Foundational Content Assets

Whether you are founding a new venture or marketing an existing local business, investing time and resources in content marketing initiatives will help you reach a wider audience of people interested in your products and services. In this chapter, we’ll go through five key steps required to develop content that is likely to perform well and provide value to your potential customers, before we get to the exciting phase of beginning to develop foundational content.

In this chapter:

• Set goals
• Do customer research
• Do keyword research
• Do market research
• Create and market assets

Local businesses can have many goals — including altruistic ones like improving resources in a community or reducing carbon emissions — but nearly all ventures are unified by the overriding objective of earning enough customers and sales to be profitable. Being able to pay your staff and yourself a living wage is the first real signal that your company is succeeding, and local business content publication, and marketing, contribute to this goal by supporting customer discovery, acquisition, and retention.

Because your marketing efforts contribute to your bottom line, you should assign each content type its own goals. Make use of SMART Goals, which stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, relevant, and time-bound, to help keep your projects and expectations on track. For example, if you own a plant nursery in San Juan Capistrano, California, and are publishing a substantial guide to the native trees of California, goals could include:

• Earning 15 new links from authoritative publications
• Earning 500 social media mentions
• Earning 3 invitations to speak on podcasts, radio programs, local television, or at events
• Earning 10 new transactions per month over the next year
• Increasing time spent on your site from 52 seconds to 3 minutes per session
• Doubling organic traffic to your website
• Earning organic and local pack rankings for 20 new terms

If your business is new, you may have to simply estimate numbers that seem desirable until you have established how much return on investment (ROI) you typically see from your efforts. When you begin to receive results, you can re-evaluate whether you are setting realistic objectives or whether your bar needs to be moved higher or lower.

At the smaller, but by no means less impactful, end of the content spectrum, you could experiment with whether the text on a call to action (CTA) booking button could be edited to increase clicks. For example, the text might currently read “submit” and have a conversion rate of 0.2%. Your content marketing experiment could be whether you can increase that rate to 1.5% by changing the text to “reserve your time,” because you’ve noticed that this is how clients speak about scheduling appointments with your business.

By tracking the outcomes of the change, you’ll know whether your mini-campaign has or hasn’t met its goal. While businesses previously ran A/B testing in Google Optimize, you can now run tests using Google Analytics 4 under the Behavior section. If tracking the performance of your content assets in Google Analytics is new to you, these resources will help get you started:

• Google’s GA4 Account Training Guide and Support
• How to Use Google Analytics 4 for Content Marketing Success
• Learn GA4: 17 Top Guides and Resources
• The Next Generation of Google Analytics
• GA4: Leverage the Power of Custom Reports to Enhance Your Reporting

Don’t be afraid of playing with numbers when you start out setting goals. They will teach you what works and increase the success of your publication and marketing experiments over time. And even if your tests don’t “win” – you may still gain valuable insight.

Finally, there are other tools besides Google Analytics 4 that you may use to track the performance of specific assets over time to see if you’re meeting your goals, including but not limited to:

New Merchant Experience Insights

These metrics are specific to local businesses, and are reached by clicking on the Performance tab in the New Merchant Experience, where you can directly manage your Google Business Profile listing, as shown here:

This form of local business listing analytics gives you an idea of how your Google Business Profile is driving views, calls, messages, requests for driving information, and clicks to your website. To make the very most of your ability to track customer activities surrounding your Google Business Profile, watch Claire Carlile’s excellent tutorial on UTM tagging.

The best practice of including these special tags in fields like your website URL, your menus, or the little posts known as Google Updates, will help you understand the value and behaviors of the traffic being driven to your website by your Google listing.

Local and organic rank-tracking tools

You have two main options for determining whether your content marketing campaigns and other efforts are growing your visibility in Google’s local and organic interfaces over time. First, you can regularly look up your desired search terms manually from different locations near your place of business and see where you rank. Remember that the location of each customer’s device will change what they see in both the local and organic results, meaning that there is never a #1 ranking in either results set for any business.

Rather, moving around town with your mobile device in hand and seeing where you appear in the results should give you a general sense of whether your visibility is improving or not over time for customers in different areas near you. We will discuss this process in greater detail in the upcoming market research section.

Your second option is to use tools that show you local or organic rankings, or both. Moz Pro Campaigns offer a rank-tracking feature that allows you to track keyword performance over time. With this tool, you can see your site’s overall presence in organic and local SERPs. You can also use this sophisticated software to track competitors, and identify holes in their content strategy, which your company can fill!

For tracking ranking order within the local SERPs, Whitespark’s Local Rank Tracker is a popular choice. Other useful products include Local Falcon for tracking Google Maps visibility and Mobile Moxie’s SERPerator for checking your Google visibility on mobile devices, which is, of course, highly relevant to local businesses.

Additionally, if you’re looking to track local keyword rankings and SERPs at scale, STAT is an excellent choice.

Location data distribution tools

Another type of tool you’ll want to know about is one that tracks improvements in the distribution of your local business listing information to platforms across the web. Start by entering your company name and address in Moz’s free online presence checker. It will instantly tell you whether your listings are in good shape on major platforms or if they need work so that customers and search engines don’t lose trust in your business by encountering misinformation like incorrect phone numbers or opening hours.

