Local SEO Video: 2018 Local Brand Awareness through Blogging

10 Ways to Make Your Local Business Standout in 2018 Part 1: Blogging

Here is a Local SEO video that I created a few months ago to help local businesses, such as; dentists, doctors, therapists, physicians, and etc. to get more new customers and be seen as an industry expert through a content marketing strategy called blogging. Blogging is a great strategy to engage with your website visitors. Most people are not going to just buy immediately from you.

Therefore, if you can create a blog post answering their questions, showing your business as an industry expert, this could be a great lead generation funnel.

Like most businesses, you have tons of competitors who have been consistently promoting their business online to generate more leads and sales. Therefore, blogging can push you ahead of the competition especially those that don’t have time to engage with their customers by writing free content that is answering topical and timely questions.

This strategy can drive visibility, brand awareness, and leads because you are taking the extra step to show your customers you care about the questions they have and are willing to answer them for free through a blog post.

Here is our video about the importance of blogging for local businesses with more in-depth insights. We are in the middle of 2018 already, don’t let another day go by not showing your potential customers that you can hel;p them. Enjoy!

Local SEO Video Transcription

Video Transcript Start

What’s up everyone?

We’re gonna jump right into it. So today, we’re discussing 10 creative ways to make your brand stand out online in 2018. So each week, we’re gonna– or I would say throughout of course a few months. We’re going to stretch out and talk about these 10 ways to make your brand stand out online and for the first episode; Episode 13, we’re going to discuss blogging.

All right, so blogging is so important today and just some quick stats about blogging. 53% of marketers have blogging as their top content marketing priority. So if you’re a small business or a business owner in general, and you have a marketing team or marketing consultant or marketing specialist; whatever the case may be. There’s a high percentage of them focusing on blogging as a top content marketing strategy and there’s a reason for that.

So, if you also have a blog 43% more pages are indexed within Google search engine compared to websites that do not have a blog. And what that means is the more pages that you have indexed in Google, the more Google is going to crawl around your site and analyze your content to ultimately allow you to get better rankings within their search engine which in result drives more patients or more customers.

Small businesses that have a blog see 126% more growth than a business without a blog. So ROI and new customers are so important. So blogging should be a part of that marketing strategy. It also develops your business as an industry expert and it creates brand ambassadors for your business. So today, I’m going to give five tips. So five tips that really can help you create a blogging content strategy. Simple tips that you can follow and utilize to make your business stand out among the pack.

Tip 1: Determine your Blog Schedule

This is so important whether you blog once a month, twice a month, four times a week. Whatever the case may be, you want to be consistent here. You don’t want to blog say tomorrow for example and then turn around and blog six months later. You want to be consistent.

The reason behind that is once you build your audience, your customers are going to expect your content to be put out on a consistent basis and they will look for it. But if you’re not consistent, they will find someone else. So highly important. Find a consistent blog strategy or schedule.

Tip 2: Identify your Blog Audience

So super important; blog for your customer. There’s a lot of marketing strategies behind blogging and SEO and all that good stuff but you want to blog for them. Find questions that they are talking about or asking or statements or topics that they have– that’s around your industry or community.

Find those questions those topics and blog on them. And answer those questions within your blog posts. This will separate you as a– again as an industry expert but then also will create those brand ambassadors where they really feel you understand their pain points. And then it will eventually connect them better with you so that you can generate sales.

Tip 3: The Brainstorming Topic Ideation Phase

So you’ve got to be able to come up with topics consistently. You may be well-versed in your industry and you may know a lot of questions that they’re asking. You may be very engaged with your customers but then sometimes, we all have idea blocks.

I’m gonna give you some quick tools. Some are paid, some are free where you can see what the industry is relating to and how you can jump on top of that train and be ahead of the curve in terms of creating great blog content. So let’s jump right into it.

So one tool. This is the a paid tool called ‘Buzzsumo’. So most of our clients are in the dental industry so I typed in dentistry. So this tool is amazing. There’s a lot that you can do with Buzzsumo but we’re gonna focus on just a blogging strategy.

So I type in dentistry and you’ll see all these topics that come up. And if you look to the right here, you’ll see all the engagement that these topics had. So you got Facebook engagement, LinkedIn, so forth. Obviously with this keyword is one keyword you want to be more specific.

But this just shows you the value with the content that’s already out there. Create great content, find a very niche topic, and then create content around that. And then you can also engage with some of these people. Find out who these people are and engage with them to generate this kind of traction for your content.

The next tool is ‘Ahrefs’. Content Explorer, it’s a section in their tool that kind of– it does something similar to Buzzsumo but Aherfs has a lot of marketing opportunities there inside of the tool but I typed in “SEO for dentists”. It has some of the same metrics and engagement information that you can utilize. That’s also a paid tool as well.

