This post, however, is going to talk about the time spent and the return on investment on creating more and more of these great pieces of local SEO content. We’re seeing this as we dive into our client’s analytics and even the analytics on our website here and finding how many people are actually searching long-tail search terms.
Target Long Tail Search Terms
So, long-tail search terms are anywhere from three to seven words in a search term. So “massage therapy for runners in Victoria, BC” would be a long-tail search term, or “how much does massage therapy cost in Victoria BC?”
Those are long-tail search terms. So, as you create more of those pieces of content, whether it’s a blog post, whether it’s an article, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same thing, it’s a webpage going on your site that targets a long-tail search term, you’re going to see a lot of traffic coming to your website.
And like I said, we are analyzing our clients’ sites because we are writing this type of content for them, we are advising them to write that piece of content that says, you know, “Who is the best massage therapist in Victoria BC”. You might list three competitors and you might also list yourself and say ‘hey, we’re pretty good as well, learn more about us.’
Put In The Effort
But, the time spent on creating those is very minimal, you know, it might take a maximum of five hours if you really want to write it well, and if you really want to do your research and if you really want to create some nice design elements to make it visually appealing, but that five hours goes a long way in the overall scheme of things, and I’m going to tell you why.
This is because not many of your competitors are going after these long-tail search terms, and this lower-hanging fruit. They all want to rank for the big, juicy search term, you know, let’s use a massage therapist example again. Everybody wants to rank for a “massage therapy in Victoria BC”. But there’s probably 100 websites+, whether it’s a local, just a small one-person massage therapy clinic, or whether it’s a huge one, everybody wants to rank for that search term. But what they’re not looking at is all these other search terms that people are searching
And it could be “massage therapy for runners in Victoria, BC”. It could be “who is the best massage therapist in Victoria BC”. It could be “how much does massage therapy cost in Victoria BC”
Those types of search terms, nobody’s creating content for them, or there might be a few, but how well-written are they, and do you think you can improve upon it? There are people searching those terms and if you can get to your website and that page in front of that person who’s searched them, you’re going to be doing them a favor, and you’re going to have a lot of traffic coming to your site.
Your Website Is A Bicycle Wheel
So, again, this is part of the bicycle wheel strategy we call it when it comes to content. The homepage is the middle of the bicycle wheel, but all these other pages that are targeting these long-term search terms, they’re spokes, and the more spokes you create, the more web traffic you generate. But, these spokes have little competition, so you’re going to see a lot of quick results coming to them.
One of our clients is in the home renovation industry, we’ve written articles based on each renovation, whether it’s kitchen, bathroom or basement that talks about cost. So, we’ve got three articles right there that target “how much does bathroom renovations cost in Victoria BC?” “How much does basement renovations cost in Victoria BC?” And “How much does kitchen renovations cost in Victoria BC?”
And those pages alone are generating close to 15% of his traffic, so outside of his website, he’s getting another, you know, 15% more traffic coming to his website through those pages. As you multiply all those pages, you’re going to see more and more traffic. The time spent on creating those pages is not going to take you more, it’s going to take anywhere from an hour to five hours, depending on how well you want it to sound and depending on any other types of content that you want to promote once that person is on that landing page.
Increase Visitor Time Spent On Your Website
So, again, you know, if you’re writing a lot of content, you’re interlinking to all this other great content to keep people on your website. You know, the whole goal is to not only get more traffic to your website, but it’s also to keep these people there and keep them engaged. So, creating good pieces of valuable information and linking to them from all these pages you’ve created.
And that’s the whole goal; you want to keep people on your website as long as you can. So, the time spent on creating these pages is very little, but the return on investment from them is huge. And you just think about that bicycle wheel and you think about creating spokes over the course of three years, if you create 30 articles a year that generate 10-30 visits a year, you know, over three years you’re going to see a lot of traffic coming to your website outside of your homepage and through those bicycle spokes. If you’re doing things properly, you’re keeping them on your site by interlinking to other good pieces of valuable content for them.