Because 52% of local business review writers say they’ve written negative reviews after encountering incorrect information around the web, it’s critical to ensure that your listings are accurate. Meanwhile, one major study found that you can expect significant increases in visibility, clicks to your website, phone calls, requests for driving directions, and more when your local business information is listed on 10+ local listing platforms.

You have three main options for managing your listings across sites like Google, Apple Maps, Facebook, Yelp, Nextdoor, Bing, and others.

• Do all of the work of creating and managing your listings manually. This can be quite time-consuming and even statistically prohibitive if your business has more than one location.

• Pay a company to build your listings manually for you. There are multiple brands offering this service, and it can be a good option for building your listings. However, because you have to pay again any time you want to update your listings if your information changes, it may not be a solution that works for everyone.

• Use an automated service like Moz Local, where you pay a subscription fee for distribution to all the major platforms, duplicate removal, and review and social media management capabilities, with no extra charges to update your listings when your information changes. With this option, you can track improvements in your listing information quality over time, and because local business listings (also known as structured citations) form a central part of your content publication and marketing strategy, this area of your work deserves serious time and investment.

With the right tools, you can set meaningful goals, measure performance, and know when different areas of your publication and marketing are succeeding!

Earning an excellent and lucrative local business reputation hinges on two things: knowing your customers’ needs and fulfilling them very well. Every sentence you write, page you publish, listing you create, photo you take, and all other elements of your content strategy should be based on these two foundations. Whether you are starting a new business, improving an existing one, or even growing one, you have a tremendous variety of good options for getting to know your community better.

There are many methods for gathering sentiment from customers and the wider community, including:

• Run sentiment analysis on your existing reviews and the reviews of your competitors. This will give you an idea of what customers do and don’t like about the businesses in their town or city. You can run a sentiment analysis on your product reviews through tools such as MonkeyLearn.

• Run a formal survey with a service like SurveyMonkey with geographic segmentation by zip code so that your survey group is limited to a particular region.

• If you’ve built a social media following, run a less formal local poll to gauge the wishes of your community.

• Survey your customers via email or text messaging.

• Run an offline print survey in your physical location.

• Record and analyze phone calls to understand both successes and failures and how your customers and staff talk about them.

• Have public-facing staff keep internal documentation of the words customers use to describe your business, products and services in person, as well as their praise and complaints.

• Access demographic information for your area from local, state, and national sources, such as Census.gov in the US.

• Use the subregional segmentation of Google Trends to see how larger search trends might be informing local search trends.

• See what websites your customers visit, which social accounts they follow, and which social hashtags they use with paid marketing research tools like Sparktoro.

• Read newspaper and library archives about your town and speak to long-established residents to discover if there were business models, goods, or services that were formerly available, but are now missed by local people. They could be ripe for a comeback.

The more connected you are with your community, the more easily you will be able to communicate with them when you need to assess local demand to fine-tune your business operations. Collecting the email addresses and SMS/text numbers of customers and participating on the social platforms your customers prefer is essential to ensuring that you are taking a multi-channel approach to open and informative two-way communication.

The sentiments, desires, complaints, and words that make up these exchanges will be fundamental to the content your business publishes and markets, ensuring that it is tailored to the needs of your community.

Some businesses may simply strategize from the raw data they collect via surveys, polls, and other research, but many will want to formalize their findings by building out customer personae. These are fictional versions of either your ideal customer or your most typical customer, based on your research. The point of building these models is so that you are constantly aware of who you are marketing to. Customer personae (also sometimes called user personae or buyer personae) can include any or all of the following data:

• Age
• Income bracket
• Gender
• Level of education
• Household size
• Geographic location
• Challenges
• Goals
• Offline and online tastes and habits
• Stance on issues and causes

Depending on your industry and market, there are many other factors you may want to establish about your ideal or typical customers.

The upside of building out these personae is that you can use them to develop your business in new ways to better meet the needs of the people you want to serve. They are also a good asset for quickly communicating to new staff and stakeholders who it is that your business serves. And, of course, it’s confidence-building, efficient, and fundamental to know who you’re creating content for before you create it!

The downside of customer personae is seen when a business becomes too reliant on the idea that’s been generated of who their customers are, causing them to disconnect from how varied and unique each patron actually is. If the view created by personae is too narrow, the business can accidentally overlook customers it could be engaging with. Just remember that there's no substitute for a local business that invests in knowing its individual customers in the real world and puts in the time to build real relationships with them in the community.

Keyword research is a specialized form of customer research that tells you how people search online for things you currently offer or could offer if they are in demand. Your next step in getting to know your community is to utilize keyword research tools to keep building out your list of important phrases that belong in your content.

Begin by creating a keyword list containing:

• All the main terms you identified during your Customer Research phase

• The name of your brand, as well as the names of all your goods and services

• Specific attributes of your inventory, offerings, or business identity that you know matter to customers, such as “late night”, “family-owned”, “dog-friendly”, “sustainable,” etc.

