Offsite Content Assets

You’re now ready to put down roots and branch out across the wider web to market your business with the exciting objective of becoming listed, cited, and linked to by other sites and platforms. Like a great tree, you are establishing yourself in the local landscape. This phase of work will build a strong and broad presence for your business and is highly related to the “authoritativeness” signal of E-E-A-T. The more authoritative sites mention and link to your local business, the more search engines, like Google, come to see you as a relevant answer to searchers’ queries. And, the more places that customers encounter your business online, the greater your chances of being chosen for transactions. These are simple principles, but they take some work to implement, so let’s jump in!

In this chapter:

• Local business listings
• Review acquisition, management, and analysis
• Unstructured citations
• Inbound link strategy
• Featured snippets
• Email marketing
• Public relations (PR)
• Paid advertising
• Social media marketing
• Social media marketing and social marketing

Local business listings are profiles of your company on platforms like Google Business Profile, Yelp, or TripAdvisor that exist to publish this type of information. These types of listings are also called structured citations because they formally cite your business with specific information (like your business name, address, phone number, and hours of operation), as opposed to more loosely mentioning your company in passing, like a casual reference in a blog post.

Google’s local platform often dominates how we talk about local business listings. However, a complete marketing strategy should include getting listed across the many search engines, data aggregators, and directories that make up the Local Search Ecosystem.

Search Engines

• Google
• Bing
• Apple

Primary Data Aggregators

• Foursquare
• Data Axle (formerly Infogroup)
• Neustar Localeze

Major Directories and Important Platforms

• Yelp
• Facebook
• Instagram
• YP
• Better Business Bureau
• Superpages
• DexKnows
• BrownBook
• Judy’s Book
• Waze
• Uber
• Nextdoor
• ezLocal
• CitySquares
• Cylex
• Hotfrog
• USInfo
• ShowMe Local
• TomTom
• Here
• Opendi
• Yalwa
• iGlobal
• Manta
• Tupalo
• US City
• N49
• Pages24
• Find Open
• Whereto
• Navmii

Geo/Industry-Specific Platforms

• Directories for your industry, like FindLaw.com for law firms or TripAdvisor.com for hotels
• Directories for your city, like local Chamber of Commerce branches
• Other city-based hubs of local business listings, like community sites

Search engines, data aggregators, and directories together make up the complex but important Local Search Ecosystem. They also play a central role in local business marketing, with the goal of ranking well in the local component of search engines (like Google, Bing, and Apple Maps) and of being visible on other platforms your customers use.

One of the largest surveys ever conducted on the impacts of structured citations found that the sweet spot revolves around getting listed on about 30-40 high-quality platforms to enjoy maximum visibility in search. Benefits of this strategy include a 102% increase in requests for driving directions, a 13% increase in phone calls, and an 87% increase in clicks to your website.

Given that an increase in any of these metrics can represent significant revenue growth for local businesses, it’s clear why mastering the art of local business listing management matters so much to your content strategy. You can find a complete guide on all the major elements of Google Business Profiles here. You’ll be publishing everything you listed in your Contact Ecosystem (in Chapter One) on these platforms. Some listings, like your Google Business Profile, feature additional and robust content marketing opportunities. We’ll cover a few of these options next.

Google Updates (formerly known as Google Posts)

Google updates are like a micro-blog that appear right on your listing. Google Updates come in three flavors:

• General updates (which stay live for 28 days and then get archived)
• Offers (which you can set a date range on)
• Events (which stay live until the event date you set is over.)

You have 1,500 characters to play with, and you can include images that include text, and clickable buttons that take searchers to your website for more information.

You can write and post an update by clicking on the Add Update tab in the New Merchant Experience, which appears when you’re logged into your Google account, and look up your business name.

A recent study by Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky found that updates perform best if they:

• Avoid using ALL CAPS in the title, but do include emojis 😍
• Use custom images (not stock photography)
• Use text within images, like a photo of a product overlaid with text "Sale Ends Monday" or "Shop Our Sale Now!"
• Have a strong call to action
• Feature specials or discounts
• Create a sense of urgency

Other creative uses of these updates include featuring UGC like especially great reviews, mini-stories about customers’ experiences, or as a showcase for community involvement. While Google Updates have no observable impact on local pack rankings, they provide free, highly visible screen space for you to give extra reasons for customers to choose you. Look deeply into your customer, keyword, and market research findings for inspiration.

