more keyword phrases related to your businesses, providing one or more signals of E-E-A-T, etc.

• Your market and customer research indicates that some aspect of your business is one that either your local community or your larger industry is passionate enough about to inspire them to read your blog.

• You or someone on your team is good at writing engaging content.

• You or someone on your team has the time to keep your blog regularly updated, doing the research, writing, and marketing of each post so that your blog signals a vital presence instead of accidentally making your business look neglected.

• The competitive level of your market indicates that you need to make an effort beyond simply publishing foundational website pages and that you feel you can make a better investment in blogging than anyone else near you is currently doing

If you answered “no” to all or most of these scenarios, then a blog likely isn’t the right match for your business and you may be better off sticking to shorter form content marketing on your social media profiles. If you answered yes to all or most of these scenarios, check out these examples of local business blogs for inspiration:

• Gather & Grow is a blog by a master gardener that showcases their landscaping work and promotes their in-person and online classes and workshops

• Cinnamon Snail is one of the most popular food trucks in the US, and uses its comment-enabled blog to share recipes for some of its popular plant-based dishes

• Consider the Wldflwers is a jeweler in Nashville that uses its blog to dive deeply into the history and design of heirloom jewelry

• Apartment Therapy started out as a way for a local interior designer to share advice with their clients, but ended up becoming a multi-million-dollar publication

• Anthropologie’s blog about fashion and lifestyle support sales at its 200+ retail locations

According to Hubspot, businesses that blog earn 55% more visitors than those that don’t, and blogs typically work in tandem with your social media accounts, giving you plenty to share and link to. Blogging platforms that are currently enjoying popularity include WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and Drupal. In most cases, you’ll build the blog into your own website, but in some cases, business owners may choose to blog on third-party platforms like Medium in hopes of gaining a wider audience.

Blogs can become a strong asset for some local businesses, but if you’ve decided they’re not a good fit for your goals, time, talents, or community, try researching whether there are established bloggers in your area or industry who would either accept a guest contribution from you, or interview or feature your business. Piggybacking on popular platforms is a smart way for local business owners to take some part in the blogging phenomenon without making the considerable investment in maintaining a blog of their own.

Vlogging

If all or most of the contents of a blog are video-based instead of text-based, it’s known as a vlog. All of the questions you asked yourself in the blogging section above, pertain to this scenario in determining whether a vlog could be right for your local business, plus these additional factors:

• You or someone on your team is comfortable in front of a camera and makes an engaging, well-spoken host

• There is a strong visual element to your business, such as products or services that need to be seen to be appreciated

• There is a strong how-to element of your business, such as products or services that need to be demonstrated to be chosen by customers

• There is enough material for you to keep vlogging about for many years

Here are some real-life examples of vlogs to help you better understand whether this form of marketing could be a good fit for your business:

• Joe Everest is a third-generation fence builder whose blog demonstrates his expertise and supports sales at Ozark Fence Company in Missouri

• Sew Yeah began its vlog before it opened the doors of its Las Vegas quilt shop and continues to publish videos with a DIY sewing theme

• Sunny Campers of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, uses Instagram to vlog about its renovations of vintage Airstreams

• Lily’s Loaf vlogs about her London micro-bakery and has earned more than 10,000 YouTube subscribers and lots of orders for her bread

YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are all popular choices for vlogging, and you can make videos on the same topic, but of different lengths for a variety of platforms. These videos can then be embedded on your website to greatly diversify the types of content you’re offering to your visitors.

Podcasting

The definition of a podcast is a bit loose because it can either be solely audio or be both audio, like this one from REI, and video (like a vlog). Podcasts tend to be regularly scheduled media, so that subscribers know when to tune in, but they are also then typically recorded so that fans can listen later, in their own time. Some podcasts are aired live and feature interactive engagements with an audience, like a call-in radio show, but others have no interactivity. It’s typical for podcasts to be published across multiple platforms, including the business’ own website, plus popular sites like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

Before starting a podcast, ask yourself the same questions that were featured in the Blogging and Vlogging sections, above, plus these additional queries:

• Can you realistically commit to a regular recording and publishing schedule and rarely or never miss a date?

• Is there enough of a local or industry audience interest in your theme to help you move up in the rankings of podcast platforms by earning a large number of listeners and followers?

• Can you invest in professional recording equipment so that your podcast represents your business well?

• Do you have a network of associates who would be willing to appear as guests on your podcast?

• Are you more comfortable with audio-only, or would video increase the appeal of your podcast?

If running your own podcast isn’t right for your business, investigate whether there are established local or industry podcasters who would invite you on as a guest to help get the word out about your brand. If, however, you think you may have the makings of a good podcast, check out these four examples for further inspiration:

• REI’s podcast covers multiple aspects of outdoor living and environmental concerns as part of its dynamic presentation of its retail stores.

• It might seem like a local realty or insurance professional wouldn’t have enough to say to launch a whole podcast, but when this duo teamed up to create the Buffalo Community Podcast about happenings in their part of Minnesota, it became a hub for their town, and has earned them wider press.