You can either create a list in any kind of spreadsheet creation program you prefer (Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice, Google Sheets, or even Numbers), or you can create a special spreadsheet known as a CSV file for faster and easier uploading to tools. This guide will walk you through running your list of keywords through the free Moz Keyword Explorer tool. You can learn more about how to use this tool in the Keyword Explorer section of our Help Hub.

To get started with a free community account, go to Moz Keyword Explorer and enter a search phrase into the tool. You will then be prompted to create a community account, or if you already have a Moz account, you can click Log in.

Once you have access, you can set the tool to reflect your country and then look up a phrase like “organic vegetable seeds” to receive a ton of information about this keyword term.

To help you determine how highly this term should be featured in your content, Keyword Explorer shows:

• Monthly volume — This tells you how in-demand your search phrase is, based on how often it is searched for in Google on a monthly basis.

• Difficulty — This figure estimates how hard it will be to earn a top 10 organic spot in Google for the search phrase, with 1 being the least difficult and 100 being the most difficult. Fortunately, for local businesses, your actual difficulty will always be much lower than the number shown in attempting to rank for this same search phrase for nearby customers who want a local, not a national, source.

• Organic CTR — The higher the number in this field, the better your chances of Google users clicking on the organic results, instead of on other SERP features like ads or images. If the CTR number is low, it’s a good hint that other forms of content (like images or videos) could be a good opportunity if you want to compete for the given term.

• Priority — This number combines the data from the other metrics described above to help you assign priority to a list of your keywords. For example, if you’re trying to determine whether to focus more on a phrase like “organic vegetable seeds” or “organic veggie seeds” in your content publication and marketing, look at the priority score for each. The phrase with the higher Priority score will typically be the better choice because it means that term has a higher Monthly Volume, a lower Difficulty score, and a higher Organic CTR.

• Keyword Suggestions — This outstanding feature suggests additional phrases you should consider incorporating into your content strategy. In our example screenshot, the tool is telling us that some people are specifically searching for “organic vegetable seeds near me”, for instance, and others want to know that they can buy from you online, as well. Click on See all suggestions for a full set of other phrases you should put in your list.

• SERP Analysis — This feature shows you which website pages are ranking on the first page of Google for the given phrase. Each entry is accompanied by useful metrics, including an overall Page Score (based on the On-Page Grader tool), Domain Authority, Page Authority, and the number of links both the page and the overall domain have earned. This enables you to estimate your chances of having a page on your site break into the top 10 organic results vs. competitors. Again, the good news here is that most local businesses will find their competition greatly reduced for customers who are looking for a nearby solution to their needs, instead of a national or international one.

With your free community account, you can manually enter up to 10 keywords per month, which is a great start for a small local business wanting to test drive a tool and use its findings to optimize a single product page or to inspire a couple of blog posts every month.

But local businesses of any size that are ready to become strong competitors should seriously consider upgrading to make full use of all the features of this tool, including the ability to upload lists of up to 500 keywords at a time and get all the data about them at once so you can create a complete content strategy.

By using Keyword Lists, you’ll get all of the above data in an organized dashboard layout to help you with your research and content planning. You can find complete documentation about filtering, sorting, and managing your Keyword Lists in this useful guide.

Finally, with a free community account, you can receive a 50-row analysis of the keywords your site (or a competitor’s site!) already ranks for in Google’s organic results, with the ability to upgrade to a paid account for deeper analysis. This process can alert you to gaps in your content strategy that you can benefit from filling in.

There are many paid and free keyword research tools on the market. For example, Google’s Keyword Planner is a free tool connected to its paid Ads program. You can also try three free searches on AlsoAsked before upgrading to a paid account, or you can just go right to Google’s own results to see what further keyword hints you are given by looking at features like “People also ask.”

And related searches.

You can also get more potential keyword suggestions by simply beginning to type a query into Google’s search function and looking at how it auto-completes your query.

In fact, the more experienced you become at local business content marketing, the more you’ll want to make a practice of analyzing all of the different kinds of content Google returns for searches that matter to you. You’ll see images, videos, news content, social media content, and many other different SERP features. You’ll have a list not just of keyword terms you want to become visible for, but of the different approaches you could take to earning that visibility via Google’s many result variations.

But to get started, do try out the free version of Moz Keyword Explorer, and you’ll be going a long way towards planting your healthy business sapling.

Now that you’ve done your customer research and keyword research, you’re ready for the third leg of this research tripod: understanding how Google views your local market.

Your market will be made up of the locations of your customers and your competitors relative to a specific branch of your business. Google’s concept of your market matters, because it determines which businesses they show to which searchers for each search phrase.

Rankings in Moz Pro can let you know whether you’re included in local packs and how other tools reveal your ranking position within those packs and map results, but to get a really useful on-the-ground sense of how visible you are in your community, try this workflow at least once a year:

Step 1: Take the terms you identified as being the most important to your customers and your business and, while located at your place of business, look them up on Google on a desktop and/or mobile device. Note your rankings in the local pack and note down the name and address of the top-ranked business for each term.

If you don’t see your business in the local pack, click on it to see if you are included in the longer listing called the Local Finder.

