The Local Business Content Marketing Guide

Introduction

The Local Business Content Marketing Guide

What kind of content will help my local business achieve its marketing goals?

This is the essential question every local business owner asks as soon as they step online and discover that both their real-world customers and search engines expect them to become a publisher and a marketer. This guide is an all-in-one resource designed to help you answer this question with the right strategy for your unique local business.

While there is a lot of excellent content publication and marketing advice scattered around the internet, it can be hard to piece it all together. The goal of this guide is to gather all the best practices and current thinking into one place. Most importantly, this guide is specific to local businesses and their unique opportunities. Think of this as your book of local content ideas— a book you can open again and again for inspiration as you reach different stages of business growth.

Mature forest trees can play host to over 1,000 different species of other plants. Similarly, your business can gradually and steadily become a great host to many different types of content that demonstrate and expand the role you play in thriving local life. But before you plant your sapling, let’s take a good look at the lay of the land and understand what modern search engines and potential customers need from today’s local businesses.

Evergreen Tip

“Local business content” is any form of text, image, audio, or video content that is published by or about any business that serves the public face-to-face. Researching and creating such content is just the beginning of the process, though. “Local business content marketing” is the strategy and ongoing process of developing a comprehensive plan to ideate, design, create, share, and promote content that aligns with your brand, speaks to your target audience, and is measured against specific goals.

The present state of search

To reach the customers you plan to serve, think of all the online platforms as a box of gardening tools with your name on it. If you know how to use these implements well, you’re setting yourself up for success. Local business owners typically find that Google is the main publicity tool in their kit because it has succeeded so well in becoming part of people’s daily lives any time they need local information. According to Statista, Google’s search market share stands at 84.69% in 2023.

Whether someone is looking for “tacos near me”, or “best native plant nursery in San Francisco”, Google’s continued success depends on delivering relevant information so that searchers don’t look for their information elsewhere. And because the web is full of the opposite – low-quality content and misinformation – Google protects its reputation and revenue by gearing its algorithm and policies towards surfacing content people can trust.

As you go forward, there are five main resources with which you should be familiar to help you sow the seeds of success in Google’s landscape:

1. The Helpful Content Update
2. Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines
3. E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)
4. The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google
5. The Prohibited and Restricted Content Guidelines

1. The Helpful Content Update
This adjustment to how Google evaluates and ranks websites via its algorithms is based on a system that rewards content that humans find satisfying. Google wants to surface content that is written from a people-first perspective – not content that is published in an effort to game the platform. Websites that habitually publish high-quality content which helps people should have an easier time ranking well in this scenario, whereas those that are filled with lots of low-quality content will be made less visible by this machine-learning-based system.

If you’d like to watch a short video with further details about this sitewide quality signal, tune in here, but the main takeaway is that the reputation of your website, as a whole, for being useful to real people will impact the ranking chances of each of your individual pages. Determine that you’ll publish for people, not just for search engines, and always remember that your website’s rankings contribute to how visible you are in Google’s local search results.

What is considered a local business?

Local businesses are defined as commercial entities that serve customers in person. Local business models range from small, single-location companies to large enterprises with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of premises. Service area businesses without physical locations also qualify as local businesses, provided they carry out their work at the locations of their customers and clients.

2. Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines
Google employs 10,000+ people to evaluate website pages on the basis of the concepts in the quality rater guidelines, often called the "QRG." While the principles outlined in the QRG don’t directly impact search engine rankings, Google’s raters do the work of finding out whether algorithmic updates (like the Helpful Content Update) are actually working to deliver high-quality results. If not, Google will just keep tweaking their algorithms, which they do continuously.

Few people have time to read through Google’s documentation in its entirety, which is why we’ve summarized these takeaways that are especially relevant to local businesses. The overriding tone of the QRG is that Google wants to reward content that is useful to human beings and wants to demote content that has been published with an eye to exploiting search engines.

Sage Advice from a Local Marketing Expert

"Local businesses should focus on branding, customer experience, and developing their expertise. With generative AI coming into play, having lots of content about your topic isn't enough. Your content across all platforms needs to paint a clear picture of who you are and why you're important."

Amanda Jordan — RicketyRoo

3. E-E-A-T
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness ( E-E-A-T) make up this acronym that formed a significant update to the QRG. It can be broken down like this:

• Experience — Google wants to know if the author of a piece of content has first-hand experience with the subject. For example, if a plant nursery owner writes an article about the top 10 brands of bagged compost, can they demonstrate that you have actually used these products before writing about them?
• Expertise — Google is looking for topics to be covered by authors with a high degree of knowledge, whether that is someone with formal credentials or practical, everyday experience.
• Authoritativeness — In part, Google determines the overall authority of a writer by whether other trusted sources cite and link to their work.
• Trustworthiness — Google says this is the most important component of E-E-A-T, and your task is to ensure that whatever you publish about your business, its goods, and its services are factually accurate.

Evergreen Tip

In marketing local businesses, you may encounter misinformation about linking out from your website to other sites causing trust problems. Don’t worry about this! As long as the publications you link to add to the quality of a visitor’s experience on your site, it's a great idea to link to relevant and useful authoritative sources of further help and information.

4. The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google
This pivotal set of rules and best practices is what governs how local businesses should list themselves on Google. They are critical for comprehending the system that makes up most of the content found in Google Business Profiles, local packs, local finders, and Google Maps. These guidelines help you determine your eligibility for being listed as a local business by Google.

Evergreen Tip

If you represent your business honestly and accurately at all times, publish content on the basis of what will help your customers most with what they need, and showcase why you and your business are trusted in the community you serve, you will automatically be adhering to most guidelines and growing a business that is capable of benefiting from most online policies and opportunities.

5. The Prohibited and Restricted Content Guidelines
Finally, this separate set of guidelines outlines what you should not be publishing within Google’s local search platforms. This is important to prevent review spam and maintain trust.

With these five resources in hand, you will be able to grow your content publication and marketing strategy the right way in Google’s environment.

The present state of local consumer demand

Customers have become deeply accustomed over the past two decades to using the web to navigate their local commercial landscape. But both the COVID-19 pandemic’s acceleration of buy-online/pick-up/home delivery fulfillment solutions and the coming of age of younger patrons are creating new trends impacting local consumer behavior.

Evergreen Tip

Understanding customers’ values is more important than ever. Authentic alignment with the values of your local community has become a business priority.

In sum, you’ll build your offline business for people, and Google urges you to publish online content for people, too. It’s this customer-centric approach that will enable you to enjoy maximum returns from your investment in local business content publication and marketing. With this in mind, you’re absolutely ready to get planting!