Instead, it’s worth writing about what your audience cares about: your local community! Where you sell and who you sell to are more important than what you’re selling.

The local long-tail opportunity

Here’s an example. A local insurance agency I work with has long ranked in the first position organically and in the local map pack for most of their services. They sell auto, home, life, health and business insurance. This client also has a positive reputation online, earning rave reviews on Google and Facebook.

However, they weren’t gaining followers on social media, and website visitors were stagnant. Despite ownership of their industry’s most competitive keywords, the market was small. In a city of 250,000, only a handful of residents were actively looking for their services in Google.

So we started to write about what locals cared about. For the past two years, we’ve done a list article on all the reasons their city is the best place to live. In some months, it even outpaces traffic on the home page.

Takeaways

• Four of the top 10 most popular pages have nothing to do with their services.
• 35 percent of traffic is coming from blog posts focused on their community.
• 44 percent of traffic is coming from the blog.

Other articles we’ve written include activities to do outdoors, where to propose in their city and the truth about local crime. The formula is to write blog content aligned with your audience and location, even if it doesn’t directly align with your service. These topics would work for most cities and consumer-facing businesses.

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