You can also click on the Maps tab under the search box in Google’s main organic results.

And see how differently businesses are being ranked on that platform, which may look like the Local Finder but is actually quite separate. Note down both your rank and the name and address of the top-ranked competitor.

At the time of publication, Google has also released their AI-based Search Generative Experience (SGE) to early testers in Search Labs, with an end date of December 2023. This screenshot, captured by Barry Schwartz, shows a 5-pack of local results and other features. It is possible that SGE could come to replace the local 3-pack, which has been standard for many years. If this happens, future market research will include checking how your business and its competitors are being featured in SGE for local queries.

And, finally, find your adjusted organic rank in the organic search results by looking at the results and subtracting anything that isn’t an actual business competitor. For example, you might find Wikipedia or Yelp ranking for one of your search terms, and local businesses can’t typically compete for visibility against these large entities. Instead, look at the order in which actual local businesses are ranked in the results, and note down the name and address of the top competitor and where you rank for your most important keyword phrases. For example, Home Ground Habitats ranks 4th, in the following screenshot, but because Yelp isn’t actually a competitor of the local business, their adjusted rank would be third.

Step 2: First, look up your town on Google Maps and note Google’s concept of its border in red.

Now, take your mobile device and travel to a different part of your community, do the same searches, and note down where you appear in the results, along with the name and address of the top competitor for each instance. Go to several areas throughout your market and perform these searches.

You will be able to observe who your real competitors are on the basis of what appears for searches in different parts of your market, and if you go outside the borders of your town or city, you will see how Google is behaving. Is your top competitor inside the city’s boundaries also managing to rank for searches beyond the perimeter? That’s a good sign that you can, too, with the right strategy.

For maximum insight into the top-ranked brands you’ve uncovered, use this tutorial and free spreadsheet to perform a basic competitive audit of your business vs. the top local competitors you’ve identified for your most important phrases.

Step 3: At a later date, when you have made a serious investment in the development of content and marketing for your business, repeat Steps 1 and 2 to see if you’ve moved up in the organic and local rankings and have become visible for new search phrases for which you’ve invested in creating new content. Again, you can use the tools we’ve mentioned to keep regular track of ranking changes, but you’ll find it very reassuring and informative to periodically do the actual legwork on this and see a real-world view of what your customers see by visiting their locations around town. You will also have established the top competitors for your core phrases so that you can further investigate their strategy with the goal of eventually surpassing them.

Now that you’ve set goals and taken the necessary time to do the vital work of customer, keyword, and market research, you are ready to start developing foundational content for your business on the basis of what you’ve learned. Congratulations!

Create your USP/UVP

One of your hands is now full of all the facts you’ve learned from your research about what customers want, how they talk about it, and how they search for it. In the other hand is the knowledge of what your business does best — hopefully better than anyone else in your local market — in the context of the top competitors you identified in your market research. When you bring the two hands together, you’ve got the materials you need to create an incredible Unique Sales Proposition (USP), sometimes also called a Unique Value Proposition (UVP).

Study the USP for this local heirloom rose nursery:

"Since 2005 Rose Petals Nursery Has Been Preserving History, One Rose at a Time. We sell rare roses online with domestic shipping* and local in-store pick up available." — Rose Petals Nursery website

In just a few lines, the home page of Rose Petals Nursery tells the customer that this business sells antique, historic, and old garden roses (all keyword phrases), has been in business since 2005 (denoting a long history of providing customer experiences), is in this business to preserve historic plants (denoting expertise), and offers local in-store pickup as well as domestic shipping (meeting customers’ diverse needs for fulfillment). It’s a wonderful example of a USP that conveys both the findings of keyword and customer research as well as several E-E-A-T signals.

A USP isn’t a slogan, though a slogan can be part of it. Rather, think of it as a very short elevator pitch that tells customers what you think they most want to know about your business before giving it a try. Your task is to write a brief USP based on what you’ve learned and then publish it in some or all of the following places:

• Your website home page
• Your website About or Mission page
• Your social media profiles
• Your email marketing
• Your Google Business Profile description
• In a Google Update post
• In a Google Business Profile image
• In print, radio, local newspaper, or local TV advertising
• In paid online advertising

Take the treasures you’ve accrued from your customer research, keyword research, and market research, and create and publicize a USP that sets you apart on the local scene. And don’t consider your USP to be set in stone for all time. You can edit and refine it in the coming years as consumer trends and your business offerings evolve and track whether your edits increase customer actions on your site and other assets.

Product/service descriptions

For each product or service your business offers, write a description that fulfills all of the following criteria:

• Is written for people (not search engines) in language that reads naturally and comfortably to humans
• Reflects all of the knowledge you’ve accrued from your customer, keyword, and market research phases
• Begins with a summary for customers who want all the most important facts quickly, but follows up with more detailed information for those who want to know more
• Answers all frequently asked questions that you know relate to the offering
• Includes one or more high-quality photos of the offering
• Is as unique as possible
• A list of related products you offer
• A clear call to action (CTA)

You will be using these descriptions to create a unique website page for each of the main products and services your business offers when you get to the phase of work discussed in Chapter Two of this guide. Your descriptions might also include video content, customer reviews, statistics, and other features that will help make your product/service pages the best in your local market. For many local businesses, five main FAQs typically arise when they first start writing product and service descriptions, and we’ll answer these upfront.

