Get Your Business Seen Locally By Writing Blogs

One of the most important things when running a business that relies on local customers is to be able to be seen locally online when people are looking for businesses like yours. Writing blogs can be a great way to improve your local visibility and help you stand out on local searches on search engines such as Google.

A lot of people believe that their website is going to automatically allow people to find them, and if the website features their business name that will allow anyone who is looking specifically for their company to find them.

So for example, if someone typed in “Fantasoft digital marketing” they could find the company I run myself. This is not good enough to allow people to find my company by itself. They would need to have knowledge that the company exists, the name of the company and possibly the name of the town I am based in in order to find my business.

I have made more money through writing blogs for my website and having people find me and my services than I have made through Google and Facebook adverts, word of mouth and working as an affiliate for fellow digital marketers and IT companies.

So what exactly is a blog?

This article you are reading is a blog. It was written with the specific intent of helping other people make money for their business using blogging. The goal of the blog is to inform and assist people, and help them to understand how helpful writing blogs can be for their company.

So what makes a good blog?

A good blog for a local company will feature around 750 words. A lot of digital marketers will tell you that you can make do with 300-500, but if you really want to stand out on local search results, it’s helpful to have a lot more information. Most of my blogs are over 1000 words, and I always recommend going for more rather than less, as an informative blog is much more valuable than a few pointless sentences.

Neil Patel who is one of the greatest SEO experts of our time has blogs that are absolutely titanic with thousands of words, however to show locally in web searches, 750 words plus has proven to be very successful.

Your blog will need to have local information in it, though only in passing. I always like to add localising information at the end of the blog.

How long does it take to write a blog, and how many should I write?

A normal person writes approximately 50-80 words per minute. That means that at 50 words per minute, you can write 750 words in a 15 minute interval if you know what you are talking about, which you will do, as you will understand your business completely. If you need to do some research double this number. 

Let’s say we have got a blog that needed a little research and it has taken 30 minutes to write. This is the same amount of time as you might spend watching a television program, when I’m being very conservative with numbers.

If you wanted to write just 1 blog a week, that is 30/10080 minutes. Over a year that would be 48 blogs on your site if you took one month off for a holiday, and at 750 words, that would be 36,000 words on your website, which is half a novel worth of information. 

If you wrote 1 blog a day you would have a huge amount of information on your website.

But how does this help me? 

Let’s say you run a restaurant, (I mainly work with restaurants.) You get your salami from a local butcher in a street nearby. You can reference the butcher’s shop, and link back to their website. (This will help them get found as well.) You can mention where the butchers is located. You can also give some information on where they get their salami from. Information on salami and then finally at the bottom, you mention the name of your restaurant and where you are located. 

When your website is scanned by a search engine crawler, information is gathered about the website. This information tells the crawler a variety of different things about your website, let’s say someone looks for salami locally, they might start seeing your website and the butchers website appearing in their feed and ultimately discover your business. If you are putting your business information at the end of the blog, such as: At Billy’s Pizza Palace, we always work hard to source our ingredients from local suppliers in the @townname area. You are going to start appearing a lot more often in local search results. 

This can be done for any business. From roofing contractors to solicitors, to accountants to marketers like myself, every business has something they can talk about. 

Blogs should be shared

When you write a blog, you should share it on your social media so people can read up on your businesses. A lot of the people who will read it will be happy to see where you are getting products from or to learn about the inner workings of your business. You can talk about anything and you may get them shared out. Popular blogs which are getting a lot of views will usually end up being placed higher in search results, helping you get found.

Is it worth the time?

If you wrote one blog per day of 750 words for an entire year, taking no time off, it would cost you the time you might spend watching tv programs, scrolling through Facebook or playing games on your phone. Since I started blogging, I have managed to do some incredible work for a multitude of different companies, and with very little time actually blogging. I work a full time job, run a company, find the time to blog and have enough time to enjoy programs and computer games as well.

If you covered information locally, local business interactions between you and other businesses, and talked about how you were involved in local events and projects, you would find that eventually just by typing the town’s name you would appear high in the search results.

By blogging regularly, you will be putting yourself at an advantage over your local competition, and giving your website the boost it needs to thrive in the modern world. 

This blog is just over 1000 words and took me 28 minutes to write.

I hope this helps!