Categories

Sometimes just a word or two can end up playing a pivotal role in your content marketing strategy and in how you rank! Under the Edit Profile tab of your New Merchant Experience, select a primary category and up to 10 total categories to explain what your business is. Read this complete guide on how to choose the right Google Business Profile categories on the basis of research. It’s vital to get this right because categories do directly impact local rankings in Google, and miscategorized businesses will seldom show up for important phrases.

Images and videos

Rich, engaging content like images and videos play a key role in your content marketing. A Google survey found that people are 90% more likely to buy from businesses that have photos in their organic and local results. Images impact rankings, and Google can understand their content. They attract visually oriented users and can influence conversions. You can add both images and videos to your Google Business Profile. You can add both images and videos to your Google Business Profile.

Take and upload pictures covering every aspect of your business premises and showcasing your main product/service lines. Add new photos and videos on a slow but steady basis to reflect seasonality and other developments at your company. Here are Google’s guidelines (which we recommend reading in full) for both forms of media:

Photo guidelines

Your photos look best on Google if they meet the following standards:

• Format: JPG or PNG.
• Size: Between 10 KB and 5 MB.
• Recommended resolution: 720 px tall, 720 px wide.
• Minimum resolution: 250 px tall, 250 px wide.
• Quality: The photo should be in focus and well-lit and have no significant alterations or excessive use of filters. In other words, the image should represent reality.

Video guidelines

Make sure your videos meet the following requirements:

• Duration: Up to 30 seconds long
• File size: Up to 75 MB
• Resolution: 720p or higher

Business owners can’t directly control which photo Google shows as their main profile photo. Google can and does alter this at will, possibly based on words in searchers’ queries, or metrics like which photo is oldest or which has the most views. Because this is beyond your control, your best practice is to adhere to the guidelines and be sure you’ve uploaded lots of high-quality photos so that you’re proud of whatever is displayed.

Website URL

The website link on your listing is vital to your content marketing strategy because you get to choose how customers transition from a third-party platform to a platform where you fully control the quality of their experience. For single-location businesses, this link will usually point to your website home page, which will typically have the highest Page Authority to help with your ability to rank in Google’s local packs, finders, and Maps.

However, there are two main instances in which the business may choose to point their listings to a different page on their site.

1. Multi-location businesses — If you link from each of your multi-location listings to its respective landing page on your website, this typically provides the best user experience. It ensures that the visitor is being taken from a listing for a particular location to a website page for that location instead of being dropped on the home page and having to go seeking the location landing page for themselves. However, some businesses choose to prioritize the goal of ranking more highly over a quality user experience and link all their listings to the home page because it usually has the highest Page Authority (ability to assist with rankings). The choice is up to you.

2. Multi-practitioner businesses — In nearly every case, it’s a best practice to link your multi-practitioner listings to your practitioner landing pages. If you link them all to the website home page, then the practitioners’ listings can end up competing for visibility with the practice’s listing in Google’s local results. This can create headaches for the brand, which are best avoided by linking each practitioner’s listing to their own landing page and having them choose Google Business Profile categories that aren’t already being used for the main practice listing.

Description

Most local business listing platforms let you write a description, and this is an excellent spot for the USP/UVP you’ve identified. It’s also a good area for you to highlight specific attributes of your business that you know matter to customers, such as accessibility, sustainability, or diversity, equity, & inclusion (DEI) principles. Like updates, the text in your description has no demonstrable impact on local rankings, but use the findings of your research to incorporate the language you know customers use in talking about your business.

Questions and Answers

You have two opportunities related to the Q&A section of your Google Business Profile. Firstly, you can use the New Merchant Experience to upload and answer the top FAQs you’ve identified in your earlier research. This can help people get a quick answer about things you know they ask all the time. Additionally, you should be continuously monitoring this section for new incoming questions from the public.

Moz Local customers receive alerts whenever new questions arrive so that you can ensure that potential customers are receiving authoritative answers directly from your business. In the absence of management, potential customers may receive unhelpful and misinformed answers from the general public, which represents a loss of control over the customer’s experience of your brand.

Products

Upload photos and short descriptions of your best products and services via the New Merchant Experience and be sure they include links to the right pages on your website for more information.

Attributes

Also located under the Edit Profile tab is the ability to add attributes that Google will combine with information they get from the public about specific features of your business. Use this section to identify good things about your company, like who owns the business, amenities, such as whether a building has gender-neutral restrooms, protocols, such as whether an appointment is required to visit a business, or layout information, such as the presence of wheelchair-accessible entrances.