1. Do I need to have a description for every product or service?

Yes, you should typically write a full description for each main product or service, but you don’t necessarily need to write a description for every variant of each offering. For example, a local retailer stocking t-shirts does not need a unique description for each color and size of each shirt. A single description is enough.

Additionally, some business models, like grocery stores, may have too much inventory or inventory that changes too frequently to reasonably write a description for each apple or loaf of bread that goes on and off the shelves. In such cases, it may be more appropriate to write overall category descriptions of the types of inventory you typically stock rather than more granular descriptions.

For the majority of local business models (think dentists, hardware stores, lawyers, contractors, caterers, plumbers, retailers, etc.), every unique service you offer or product you plan to sell online as well as offline should have its own description. If your inventory is large, you may need to build out your descriptions in stages over a reasonable time frame.

2. How unique does each description need to be?

There are two main flavors of this FAQ.

The first typically stems from retailers who are selling mass-produced inventory and want to know if Google will penalize or demote them in any way for using manufacturer’s descriptions as their product description. Business owners may have heard of “duplicate content penalties” and be worried that their website will be in trouble for cutting and pasting the descriptions that exist on manufacturers’ sites.

In 2021, Google’s own John Mueller directly addressed this concern, saying:

“So there are two aspects here when it comes to duplicate content. First of all, you don’t get a penalty for duplicate content… the only time we would have something like a penalty or an algorithmic action or manual action is when the whole website is purely duplicated content… if it’s one website that is scraping other websites, for example.

If these are e-commerce sites and you have the description that’s the same and the rest of your website is different, that’s perfectly fine.You don’t need to worry about any demotion or dropping in ranking or anything.”

In other words, if you must, you can use manufacturers’ descriptions, provided the rest of your website is unique. But note our emphasis on if you must. Any time you use someone else’s content instead of writing your own, you lose the opportunity to differentiate your brand from others and to be chosen by customers for that uniqueness.

Picture a scenario in which five hardware stores in the same city are all using the exact same manufacturer’s description for the same barbecue. How is that description going to help your hardware store stand out in the search engine results and be chosen over the other four? Ideally, then, you should aim for as much uniqueness and helpfulness as possible if your need to compete is a priority. It may not be, in markets with a low level of competition, of course.

The second flavor of this FAQ commonly stems from multi-location businesses, like a landscaping business with three different offices in adjacent cities. Owners ask whether they need to have a unique description for “drought-tolerant landscaping Novato”, another for “drought-tolerant landscaping San Rafael” and yet another for “drought-tolerant landscaping Mill Valley” with a unique page on the site for each variant.

The answer is that, unless a product or service is substantially different in each of your service cities, no, it’s not typically necessary to do this. Instead, you will aim to have a page for each city where you have a physical location or serve customers and another page for each product or service. You don’t typically need a page for every possible combination of the two components, and, in fact, it can be wading into dangerous waters to take this approach.

In our introduction, we covered how the Helpful Content Update specifically looks at sites that have a pattern of publishing large volumes of low-quality content. The hazard with taking the approach of creating large numbers of pages to cover every city + product/service variant for a multi-location business is that you will end up generating low-quality content because there isn’t actually anything unique or helpful to say across dozens of these similar pages. Instead of being helped, customer experience becomes worse, and overall site quality can suffer. A good rule of thumb is that, unless you have something unique to say, don’t just keep saying (and publishing) the same statement over and over, swapping out a keyword here and there in the hopes of engaging people. It’s seldom a great strategy.

3. How long do my product/service descriptions need to be?

You may have encountered SEO advice around the web claiming that your product/service descriptions and website pages need to be a certain length to please Google. This is a myth, and there is no need to count the characters of the main content on any page.

Instead, you should take a two-pronged approach to each description you write. First, start your pages with something called a TL;DR. This stands for “Too Long; Didn’t Read” and refers to website visitors who need to be served with key facts at the top of your description because they aren’t going to read much content before making a decision. Serve them up a short paragraph, list, or even an infographic that immediately and succinctly covers the USP/UVP of a particular good or service.

Then, for readers who are more seriously researching something you offer, move on from there to more fully describe the attributes of the item. Be as detailed as possible, answering every FAQ you can think of surrounding the offering, and providing as many incentives as possible for the potential customer to choose this item and your business.

Competitive product pages can contain many types of content, including descriptions, statistics and other data, images, videos, reviews, and links to other pages of related content. There is no length limit, and each page is a chance for you to earn high visibility in the search engine results because you have put in the effort to publish a best-in-market asset.

A best practice is to look at the results Google is currently returning for your desired keyword phrases. Notice what types of content Google is returning. Do you see lots of images, or videos, or short answers, or lengthy articles? The SERPs are full of great hints for which types of media may perform best and most closely match the intent of customers visiting your product and service landing pages.

