If you have a website and you want to optimize it to attract local traffic, adding a blog to your website strategy can help you with this. Blogging when used correctly is a powerful SEO tool that can help you get local traffic to your website. Blogging is a very effective and economical solution that you can use to publish relevant content to your business that will interest local visitors.
The first step with any blogging strategy is to identify the keywords you will be targeting for your business such as plumbing, pizza take away, etc. You can then combine these keywords with your city and area name such as Bloemfontein or Durban. So for a pizza take away restaurant in Bloemfontein, you would end up with “pizza take away Bloemfontein” and “Bloemfontein pizza take away”.
Optimize your website
Optimize the structure of your website and use keywords in the meta title tag, headings, and any other visible areas of text. This will make your blogging strategy very effective. Add a blog to your website such as WordPress where you can easily configure the blog and add all the required plugins. Use plugins such as Google XML sitemap that generates an XML sitemap of your blog posts and pages, SEO to add all the necessary SEO tags, and Google Analytics to track your new blog.
You can install a blog on a 3rd party website such as WordPress.com, but the problem with doing it this way is that you won’t be able to configure and optimize the blog 100%. By adding a blog to your website, you are adding value to the domain your website is hosted on.
Blogging for value
To start publishing blog posts, you don’t have to write pages and pages of content. Use a minimum of 300 words per post and publish new blog posts 3 times a week. Each blog post that you publish should be focused on only one main keyword phrase. In our example above, if we wanted to target the keywords “Pizza take away Bloemfontein”, we could use that as a title of our blog post, and mention those same words in the content of the blog post every 100 words.
On every blog post, link one of those keywords you are using to the most relevant website page on your website. This will increase the rankings to that particular page for the keywords selected. Optimizing for local SEO is very easy when done correctly with a blogging strategy.