These tiny content marketing gems can mean so much to members of your local community and help Google match your business to queries that specify these attributes in their searches, as shown in this local pack result:

Services

Businesses in some categories will be offered a pre-set selection of services they can add to their Google Business Profiles. Like categories, these choices can directly impact your local rankings, so definitely choose any that match what your business offers. Additionally, look at the list of services for further content inspiration for your website and social media marketing. Are you covering all the topics Google is referencing? If not, consider how you can best incorporate these phrases into your content.

Other GBP Features

Depending on your business model, a tremendous array of other GBP content features may be at your fingertips, including:

• See What’s In Store product listings, if you sign up with Google’s Pointy service
• Menus for restaurants
• Buttons for bookings, messaging, reservations, ordering food, and more
• Links to your social media profiles
• Special features for hotel listings
• And so much more!

In sum, each local business listing platform has its own features for you to explore and integrate into your content marketing strategy, but with so many opportunities, it’s easy to see how the management of multiple listings across multiple platforms can quickly become a big chore. Software like Moz Local was developed to lighten the work by helping you:

• Get listed across major platforms in the Local Search Ecosystem
• Edit your business information in one dashboard for distribution across the ecosystem any time key features of your business change, such as hours or phone numbers
• Discover and resolve detrimental duplicate listings
• Be alerted to incoming reviews and questions
• Quickly publish review and question responses
• Analyze review sentiment
• Analyze how the public is interacting with your listings
• Post on social platforms

With an approach based on all the research you’ve done, and perhaps some good tools, your local business listings will become a major customer service vehicle, a content marketing showcase, and the key seat of your online reputation, which we’ll turn to next.

Statistics tell the most compelling story of why local business reviews will come to play a starring role in your content publication and marketing strategy. Our most recent Local Business Review Survey showed that:

• 96% of your potential customers read local business reviews

• For gauging trust, 86% of consumers say reviews are either “the most” important or a “somewhat” important factor

• Only 14% of people never write reviews; you can earn plenty of reviews if you simply keep asking

• When customers write reviews, 11% expect a response within 2 hours, 21% expect a response within 24 hours, and 28% expect a response within 48 hours

• Negative reviews aren’t as scary as they seem; if you respond well, it will improve the impression 67% of customers have of your brand, and 62% will give your company a second chance if you resolve their complaint

• After reading reviews, 91% of consumers’ next steps occur in areas completely controlled by the business, such as the company’s website, premises, and direct contact options

• Aspects of Google Business Profile reviews, including number, rating, and recency, demonstrably impact local rankings

With so much power in play, local businesses need to master three arts related to reviews in order to be recognized by search engines and customers as the best choice in town. We’ll cover each of these now.

1. Review acquisition

Reviews can only become a robust component of your content marketing when you have plenty of them. The number of reviews you need to earn is loosely based on the competitive level of your market. If the top competitors you identified in your market research phase all have X number of reviews, your goal will be to achieve and then surpass that number.

Fortunately, with the exception of Yelp, most third-party review platforms are perfectly fine with you requesting reviews from your customers. Now is a good time to look again at Google’s prohibited and restricted content guidelines, which you encountered in the introduction of this guide. Familiarize yourself with these guidelines so that you won’t accidentally engage in a forbidden review-related activity.

Best practices for review acquisition include:

• Asking a limited number of customers per month to review your business; and engaging in an activity that brings in a flood of reviews all at once can result in those reviews being filtered out by the platform

• Offering customers a variety of review platforms to choose from so that they can write this vital content wherever they feel most comfortable

• Asking for reviews via multiple methods, including in-person, email, texting, in-store signage, and print materials

To protect your business’ good name, never engage in any of the following activities:

• Reviewing yourself or having staff and former staff review your business
• Offering any type of incentive in exchange for reviews
• Posting reviews on behalf of customers
• Setting up review kiosk stations at your place of business
• Hiring any marketer who offers review spam as a service; no marketer in your employ should be paying for, incentivizing, or otherwise spamming reviews on your behalf
• Engaging in any deceptive review practice; these actions have led to multiple lawsuits, fines, profile removal, and other serious damages

When asked, over half of customers will leave you a review, but the truth is that 39% of surveyed customers say they haven’t received a single review request in the past 5 years. Meanwhile, as shown in the above image, the top reason most customers don’t review your business is because they forget to. Don’t be shy about following up if your initial review request doesn’t result in action taken. So much opportunity is being left on the table. You can best activate this amazing and free group of content writers for your business by collecting their email addresses or phone numbers at the time of service and following up shortly after with links to your profiles.