4. How do I use my keywords in my descriptions?

In your keyword research phase, you investigated how people are searching for each of your goods and services. Your findings are what you should be incorporating into each description you write. Here’s a handy tutorial about grouping keywords by intent if you’d like more help with seeing patterns. Covering any subject fully means using customers' own questions and language to present information that matters to them.

Unfortunately, the web is full of outdated advice and myths about how to incorporate keywords into on-page website content. For example, some resources insist you must have a specific “keyword density” and repeat keyword phrases over and over again, which is a manipulative practice that stems from a former Google era.

Businesses tend to fare better over the long haul and avoid drastic ranking drops connected with Google updates if they ignore questionable and misleading SEO tactics and instead stick to Google’s primary guideline of writing for people. A well-optimized product or service page on your site that incorporates your keyword findings in natural language should cover the intent of searchers and be understandable by search engines, without much worry about tricks or tactics. Best practices include featuring your discovered keyword phrases in webpage elements, including:

• Title tags
• Header tags
• Meta descriptions
• Alt text
• Link anchor text
• Page content

Get trustworthy insight into making the most of each of these elements and more in Moz’s celebrated Beginner’s Guide to SEO. The process of optimizing your descriptions with your keyword findings for best performance can seem like a daunting skill to acquire, but if you keep in mind that your overall goal is simply to communicate what customers need to know in the language they use to search for what you offer, the process will become normal and natural to you.

5. What about using AI chat to generate my local product and service descriptions?

At the time of authoring this guide, AI chat functions like Bard and ChatGPT are making big headlines. Because these bots can be commanded to produce large volumes of content with little or no effort on the part of website owners, there is a strong temptation to generate assets like product and service descriptions instead of making the investment in writing them. Some fans even claim that AI chat levels the playing field for small businesses because it enables these companies to compete with larger brands in terms of the rate and volume of content publication.

While this might sound like a good idea, and be especially appealing to busy local business owners, there are some significant pitfalls to taking this approach, including:

1. AI routinely generates false statements. If published by your business, this could cost you sales, damage your reputation, and even potentially result in litigation.

2. Google’s stance on AI-generated content seems to be in flux. In the past, Google seemed to regard such content as falling outside its familiar mantra of creating content for people rather than search engines. Now Google has launched its own AI chat, called Bard, and appears to be modifying its position, but SEO history teaches us to beware of tactics that might end up becoming the subject of future Google updates and penalties.

3. AI content generation is a shortcut. If you and all of your competitors decide to use it, how will you differentiate your brand for customers? Some practitioners recommend using AI to generate content that you then re-write to some degree, but this step may actually end up being more of a hurdle than a door to presenting your business with true imagination and originality. Beware of bland content or any strategy that could end up with customers not being able to tell the difference between you and your competitors.

AI chat has taken us into a new and experimental phase of the internet, and some local business owners will want to experiment to see if it actually reduces workloads while still producing something actionable for customers. The larger the business, the greater the appeal may be to use AI to generate hundreds or thousands of pages of content, and this strategy could end up working for some, but this also calls for big reminders that one of the longstanding USPs of small local businesses is their uniqueness and human touch. If the web becomes full of AI content, small local businesses may have the opportunity to stand out by really embracing E-E-A-T and a truly human approach to serving communities.

Fulfillment ecosystem

Unless your business can completely fulfill its profit goals from solely offline transactions, you’ll need to be part of the group of local businesses offering both real-world and online purchasing. This trend has been accelerated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and while many customers have returned to shopping in person, others continue to prefer the safety and convenience of digital transactions.

Options for fulfillment have truly blossomed, and now is the time to take what you know about your customers’ needs and determine all of the ways in which you will facilitate their purchases. Your fulfillment ecosystem should include some or all of the following:

• Shop in-store with multiple payment options
• Buy online, pick-up in-store
• Buy online, pick up curbside
• Buy online, pick up at a distribution center or drop off location
• Buy online for first-party home delivery
• Buy online for third-party home delivery
• Buy online for remote shipping
• Order via phone, email, or text with multiple payment options
• In-house booking system
• Third-party booking system
• Telemeetings
• Product availability through third parties (other businesses vending your products both on and offline)

Customers definitely need to know if your options meet their needs, and you should be certain that your entire fulfillment ecosystem is published in the following places:

• Your website
• Your local business listings
• Your social media profiles
• Your emails
• In-store signage
• Employee training manuals
• Phone scripts for your staff

A simple step like organizing all your fulfillment methodologies can be easily overlooked because it’s so well known to the business owner and staff, but potential customers won’t know what you offer unless you publicize it.