• Another duo, this time hairstylists from New York, offers the DTH Podcast to showcase their beauty industry expertise and earn bookings.

• The UK’s Littleton Food Co-op podcast covers food and drink, sustainable shopping, and gift-giving to give listeners many reasons to shop at their grocery store.

Podcasts require a serious investment of time and are typically only a good choice for local businesses with strong storytelling opportunities, but if successful, they can make a website very unique and special and provide excellent media for sharing on your social profiles.

As you publish each component of your local business website, adherence to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) helps ensure that US-based companies are compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act, and are not discriminating against internet users with different abilities. In her memorable MozCon presentation, Miracle Inametti Archibong explained why every business website needs to implement good accessibility standards on the basis of these facts:

• 80% of what we learn is done through a visual medium
• 1 in 8 Americans have a disability, and 12 million internet users have a visual disability
• People with vision loss consistently report having advanced internet proficiency
• Working-age people with disabilities cumulatively possess $490 billion in after-tax, disposable income
• 83% of people with accessibility needs shop on sites with accessibility standards, even if prices are higher
• 97.4% of homepages have accessibility errors
• Missing alt text accounts for 61% of all home page accessibility errors
• Compliance with the ADA is a legal requirement in the US; in 2021, there were 10 lawsuits per day in the US related to accessibility issues alone

Local business owners may best envision website accessibility as a form of customer service that helps you serve as many customers as possible. Access the education you need to serve the public via your website in these helpful tutorials:

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: What They Are and Why SEOs Should Care
• An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO (Series Part I and Series Part II)
• Alt Text — an illustrated guide
• The State of Digital Accessibility: Three Key Challenges
• The ROI of Digital Accessibility
• The ROI of Accessibility in SEO

Local business content publication and marketing is definitely a big responsibility, and it’s a major help that there are so many resources available to you, your website designers, and developers to ensure that you are welcoming and including as many people in your community as possible every time you build something new on your site.

If you’ve been doing any reading about optimizing your local business website, you’ll already have encountered the idea that earning links from relevant third-party sites can help you achieve your organic ranking goals. These types of links are known as inbound links and local businesses in competitive markets will often see the necessity of earning these as a top goal of their strategy. We'll dive more deeply into this in Chapter Three of this guide.

Right now, though, let’s look at the type of links you can fully control, and which can also have very positive impacts on your search engine rankings. Internal links are simply links from any part of your own website to any other part of your website. The above screenshot shows a page of the Xerces Society that is linking to a variety of its internal content on the topic of regional native plants.You’ll already be familiar with the idea that the main navigation menu on your website is made up of links to the pages on your site that you most want customers to discover, like this:

The navigation menu to the right of this site’s logo is all made up of internal links to the pages this non-profit organization feels are most important for visitors to see first. When clicked on, each of those headings also drops down to feature further internal links. But there are also more internal links on this page. The red and orange linked buttons at the top of the header are clearly highly-featured functions of this site, as is the white “sign the pledge” button.

And, as we move deeper into this site’s pages, we see that they are practicing good internal linking within the text content of their site. In the example below, the link in blue points to a different article the organization has published about protecting bumblebees. Both text and images can serve as opportunities to link from your own assets to your own assets.

Most modern website builder software and content management systems (CMS) will have no-code or low-code functions that let you link wherever you want to with the click of a button instead of having to write code, but here is an example of what link code looks like, so you know how to recognize it.

In the above fictitious example, some anchor text on a website reading “Guide to the Best Native Trees for Northern California” is being linked to CANativeTrees.com’s page with the optimized URL “norcal-native-tree-guide,” and with the link title attribute “Best native trees for Northern California.”

Your website management system should enable you to input the URL you want to link to, the title attribute you want to include as a signal of what the page you are linking to is about, and the anchor text you want to be visible on the page so visitors can click on it.
 

Internal links not only enable you to guide website visitors along the paths you most want them to take on your website, but they also enable search engines like Google to understand the architecture of your website. The special beauty of internal linking is that every time you link from Page A to Page B of your website, you are spreading a little of Page A’s ranking power to Page B. The more frequently you’ve linked internally to a particular page on your website, the more you are telling search engines that this is a page that really matters.

In action, let’s return to our example of a California native tree nursery. Let’s say they have three nursery locations across the large state of California. Let’s imagine that their website is quite established and has 250 total pages on it, but the main goal of their present initiative is to earn higher rankings and more traffic to three new guides they have built on planting the best native trees in Northern, Central, and Southern California. They’ve worked hard on these guides, and they’ve been written to convert customers who are researching good native trees for their region into customers who are buying native trees from the nursery to plant in their gardens.