Think of review acquisition as a marathon rather than a sprint. The goal is to earn a steady drip of recent, positive reviews over time for the life of your business. As covered earlier in this guide, the review content you earn should be published on multiple pages of your website, including review pages, location and city landing pages, and multi-practitioner landing pages. It can also be featured on your social profiles, in Google Updates, and even on store signage and advertising.

2. Review Management

Your primary goals in managing reviews are to know when new reviews come in and to offer a speedy and appropriate response. If you are on a tight budget, you can check all of your review profiles manually on a regular basis to catch incoming reviews. If your business is in a competitive market or has multiple locations or practitioners, review management software like Moz Local can quickly become a necessity.

As soon as you have your review acquisition strategy underway, six FAQs will quickly emerge:

1. Do I need to respond to all reviews?

Yes. Reviews are customer service. Just as you wouldn’t ever ignore a customer who approached you to chat at your business location, you should never ignore a review. If you have to prioritize which reviews to answer, respond to negative reviews first because 64% of negative review writers are expecting a response from you, while only 40% of positive review writers expect responses. The truth is, these are very low consumer expectations, and your business should ensure your customers are taken care of better than this by responding to all reviews.

2. How quickly do I need to respond to reviews?

60% of customers expect a response within 2 or less days, but the sooner, the better. Particularly when a negative review comes in, you have a limited time window to win the customer back with a response that solves their problems.

3. How should I respond to negative reviews?

More than 90% of customers are influenced by how businesses respond to reviews. This means that your owner's response to a complaint isn’t just a 1:1 transaction but is a piece of content the general public will be reading to assess how well you treat all customers.

First, you need to know what to avoid in responding to a complaint:

• Don’t fail to offer a solution to a stated problem, or 54% of customers will definitely avoid your business
• Don’t accuse a customer of lying or 33% of customers will definitely avoid your business
• Don’t forget to apologize, or 47% of customers will definitely avoid your business
• Don’t argue with the customer or 46% of customers will definitely avoid your business

Every time a new negative review comes in (and nearly all businesses will receive some complaints), you have two key tasks.

The first is to respond as quickly as possible with a professional, non-combative apology and an offer of a solution to the problem. For example, if a customer complains that the drinks machine at your restaurant is broken, say you are sorry for the inconvenience, tell them that you have had the machine repaired, and offer something nice like a free beverage on their next visit. If you do a great job resolving the complaint, 63% of negative reviewers will update their rating and review of your business to reflect their newly improved impression of your company.

The second task is to keep a running log of all complaints your business receives because they are a vital source of quality control. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure when it comes to preventing negative reviews. Your customer service policies being carried out to the fullest and delighting customers will ensure that most of the reviews you receive are positive. But, when negative sentiment comes through, it’s free business intelligence for how you can adjust your operations to satisfy more customers. In this respect, complaints are actually a secret gift!

4. How should I handle review spam?

If you receive a review that violates Google’s guidelines or that you are convinced doesn’t originate from an actual customer and is, instead, a malicious attack on your business, don’t respond to it. Instead, use Google’s Dispute Customer Review form and provide as much detail as you can to make your case for why the review should be removed. If Google does not act on your request by removing the negative review, you have three main options:

• If your reputation has been seriously damaged by a false claim about your company, you may need to pursue litigation
• If you are hit by a sudden wave of multiple negative reviews, you may have to publicize the issue via the media to get Google to act
• You can choose to ignore the presence of a single negative review and counteract it by actively seeking multiple, new positive reviews.

Unfortunately, review spam is a fact of life in Google’s system, and Google’s history is indicative of a lack of will to truly resolve this long-standing issue. This is just one more reason why you need to stay on top of incoming reviews so that you can catch spam if it happens and do your best to report it in hopes of removal.

5. How should I respond to positive reviews?

If you’re pressed for time, you can get by with a simple “thank you” when customers write positive reviews. However, given the massive influence of owner responses on the public, local businesses looking to stand out from the crowd can put a little more effort into their notes of appreciation.

If, for example, a customer praises a dish your restaurant prepared, you could mention a special ingredient that is used, and say you hope they’ll come back to try a similar dish your chef has just perfected. Or, if a customer praises your selection of native wildflower seeds, you could mention a native landscaping workshop coming up in the next few months. The point is to think of reviews as a two-way conversation and creative businesses certainly have the opportunity to say more than just two words of gratitude.

6. Should I automate review responses?

These days, it’s possible to use software and even AI chatbots to formulate your review responses. At the large end of the local business spectrum, as in the case of a multi-location enterprise, such automation may need to be considered if the brand is receiving hundreds of reviews a month. However, a hidden cost of this approach can be a lost connection with customers who so often choose to shop locally because they want a meaningful relationship. Automation may be convenient, but carefully weigh whether it’s distancing you from your community, and be wary of responses that look robotic or lack personality.