Contact ecosystem

As with your fulfillment ecosystem, write an organized list of every way in which customers can contact and interact with your business, including

• Accurate and complete addresses for each of your locations for in-person transactions
• Accurate hours of operation, including holiday hours
• All phone numbers, including after-hours numbers if you have them
• All text numbers, including after-hour text numbers if you have them
• Email
• Direct messaging
• Live chat
• Forms
• Fax number
• In-store suggestion/feedback boxes
• Third-party reviews, with a guaranteed response from the owner
• First-party reviews, with a guaranteed response from the owner
• Google Questions and Answers, with a guaranteed response from the owner
• Local events at which your business will be present for face-to-face interactions

Publish this information wherever appropriate, including

• Website
• Local business listings
• Google Questions and Answers
• Google Updates
• Social media profiles
• Storefront and in-store signage
• Print sales and marketing materials

The two most important aspects of all the points in your contact ecosystem are that they are easily discoverable on your various online assets and that they are accurate. This is why ongoing local business listings management for accuracy and responsiveness is so vital to customer satisfaction, reputation, and revenue. It’s important that no customer is inconvenienced by misinformation and that every customer who reaches out via any method receives a prompt response.

Domain and Page URLs

Knowing that keywords in your domain can contribute to your rankings can bring up a dilemma for local businesses. For example, if your real-world business name is Anderson’s Nursery, you’re located in Sacramento, and you mainly sell California native plants, should you buy the domain AndersonsNursery.com, or should you opt for a more keyword-oriented domain name like AndersonsNativePlants.com, or even one like CaliforniaNativePlantNurserySacramento.com?

If you’re debating this, read Moz’s guide to choosing and optimizing domains and URLs, and keep in mind that you don’t want to go overboard with adding extraneous keywords to your domain. A short domain that reflects your brand rather than extra keywords may be a better choice for your overall branding and marketing, while one that is too long or over-optimized may look untrustworthy to customers. Further, unless your business never plans to expand beyond the city in which it’s located, avoid using city names in your business name or domain name. You don’t want to be a company called Sacramento Native Plants at sacramentonativeplants.com when the day comes that you open new locations in San Francisco, San Diego, and Seattle. Be sure your domain allows you to grow!

If you’ve already got a domain and website, URLs become a hot topic for your business every time you create a new page on your website. The keywords in each page URL are a ranking signal. In the above screenshot, you’ll see how this multi-location plant nursery has a subfolder for locations, and within that subfolder are landing pages for each of its city locations, this one being for a location on Miller Avenue in Mill Valley. Here’s another example of a nursery with a URL optimized for a particular plant it sells called Achillea Terra Cotta:

To better optimize the URL for this page and make it clearer to Google and customers that this plant is available at the nursery’s location in Point Reyes, California, this URL could be improved to read:

https://mostlynatives.com/plants/achlliea-terra-cotta-point-reyes

In general, local business website page URLs should incorporate the location of the business to continuously emphasize that the product or service being sold is available in the location of the searcher. An important part of your content publication and marketing strategy will be creating a unique and optimized URL for every page that goes live on your site, incorporating the terms you found in your customer and keyword research that are relevant to the contents of each page.

Logo

At first glance, a logo like this one for Oaktown Native Plant Nursery may just seem like an image, end of story. Your logo is not only a unit of content that’s key to helping your brand become a local household name every time customers see it around town – images are also a very big deal on the web.

Did you know that:

• Google can parse the contents of an image

• Images in Google’s SERPs can occupy 30% of mobile screen space

• Your logo should have an alt tag to make it accessible to customers with visual assistance needs, as well as providing another readable signal to search engines

• The file name of your logo image can be optimized with your branded keywords

• The link and link anchor text of your logo, which should link back to your home page from across your website, can also be optimized with some core keywords for your brand

• You can upload your logo image to your Google Business Profile and many other local business listings to keep building your brand

• There is a special Schema markup for company logos which helps further identify your business to Google and can also contain a few of your core keywords

• Google will often display your logo next to your organic entry in the search results

• 75% of customers recognize a brand by its logo

A logo may seem like such a small thing, but it’s central to brand identity and belongs on your real-world location, company vehicles, email campaigns, online listings, social profiles, print materials, and so much more. If you’re on a shoestring budget, you can use the free version of a program like Canva to design your own, though a professionally designed logo should be a goal to ensure the presentation of your business signals trustworthiness and high quality.

Real-world signage

Did you know that Google can read your street signage as a method of establishing that your business is legitimately located at a stated address? And it’s not just your business sign that matters to new customers trying to find you in the real world. Every kind of signage on your storefront, inside your business, on your vehicles, on advertising around town, and on your packaging materials, receipts, and other print assets needs to be considered as part of your content marketing strategy.

Whether it’s a QR code poster in your shop window that a pedestrian encounters on an after-hours stroll or a sign hanging over your cash register urging customers to feel welcome bringing complaints to you in person (instead of resorting to negative online reviews), your real-world signage should reflect everything you’ve learned about your community in the customer research phase of your work. Use your customers’ own language to speak to them with signage, to guide them through the shopping experience, and to request their feedback to help you build a better business.

Slogan

Did you know that 47% of customers look at slogans to help them understand a brand’s purpose? When you consider that the decision to shop locally is often a values-based choice, your business should carefully consider how to match your slogan to the aspirations you discovered in your customer and keyword research.

Mutli-national brands can get away with vague but famous slogans like “Just Do It” because advertising budgets allow them to saturate the world with whatever phrase they choose. Local businesses don’t typically have this kind of funding or reach and should consider how best to communicate a message to neighbors that signals shared values and evokes a positive emotional response in ten words or less. If you’re having trouble brainstorming, Shopify has a free slogan generator. Put in some keywords and see what comes up, but then write your own.