A key step of the content marketing of these pieces is to create an architecture of internal links that signals to both visitors and search engine bots that are crawling the site that these three guides are really important assets that deserve to be read and ranked well. Where on the website could the nursery include links to bring more attention to these guides? Consider some or all of the following:

• The website home page
• The main navigation menu of the site
• Breadcrumb navigation
• Sub-menu navigation for particular sections of your site
• The website footer area
• The location landing page for each of the three locations
• Other basic pages like the about page and the mission/vision page
• Ongoing blog posts where the topic naturally comes up
• The transcripts of videos
• Relevant images across the site
• The website’s sitemap

You can get an excellent technical overview on best practices for internal linking here, and for the last item on our list, you can create a page on your website (called an HTML sitemap) that is made up entirely of links to all or most of your website’s pages and exists solely to help visitors find and search engines crawl and index more of your website’s content. If your site becomes large, you can also learn to create an XML sitemap with this tutorial.

Schema markup is code that can be added to your website’s HTML that turns elements of your site into a language that search engines can more easily understand. It originated in a collaboration between major search engines which resulted in the markup standardization found at Schema.org. As Google explains it:

"Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on."

Schema is optional code. You aren’t required to implement it, but putting in the work can help your content be featured in rich results like the recipe results pictured above, with their markup for ratings, cooking time, and ingredients. Depending on your industry, there could be multiple kinds of rich results and multiple types of schema you could implement to help Google better understand your content. If you decide to delve deeply into these opportunities, read Google’s complete documentation here and visit Schema.org’s FAQ page for answers to common questions. For most local businesses, there are two major types of schema to consider:

1. Local Business Schema

This markup helps you categorize and formalize information about your business, like its name, location information, and contact information. You can use a local business schema generator like this one and manually add the code to the HTML of your website. Happily, though, these days, many modern website-building software offerings have low-code plugins or fields for adding local business schema to your site without having to read or write code. For example, Wix makes it easy for customers to add local business schema to their home pages.

One benefit of taking the trouble to create good markup is that it can help larger local brands better control the information and links Google shows in branded knowledge panels like this one:

It’s not uncommon for branded knowledge panels to contain misinformation about companies, and by taking control of local business schema, you are able to send strong signals to Google about the accurate info and appropriate links you would ideally want to appear in displays like these. No guarantees, but a good motive for implementing schema, is if searches for your brand generate brand knowledge panels.

2. Product Schema

Until 2019, there was a brief period in which local businesses were eagerly adding review schema to their sites because it resulted in the display of stars within their organic results, which studies indicated improved click-through rates. However, Google announced that it would be discontinuing this eye-catching display in 2019… or so it seemed. As the above screenshot (courtesy of Mike Blumenthal of Near Media) clearly shows, some businesses are still enjoying the inclusion of review stars as a result of implementing review schema. Mike Blumenthal mentions that Google appears to have exempted some larger businesses from their 2019 policy update, in which case, large local enterprises may still want to investigate review schema.

But for most small local businesses, the common workaround for wanting to “see stars” in their organic results is to use product review schema on their product pages, which is still widely allowed and can result in SERPs like this:

Other schema you might want to consider could include person, organization, reviewed by, citation, or author Schema while working to improve your E-E-A-T signals. You might use it to markup some FAQs. And you should always validate your schema to be sure it’s rendering properly.

Single-location local businesses with non-complex structures in non-competitive markets may find it unnecessary to invest much time in schema development and maintenance. It’s controversial to call schema an organic ranking factor, but Google has published its own studies showing how implementation has resulted in increased traffic and time spent on pages. If your business is multi-location or multi-practitioner, has a complex structure, or serves in competitive markets, a modest investment in schema implementation could yield welcome rewards for your company.

Local business owners are asking if they should be using Artificial Intelligence like Google’s Bard, the New Bing, or ChatGPT to generate content. With these applications, you can enter a few words as a question or command and get back large volumes of text. Some publishers enjoy experimenting with these tools for:

• Content and headline inspiration
• Supplemental keyword research
• Supplemental FAQ inspiration
• Review response inspiration
• Generating schema code
• To assess whether images are understood by search engines

If writing is not a great in-house strength at your business, AI can spark some ideas for you. However, there is strong sentiment in the local business marketing community that AI cannot and should not replace the expertise that is a USP/UVP of your company. And as emphasized elsewhere in this guide, always remember that AI makes lots of errors and must be carefully fact-checked because of its quality of generating nonsensical information rather than facts.

Some SEO experts predict that the web will soon be awash with AI-generated content instead of content written by humans. On the one hand, this could make it harder for local businesses to be seen, but on the other hand, it’s an opportunity for your company to stand out with original, expert content published both on and off your website.

Case studies, local surveys and polls, in-depth articles and interviews, first-hand experiential content, and pieces that convey the true local character of your community are areas in which robots (and competitors relying on them) can’t easily compete. We’ll continue to talk about AI in other sections of this guide, but for now, consider that if competitors make a habit of shortcuts and the least effort, you have an opportunity to differentiate your business in terms of authenticity and care for the experiences your customers have with your content.

Congratulations — you’ve now put in the work of developing your core on-site content assets. Your trunk is growing strong, and you’re ready to root down and branch out with the off-site marketing tactics that will bring maximum attention to your local business. Move forward to Chapter Three!

Next up: Offsite Content Assets

Written by Miriam Ellis and the Moz staff.