At the small end of the local business spectrum, software that offers customizable response templates can be an aid to the workflows of busy entrepreneurs. The main thing to avoid is taking such an automated approach that you are missing the huge opportunity to custom-write responses that differentiate your business from others on the local scene. Platforms like Google are giving you free screen real estate to distinguish your brand via its owner responses. Make the most of it.

An unstructured citation is any web-based reference to your partial or complete business name and contact information. To see this in action, search for your business in Google and note what comes up in the organic results.

Online mentions of your business that don’t stem from your own site or from a formal local business listing platform fall under the umbrella term of unstructured citations. Whereas structured citations are citations you build when you create your local business listings. For example, your listing on Yelp is a structured citation but as seen in the example above, this local canoe tour business is being cited in all kinds of publications, including the USDA website, a state tourism site, a national tourism site, and a TV news station. Other sources of unstructured citations could include:

• Blogs
• Podcasts
• Online news sites
• Press release sites
• Industry or local associations
• Local community hubs
• “Things to do” pages on other local business sites

Unstructured citations tie directly to the “Authoritative” factor of E-E-A-T, which was covered in the introduction to this guide. When trusted websites cite your business, you are building up that “A” in the eyes of Google. Unstructured citations don’t have to include links to your business, but if they do, that’s even better. Linked, unstructured citations (sometimes called “linktations”) are an even stronger signal that a publication regards your business highly enough to link to it. We’ll be covering this especially powerful version of citations in the next section of this guide.

Some unstructured citations may happen without any outreach on your part. For example, if some aspect of your business is highly newsworthy or noteworthy, bloggers, reporters, and people in your community may find out about it on their own and reference it online. If the competitive level of your market is truly low, a handful of mentions may be all you need to meet your customer acquisition goals. But in more competitive markets, active outreach can accomplish the following:

• Grow your authoritativeness
• Help you be found by more customers, in more places, online
• Help you build meaningful relationships with local bloggers, reporters, and other people in your community

Outreach can take the form of an email, phone call, or in-person conversation in which you let a blogger, reporter, or other influential publisher know that something new and noteworthy is happening at your business in the hopes of them covering it. Your content publication and marketing strategy is anchored in writing for customers to solve their needs, but you’ll reach a whole new level of publicity when you build out from this to begin creating additional campaigns that are deserving of greater press.

Look at this journalist for the Los Angeles Times publicizing Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours with a whole lifestyle piece after the company granted an interview:

Here’s a press release published in the press section of Indian Country Today News:

And here is another interview in both podcast and transcription form from a California radio site:

All of these unstructured citations combine to create a rich picture of a real business that Google can readily understand as being a relevant and trusted match for related queries. And when those citations contain links, they are especially helpful to your goals. We’ll turn to the art of earning these next.

There’s a famous 80/20 rule in content marketing that says you should spend 20% of your time writing and the remaining 80% promoting what you’ve written. These figures hold true for local businesses in competitive markets, and earning links is one of the key strategies that will help you begin to gain organic visibility in a crowded field.

Both your basic web pages and your additional published content need to earn links for a variety of reasons.

• Getting discovered, crawled, and indexed by search engines like Google, which move through the web from link to link (i.e. crawling)

• Building up the Page Authority (PA) of your individual pages and the overall Domain Authority (DA) of your website’s URL. Each link pointing to a given URL passes a measure of authority to it, influencing its ability to rank well in organic search engine results. Organic search ranking then impacts local search ranking

• Building up the ”authoritativeness” of your E-E-A-T when search engines discover authoritative online publications linking to and citing pages on your website

• Being discovered by customers who encounter links to your pages across a variety of third-party sites

Local businesses automatically build a small number of links to their own sites every time they fill in the website field on a local business listing they’re creating. However, when your top competitors’ visibility in both the local and organic results is being supported by having earned many other types of links, you’ll need a strong link building campaign, too.

One of the easiest ways to get started is to pursue linktations (linked, unstructured citations) using a tool like Moz’s Link Intersect to help you discover new link opportunities. This tool will show you sites that are linking to your competitors that aren’t yet linking to you.

Imagine you’ve opened a small bed & breakfast (B&B) in Albuquerque called Bottger Mansion. Tourism is big in your city, and you'd like to see how your backlink profile compares to larger resorts in the area and identify possible opportunities for new links.