Returning to our hypothetical plant nursery, let’s say the owner discovered that their community is deeply engaged in a campaign to stop the loss of bees and other pollinators in their region. An effective slogan for the nursery might read:

More native plants, more bees in Novato

Or

Grow the plant place to be for Novato bees

Or

Plant natives for thriving pollinators in Novato

Once you’ve settled on the right slogan for the community you serve, publicize it on your website, social profiles, local business listings (in the description), real-world signage, company vehicles, online and offline advertising, and print marketing materials. And don’t overlook the power of turning your slogan into a jingle for local radio advertising. Audio marketing can be very effective when it’s memorable. After all, 82% of US adults still listen to the radio once a week.

Mission and vision statement

If you search for your business name + mission statement, what does Google bring up? The business in the screenshot below has taken the time to write a full and eloquent mission and vision statement, so Google has plenty it can excerpt from that might meet the intent of potential customers.

Your task is to write a mission and vision statement that serves two main purposes:

1. Codifies for all members of your staff why and how your company operates. The values expressed are meant to guide everyday operations, decisions, and goals.

2. Signals to potential customers why your business is the best local choice based on the aspirations you discovered in your customer research and keyword research work.

A good mission and vision statement can do all this for your business, and it can exist on a page of your website that serves not only as a rich source of key phrases that match many customer intents but as a local beacon of values your neighbors want to know you share with them.

Company & customer policy

Your company and customer policies may be some of the most meaningful documents your company ever creates because customer satisfaction is the basis of local business success. How well your staff is trained to treat customers fairly and how much customers learn to trust your brand is of ultimate importance. This is the basis of the all-important relationships you are hoping to build with the people you want to serve. It’s how first-time customers become loyal patrons.

One of the best examples you’ll see of communicating trustworthiness to consumers exists on the home page and in the catalogs of The Vermont Country Store. It includes a 100% satisfaction guarantee and a “Customer Bill of Rights” that focuses on how customers can expect to be treated. It also outlines important information about their hassle-free return policy in case a purchase isn’t up to their standards or fails to meet the high standards of the business. This offers reassurance and a sense of security prior to purchase.

A good customer service policy is respectful and generous, and conveys that the business trusts and regards customers highly, rather than treating them with suspicion or indifference. Write a customer service policy that encapsulates your highest ideals of serving the public and make it highly visible on your website.

Then, enshrine those values in your company policies that are used to train all incoming staff. Pay special attention to the tone and voice your business uses to communicate with customers and have a detailed explanation of how complaint resolution happens at your company. Spell out how much initiative you authorize each employee to take to ensure customers are restored to satisfaction when problems arise and how to escalate serious complaints to the right people. Your good reputation depends on these details. 65% of review writers say bad or rude service has caused them to write negative local business reviews.

Finally, be sure your policy includes goals for how quickly your business responds to reviews. 65% of customers expect a response in two days or less – the sooner, the better. Meanwhile, 62% will give your business a second chance after a disappointment if your response to their review solves their problems. Swift, problem-solving owner responses to reviews should be viewed as one of the key elements of your local business content marketing strategy.

Proofs of Local Business E-E-A-T

We defined Google’s E-E-A-T emphasis in the introduction to this guide, and each of its principles can be put into practice in special ways for local businesses.

Experience — Let your customers' experiences take center stage by including their reviews, testimonials, and perspectives on your website. Showcasing customers’ first-hand experiences with your brand and its products and services is the most direct way to respond to this factor.

Expertise — Showcase your formal credentials, licenses, accreditations, and professional background on your website, as well as create content that proves your work history, such as blog posts or service pages that document completed client projects like homes you’ve remodeled, dogs you’ve boarded, or gardens you’ve landscaped. Add an author bio to blog posts and articles that briefly summarize the expertise of the author. The above screenshot shows how Avant Gardening & Landscaping showcases the expertise of its staff.

Authoritativeness — You can intentionally build some signals relating to this factor, but others you have to earn on the basis of merit. For the former, build out your local business listings (a.k.a. structured citations) on trusted platforms so that recognized sites are citing your business as a valid entity. For the latter, you will need to earn less formal mentions (a.k.a. unstructured citations) and links from sites that relate to your industry or geography to credibly prove to Google that authoritative publications recognize your business. We’ll dive more deeply into this topic later in this guide.

Trust — Reviews are almost certainly a major trust signal, but don’t overlook how vital it is to publish complete and accurate contact information on your website and around the web, as well as prominent company policy information. Your website security standards, shipping/returns policy, consumer protections, and customer satisfaction guarantees all go to prove that your business is trustworthy. Meanwhile, your site should offer the best possible user experience and avoid tactics like hiding content behind ads. Remember, Google says trust is the most important part of E-E-A-T!

Now, with your research well in hand and your foundational assets created, you are ready to move forward to publishing the core elements of your content strategy. Time to head to Chapter Two!

Next up: Core Website-Based Content Assets

Written by Miriam Ellis and the Moz staff.