So, just a quick little ‘hey,’ I want to tell everybody how easy it is, it’s just a little bit of investment of your time and energy and to get the point across that when you create this piece of content, whether it’s a blog post, or article, on your website, it doesn’t go anywhere. It’s not like a newspaper ad where the next day it’s gone or a magazine ad, when next month the new edition comes out and your magazine ad is not in there, or the TV or radio, those mediums, you have to continuously pay to have your brand in front of people, whereas content marketing and doing things properly when it comes to SEO, you are going to generate a lot more traffic and a lot more leads for your business for a lot less money.
A little bit of effort spent in sitting down and thinking about the content that needs to be created and going out and writing it and making sure it’s good. Put in the time, but think about the big picture and how the return on investment is so much greater when it comes to content marketing, because as long as your website’s doing things right, your pages, all these little spokes, are going to be ranking high, as long as you’re doing things right. So, they stay there, unlike that newspaper ad where you’ve got to make sure you’re in the next day’s newspaper.
As you go back and as you read through that, you’ll better understand what I’m gonna talk about in a second here which is – how to really create good local content for a massage therapist in Victoria BC.
In that last blog post and Soundcloud recording, I talked about how a massage therapist can create a good piece of content for the runners in Victoria BC. And I think I pretty much said write an article that targets “massage therapy for runners in Victoria BC”. But I didn’t really talk too much about what to put in it this piece of content. And here’s what you need to do to put in your content to make it really powerful.
Anyways, Google has a mobile friendly tool which tests your site to see if it was just that. So they tested everyone’s site early in the year and if yours wasn’t mobile friendly, you recieved a warning message like this.
Surely you got that message and that you pay attention to your Webmaster Tools account. Even if you didn’t, you have at some point thought about converting your site to a responsive design/making it mobile friendly. And if you haven’t you need to right away. Not to appease Google and their algorithm, but to give your visitors a better user experience on your site.
Care More About Your Visitors
Considering it’s 2015 and so many people (insert stat here) are using their mobile devices, your site should be mobile friendly. And it should be because you want to give your visitors a great user experience and not because you want better Google search rankings.
Care more about your visitors.
It’s common in SEO for business owners to think more about optimizing their sites for Google rather than the searcher. They look too deep into keyword density and writing content that was created for a search engine crawler and not a human being.
The Google mobilegeddon update brought the same.
Many business owners were focusing more on appeasing Google. It shouldn’t have taken a push and perhaps a threat that your mobile search rankings would plummet if your site wasn’t mobile friendly. All it should have taken was business owners to realize everyone has a mobile phone and everyone is browsing the web on them.
If you don’t a mobile friendly site, people will find a competitors site that is. So the bottom line is out care your competition and provide the best mobile experiece for your visitors.
The Mobilegeddon Update Hasn’t Had An Impact
We didn’t write about the mobilegeddon update because we didn’t think it would have much impact on the mobile search rankings. And as of today, November 19th, they’re still websites that are not mobile friendly ranking higher than mobile friendly ones.
Here are the search results from my mobile device for “care homes Victoria BC”.
There are four search results in the top seven that aren’t mobile friendly. Here are three of those sites.
If you ask me, these sites provide a terrible mobile experience and shouldn’t be ranked where they are. I’m still in my 30’s and am having a hard time reading those sites! Nevermind their market which is mostly children with parents who are 70+ and needing a care home.
So we’ve yet to see the impact and big changes to the mobile search rankings. But that shouldn’t stop you from having a mobile friendly site.
Care more for your visitors and provide them with a great mobile experience on your site.
In my last post I talked about how search engines, especially Google, like to see websites that have useful content. I also mentioned that content is important in my seven SEO trends for 2015. Today’s post is about a local SEO content strategy you must implement.
Why is local content so important? Google and the search engines want to provide searchers with relevant and useful resources as fast as they can. So they will rank websites that fit that bill on the first page or in the top 3. They don’t want searchers going past the first page as that hinders their search experience and might force them to try another search engine.
So the question I put to you is, what is your website’s content like?
But What Do I Mean By Content?
By content I mean two things. The length and quality of the content on your websites pages. And the amount of website pages you have.