Enter your URL in the first field of Link Intersect. You can enter just one competitor below that, but you may get more helpful information if you enter at least two top competitors (the tool will allow you to enter up to five). We’ll enter the URLs of two big hotels — Isleta and Sandia. Click the Find Opportunities button, and within seconds, Link Intersect will generate a list of sites that are linking to your competitors but not to you.

In this process, you discover that both Competitor A and Competitor B are being linked to from a site called balloonfiesta.com.

When you click on the Top Referring Page arrow at the far right of the chart, you see that these links exist on a page of businesses that sponsor the balloon event. You’ll also see that this page has a Page Authority of 39 out of 100, which isn’t exceedingly high. However, the topic does seem like it might be a good fit for a business like your B&B because both your establishment and the ballooning fiesta rely heavily on tourism:

By clicking the arrow to the left of the Page Authority column, you can visit the webpage itself to further investigate this possible opportunity. Sure enough, you can see both Isleta and Sandia listed and linked on the list of many sponsors shown on this page of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta website:

At this point, the rest of the work is up to you – deciding whether you should investigate becoming a sponsor and whether the Page Authority and business that an earned link might send is worth the investment. Maybe this is the right fit for you, or maybe you’d rather investigate another opportunity Link Intersect highlighted, like this article from Medium with an outstanding Domain Authority of 95:

Looking further into this, you may realize it’s not a good fit because, unlike your competitors, your B&B isn’t a casino. But could there be a different opportunity for your site to be featured in this publication? Let’s say you discover a journalist on Medium.com who consistently blogs about the outdoors in Albuquerque:

Perhaps your B&B just wrote and published a great guide for spotting local birds that guests may read while they are staying at your establishment. You could reach out to this writer to tell them about your guide, so they can possibly feature it in an upcoming piece.

Or how about this opportunity from momcollective.com:

After investigating further, you find that this blog publishes pieces about events and holiday fun in Albuquerque. If your B&B hosts an annual summer picnic on your cool and shady grounds, these writers might like to feature you.

All this is just a glimpse into the creative work that goes into winning links to assist your discoverability by people and visibility in search engine results. Sometimes, the mere existence of your business is enough to merit a link, but beyond this, the special things your company publishes online and the special things your company does offline can be link-worthy if you learn to make the right connections with publishers.

Once you’ve got a list of possibilities from using a tool like Link Intersect, your next step is to make those connections. Local businesses have three major options for making connections with people who publish digital content:

1. Real-world interactions

If you belong to a local business association, know neighbors who write for the local press, or know neighbors who blog about your locality, mutual regard can create opportunities for them to have something to write about and can allow you to win some nice links. You might meet in person or over the phone to understand how cross-promotion might work amongst your business peers.

Perhaps your B&B would like to send guests to a restaurant for the best barbecue in town, and the barbecue restaurant would like to publish a coupon on their site for a discounted stay at your establishment. You might pick up the phone to tell a local writer something interesting about your business, like a community cleanup you’re sponsoring or a guided tour of the oldest trees in town. The real world is the outstanding benefit local businesses have over virtual ones when it comes to link building. Real relationships can translate into really good links.

2. Online interactions

As a local business owner, you should be following major online voices in your community on social media. Promoting and commenting on the items published by local bloggers, journalists, social media influencers, and organizations helps you get to know your neighbors better. If luck is on your side, you’ll find common bonds with community members.

For example, maybe you are both eager to help your community transition to green energy and end up volunteering together on a committee. Your relationship could then lead to your neighbor writing about the fact that your B&B is now solar-powered.

Being involved in the online community can build a sense of shared identity that can make supporting one another with mentions and links natural. In Chapter Four, we’ll offer more ideas for community involvement

3. Cold outreach

Locality-based link building tends to be a comfortable activity for local business owners, but what if meeting goals means you need to earn links from writers who aren’t local? What if you’ve realized that a link from a writer who covers your industry (instead of your town) could make a big difference for your business in a competitive market?

Maybe your B&B has just debuted a brand new, gourmet, vegan breakfast option, and there is a vegan travel writer whom tourists highly respect, but you don’t know them at all. You’ve created a special page on your site with gorgeous photos of your vegan breakfast trays, detailed with a glowing description, ingredients list, and reviews from vegan guests, and you’d really like this well-known travel blogger to know about it. At this point, you’ll need to do something that may feel a bit scary — cold-emailing a stranger.