Semrush; I really like Semrush. So they have a new tool is actually in beta stage. It’s called topical research and I typed in “Invisalign versus Braces”. And if you look at all these different subtopics that came up; orthodontic treatment, invisalign aligners, so forth.

And if you click on the drop-down arrow, it shows you all the questions that people are asking in your industry. So this is very, very valuable because it speaks directly to questions. And again that’s where you want to stand out by answering those questions for your audience.

The next tool is the Keyword planner and this is a Google tool that is free for you. Obviously, you go to Google Adwords and you need a Gmail account and you just– once you go to Google AdWords you register and they have a tools option and you’ll see keyword planner here.

So I typed in “dental insurance” and then there’s a plethora of just topics if you see all these keywords that come up over here. There’s tons and tons of keywords that you could analyze and figure out what would be the best content to produce based on what your customers are asking.

With the keyword planner again, it’s free. It does have– it shows the average monthly searches which is very valuable and then also shows you the competition. So it shows you how hard it will be to rank for that keyword specifically. Lastly what I do like about the keyword planner, it has search volume trends.

So you can see when people are searching for your keywords and what timeframe. This could keep you ahead of schedule to produce content around that time frame when someone or when your audience is searching for those questions or blog topics and you could be ahead of the game there.

Lastly is Google. Like I love Google because Google has a autosuggest feature. And I typed in, “How much does veneers cost?” And if you look under there, you see all these different sub-keywords that people are searching for in relation to how much does veneers cost.

So there’s how much to do veneers cost with insurance, does insurance cost cover veneers, so forth. You can take a lot of that information and create blog content around– not that just one question but a lot of these other sub questions that you see in the auto suggests that Google is providing.

So those are some ways for your topic ideation.

Tip 4: Creating an Editorial Calendar

It’s super important that you hold yourself accountable or hold your marketing team accountable that they have a plan set up and then they’re executing it. The editorial calendar piece is pretty simple. Just get an excel file, create your columns for your topic, have a column for dates and then have sub-columns for the dates that you are going to execute your draft content, maybe your research also, your published date, and then your you know your edit date.

And then have all that together so you keep yourself along with when you’re going to publish and just stick to it. I also recommend creating calendar invites to yourself or your marketing team where they’re notified when those dates are due.

Hub spot has a pretty cool editorial calendar template that you can use and I’ll include this link in the description. But it shows you here’s a simple way that you can create a blog editorial calendar with Google sheets or an Excel document.

Tip 5: Apply SEO and Create a Great User Experience

SEO obviously is a second strategy. First, you want to blog for your audience (that’s tip two) and then tip five is apply SEO. You want to be able to communicate with Google of what you’re trying to rank for. If you do this very well, you’ll get great results.

User experience; you don’t want to have a text like 30 sentences all in one block of text. You want to make sure that every other sentence or phrase you have spaces between your content so that your readers can visually scroll down and see the connections within your paragraphs. Also headers, bullet points, bolder, italic text.

You want to really draw their attention. Videos, images, really set your content apart by creating an experience that really gives them the information they’re looking for but also keeps them there for a while. So real quick showing you this blogging example.

Here’s a blog literally that I created because of my basketball playing days. When I graduated, I just wanted to give the insights that I’ve learned from a great coach and what I learned professionally overseas and so forth around really great basketball players. And I created a blog; inspirationalbasketball.com and literally just start blogging on that website.

You can see that over time, 2,000 visits from Google a month and ranking for 4,600 keywords. Literally, that was me really focusing on creating content for my audience and being consistent as I mentioned in some of the tips there.

I created a blog article about the odds of making it to the NBA. I think that blog post right now has 80, 90 plus comments. All the tips that I just mentioned, we did that and focused on that and those were the results. There’s affiliate stuff but there’s no like hard sales, it is not like I need sales from this website. But as a business owner if you do this, you will set yourself apart and become an industry expert and ultimately get sales.

So finally, blog and blog some more. Be consistent, stick with it. Some of these big brands that I have here; Nike, Sony, Pepsi they have always have news content, blog content. They’re really connecting with their users online.

Everyone’s online these days so that’s where you need to be as a business. I always like to throw this out here as well. Small businesses have a high failure rate. In five years, 80% of businesses fail after starting, it’s tough. 20% is a low number but to set yourself apart, blogging is a good starting point.

Really connect with your customers and put yourself in the right position to get new customers from building that trust with them online because that’s where they’re at. There’s a lot of you in the sea in terms of you being a business and competing amongst the masses.

So set yourself apart. Have any questions, you can email me. I’ll have my email in the description. You can subscribe to my channel by clicking on the subscribe button. And then lastly, if you need a free SEO report for us to look at your blogging and marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Video Transcript End

If you are looking for a content marketing company in Charlotte that can help with your blogging, don’t hesitate to contact us at https://organiclicks.com/contact/ or call 704-288-4645!

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