I did some Freelance work back in 2013 for a friend who owns a niche web development company for contractors. His philosophy was to create websites that had at least 40 pages of quality content (400 words or more) and that targeted surrounding cities, municipalities and counties.
Here’s how we did it and what you need to do.
Implement This Local SEO Content Strategy
We developed a strategy where we asked his clients to list 10 other cities, municipalities or counties they were targeting residents from. From there I created optimized pages targeting each of these areas and the main service the contractor offered.
For example if it was a painter in Fort Myers, we would create pages targeting each surrounding area.
So a couple of pages we’d create would be:
“Cape Coral Residential Painters”
“Cypress Lake Painters”
“Painters In Buckingham”
We had done this for a couple of clients in 2013 here at Meaningful Marketing. But I forgot about it until recently when I chatted with Andrew Shortland from the Local SEO Guide. He did an analysis of a clients website and made one simple suggestion. Add content to the site that targets surrounding areas.
We did that beginning on February 2nd 2015. In just 3 weeks, this client jumped from 18 to 13 for the search term “painters Victoria BC”. You can see the results in the screenshot below.
This was a big jump considering the website sat in the 18th position for almost two months.
This Works For A Physical Storefront
The above examples highlight service based businesses. For them, it doesn’t matter where their clients are located as they drive to their homes and provide a service.
But this strategy can work for a physical store front as well. Create the pages and simply mention that you are not physically located in that area but that you have serviced residents in that area.
Ask your clients who are located in that area if you can name drop them on that page. The visitors might know them but if not, you still have a targeted visitor on your site and they are looking for what you have to offer. It’s up to your content and copywriting to convert them to a client so they will come do business with you.
If you are going to take my advice and use this strategy, be sure that you change the page titles and url structure around. For more on SEO friendly urls, visit this post and scroll down to the “Targeting Keywords on a Page” section.
Also be sure to create new content for each page. Google does not like duplicate content so don’t think you can just use one template page and insert the city name.
Phil Rozek from Local Search Visibility has a great post on 25 Principles of Building City Pages. He’s got some solid tips that we’ve implemented for our clients.
Bonus Strategy
We’ve found this strategy works great if you blog for business and implement the strategy of answering common questions through your blog. This shows Google and the search engines you are focusing on updating your site with new content on a regular basis.
Back in the end of January, I ran an experiment to find out how long does it take to rank on page one. In the post I stated a goal of trying to rank a new website and business on page one within two months. Bold, I know.
The reason for such a short time frame was due to the fact that I had purchased an old keyword rich domain for my mother’s Victoria BC bookkeeping business.
I wanted to see if that alone was enough to get a website ranked on the first page faster than normal. The keyword rich domain was owned by another bookkeeping company in Victoria but they decided to change their domain to a branded one. Since the domain was old, it had some trust built up with Google and contained a keyword, so I figured it would take less time to rank on page one.
That hasn’t been the case organically. As you can see by the Bright Local search rankings, the website isn’t ranking within the top 40 organic websites. I’m going to plug how great the Bright Local software is for showing how to track search engine rankings. Plug over!
Interestingly enough, the Google Local/My Business page ranks already on the first page. But that doesn’t count as the goal was to have the website ranking on page one, not the Google Local page.
What’s Next?
This is a experiment and experiments are about discovery. My discovery from this experiment is something I alluded to in my seven trends for local SEO success in 2015 post. What is this discovery?
More content.
When the website was created, we added seven blog posts relating to bookkeeping and common questions my mom gets asked. That didn’t help and to be honest, things have been really busy so no more content had been added to the site.
That was until this past weekend when we added seven more pages to the website. These pages haven’t made a difference to the rankings yet. But this strategy has been extremely successful for our other clients.
In my blog post on seven trends for local SEO success in 2015, I mentioned you should create blog posts and webpages where you answer common questions. This is one method of creating more content. Since that post though, I’ve had a consultation from another local SEO.
In the next blog post, I’m going to reveal the tip and what types of pages and content need to be added to your website to increase its search engine rankings. Make sure you sign up for our email list so you don’t miss that post because as I mentioned, we’ve seen some great results implementing this strategy into our content marketing.
Back in April Google released an update to their search algorithm. Many called it 