Watch this video to prepare yourself to write a link building outreach email that gets opened and considered:

And then watch this video to understand the bigger picture of link building like a pro:

Be prepared for an uphill climb with cold outreach. Backlinko’s Brian Dean analyzed 12 million outreach emails and found that:

• Only 8.5% of link building outreach emails earned a response
• If you email the subject more than once, you can double your chances of earning a response
• Personalizing the subject line of your email boosts response rate by more than 30%
• Wednesdays are the best days to send outreach emails

For most small-to-medium local businesses, a combination of your structured citations, unstructured citations, and some good local and industry links will bring you closer to achieving your core business goals. But, if your business is large, like a chain or franchise, or your market is highly competitive, like a legal firm in a dense metropolis, you may well need to go beyond the use of simple strategies and tools to surpass your local competitors.

Sophisticated software like Moz Link Explorer will help you audit the links on your site and the sites of your competitors so that you can structure large link building campaigns on the basis of real data and track the outcomes of your efforts. To learn more about getting started with this tool, be sure to check out the full Help Hub guide.

If your business scenario dictates that you are going to need to invest seriously in accruing links to compete in the organic and local results, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building for an expert-level education. No matter how big or small your local business is, be sure you heed this guide’s warning on avoiding links that can get your website into trouble with search engines. Pay careful attention to these don'ts:

• Don't buy links
• Don't inject hidden links into a website you don't own by exploiting a security flaw
• Don't overuse keyword-drive anchor text in link building, especially at scale.

A final word on link building in the local business scenario: Sometimes, local business marketers forget about the 80/20 rule referenced at the beginning of this section. They may misunderstand how content marketing is meant to work and believe that their only path is to continuously publish new noteworthy content. While fresh content is an important marketing component, it’s often the case that bringing more attention to the existing content you’ve already created is the smarter effort. By earning new unstructured citations, linktations, and links to your best content, you are letting that content work harder for you, expanding your visibility and audience via increased outreach rather than by creating more pages. Find the right balance of publishing vs. marketing that brings your business closest to meeting its core goals.

An essential habit to get into any time you are hoping to rank well for a new search phrase is to always start by going to Google and performing that exact search. Note what types of content Google is ranking. Do you see a local pack, only organic results, lots of videos or images, or in the case of the above screenshot, a featured snippet result?

Featured snippets are generally paragraphs, lists, videos, or tables that typically appear at the top of the organic search results when Google feels this format will provide the quickest or most helpful answer to a query. Sometimes, Google may fail to understand the local intent of a search and deliver a featured snippet instead of a local pack. A local beekeeper may know that when their neighbors perform the search “what to do about a bee swarm”, they want to contact a nearby professional to ask if a swarm of honey bees will leave on its own or if it needs to be relocated by a specialist. But Google evidently believes the query is simply informational rather than local.

If a query is very important to your business, but Google isn’t serving up a local pack for it to show your business listing, then you need to rely on your organic rankings for visibility. If those rankings are preceded by a featured snippet, you can attempt to “win it” by providing the best answer so that Google can feature your site, as it is doing with this example from Iowa State University.

Watch this helpful Whiteboard Friday on how to discover and make the most of your featured snippet opportunities:

For more tips, read this blog post on how to optimize for featured snippets and be on the lookout for People Also Ask boxes, too. They can be highly localized, as in the case of this query for zoning laws in a particular county:

When you click the last question, you can see that the strength of a local home builder’s website content has enabled them to be chosen as the answer to a query in the results:

As you can see, local packs aren’t the only means by which neighbors can find your business online. Study the SERPs for each of your most important keyword phrases, and consider what types of content you should be publishing to be visible in as many of Google’s formats as possible.

With a return on investment of $36 for every $1 spent, email marketing has stood the test of time as one of the best bets business owners can make. Don’t make the mistake of thinking of email as “old tech.” 92% of US adults use email, over 60% of all age groups state that they prefer receiving brand communications via email, and it’s the #1 marketing channel for nurturing leads. When you add to this that email marketing tools are so inexpensive, the opportunity looks even better!

You have two main questions to answer: how will you collect customer emails, and how will you use email as a marketing channel?

