Do you still use blogs on websites for local businesses?
I put blog posts on my company's website hoping it would help with SEO.
The only people that read my blogs are out of state. I barely get someone from in state reading them. The people in state who come to my website are looking for an electrician, not an article on electrical stuff- and that's what I want!
Yes, here's the problem right here and I totally agree with you.
Blogging is either for two things (or both):
1. Meaningful traffic
2. Backlinks
It can also be done to build authority and thus conversions ("Wow, I visited this electrician's website because I needed one in my area and I checked out his blog. Man! He really knows his stuff! That's why I hired him.") but I don't know how often this happens honestly.
So, let's just focus on "Meaningful traffic" and "Backlinks".
The only blog posts (in my opinion) that are going to drive meaningful traffic in your local area would be blog posts on your secondary services. But why would you use a blog post for that? Just use a regular web page and make it a services page.
The thing about Local SEO is that the "high intent" keywords don't really vary much. If someone is looks for an electrician they will more than likely type in "Electrician" and not "How do I change my circuits?" (forgive me, I know how bad of an example that is, I'm a Local SEO, not an electrician
, more job security for you). And even if they did type that in, Google isn't going to show them a local guy who wrote a blog post about that. Google thinks they want to do this themselves so they will show an article from a much higher authoritative website that breaks this down very well. I guess you could write a blog post about something in your local area, like things to do, etc. but that's not meaningful traffic really. You need traffic that will convert, not traffic wanting to plan fun activities (unless you're a fun activity destination in which this really would work).
Honestly, there are probably a few instances I'm missing (like if you're a "thing to do" in your city like I just mentioned above, yeah, write an article about that and include yourself). But as a whole, I think local blogging for meaningful traffic just isn't a viable strategy for most local businesses. There are exceptions but I think this is a general rule.
To be honest, I would love someone to prove me wrong.
Now let's talk about Backlinks.
Yes, you can probably write a really good local article that has local impact and gain local backlinks through an outreach campaign.
There are a few problems with this though:
1) If you're a local business owner, this is probably outside of your scope. You're talking about running a high level SEO campaign here. You would need to research until you found a good topic that is strategically feasible (has the potential to get a lot of good backlinks), execute the writing of it so that it will garner backlinks (not easy), and then execute an outreach campaign (the most difficult of all). This is a high level SEO practice. I think you would be wasting your time doing this and by the time you are done, if you are successful at it, you should probably look at changing careers because you're able to do what a lot of other high level SEO's cannot. The learning curve is just too much in my opinion for the regular business owner. Just take that time, make more money, and hire an SEO professional.
2) If you're an SEO company, why waste so much time and effort on this when there are seriously much lower hanging fruit backlink building strategies? You still have to go through the process I outlined above, takes a ton of time, etc. The only way I could see myself ever doing this is if I could hire the process out, it would relatively inexpensive, and I knew it would take me to the top of rankings and I wouldn't need to build another backlink. That's a tall order.
Instead, what we do, is invest in backlink building tactics that scale. Meaning they are able to be carbon copied from any SEO campaign into another.
This is just my theory.
Again, I would love to hear from someone to prove me wrong and show me the way. I need as many backlink building strategies as I can get.
For what it's worth, Brian Dean teaches something along these lines in a course he has and he says it's feasible with Local SEO. I have bought the course (not for Local SEO) and haven't gone through it yet. But color me skeptical.