For the first question, these four routes are your main options:

• In-person, at the time of service
• With various CTAs on your website in headers, banners, footers, popups, and within main body text
• With various CTAs on your local and social profiles
• With CTAs in receipt emails asking customers to sign up to receive other communications from your brand

As a local business owner, you will be actively pursuing customer email acquisition so that you can request reviews shortly after transactions, but beyond this, the answer to the second question reveals the bigger picture of why customers should take the time to share their email addresses with your business. What are you offering them? Options could include:

• A regularly-scheduled newsletter, covering topics customers are passionate about
• Welcome emails that introduce key features of your business and answer customer FAQs
• Periodic notifications of deals, sales, exclusive offers, new products/offers, events, seasonal information, or important changes at your business that customers can act on
• Shopping cart abandonment follow-up emails
• Loyalty programs that reward customers on their birthdays, or other special dates
• Customer support

As you can see, while email marketing is meant to benefit your brand, success comes from making your approach all about how it benefits the customer. Here are seven expert tips for getting the maximum ROI from your email campaigns:

1. Be sure you are using a mobile-friendly email template, as younger customers tend to look at email on their phones
2. Be sure your program is able to track open rates, click through rates, and unsubscribes so you can tie trends in user behavior to efforts you are making with your campaigns
3. A/B test to understand what content pleases your audience most; is it mainly text-only, lots of big images, deals, knowledge, news, humor?
4. Test to discover the right email cadence; an overly aggressive email marketing schedule will result in readers unsubscribing — be sure you’re not cluttering up your customers’ inboxes with too much messaging
5. Create email-exclusive offers to encourage sign-ups
6. Be sure your program lets you personalize your emails to greet customers by name, and in the case of large multi-location enterprises, you may need to ensure your program enables segmentation, so that you are only presenting content to specific, relevant subscribers
7. Be clear about your privacy and security guarantees, and be sure it’s easy for customers to unsubscribe to avoid negative brand impressions

Most local businesses will see benefits from a simple email marketing program to keep in regular communication with customers, but the decision to publish a newsletter can also be an exciting option for some brands. Local businesses have the unique position of playing a big role in community life. People care about the places they live, and many choose to shop locally for values-based reasons.

While some portion of your newsletters can have direct commercial intent (featuring deals or new products), the Institute for Local Self-Reliance lists these ten reasons for customers shopping locally. Each of them could offer excellent inspiration for newsletter content that emphasizes to your community why they can, and should, feel good about choosing your business:

1. Local character and prosperity — Towns that rely on tourism have an economic advantage when their community is different enough to be a place people want to visit. Your newsletter can talk about how customers choosing you makes your town unique, and how tourism contributes to the local economy.
2. Community well-being — Local businesses make the difference between thriving and neglected business districts in your community. They are an anchor of community life and key contributors to valued local causes. Write about the history of your town and your brand’s community involvement.
3. Local decision-making — When businesses are locally owned, they have a direct voice in making decisions that impact the community. You can write about how you are campaigning with other local business owners to create bike paths or clean up a local waterway for the benefit of all neighbors.
4. Keeping dollars in the local economy — Shopping locally keeps community money local. You can write about how customers who choose your business are supporting funding for vital services like the fire department, schools, and road maintenance.
5. Jobs and wages — Locally-owned businesses commonly create more local jobs, often with higher wages. You can make your newsletter very personal by introducing the real people employed by your company. The smaller your community, the greater the chances that readers will know your staff, providing an extra reason to be loyal to doing business with you.
6. Entrepreneurship — The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us how reliant we are on local businesses making entrepreneurial decisions for community benefit. One example of this is how small breweries transitioned quickly to producing hand sanitizer when big brands were suddenly unavailable. Your newsletter can help communicate how independent entrepreneurs offer innovative ways of helping local people.
7. Public benefits and costs — Local businesses frequently occupy existing town infrastructure instead of requiring that massive areas of land be used to develop huge stores and parking lots. As resource limitations become increasingly clear, your newsletter can communicate the efficiency of having vital resources centrally located.
8. Environmental sustainability — Shopping locally is a major green alternative to remote online fulfillment. Research and write about how customers who shop locally are substantially reducing their climate change impact through reduced air and water pollution.
9. Competition — Small businesses are the economic backbone of the United States. Write about how restraint of corporate power enables local businesses like yours to flourish, and how this supports innovation and affordable pricing in the absence of monopoly.
10. Product diversity — Surveys consistently show that people value access to a diversity of local products that are unique to their region. If this business intelligence has inspired your brand to stock local alternatives to big-brand products, your newsletter is an excellent place to tell stories about local creators.

With inspirations like these, your newsletter can become a path to building a meaningful, shared identity with your neighbors, constantly emphasizing why choosing to do business locally is the best possible decision.

Traditional PR may not play a major role in your local search content marketing strategy, but it’s good to know that you have two options that can help you get the word out about significant, noteworthy, and newsworthy stories about your business.

Option one is to write press releases and invest in their distribution by companies like Cision PR Newswire, Chainwire, Businesswire, or PRWeb. Formal press releases aren’t typically necessary if the majority of your customers are hyper-local, but if your business exists in a large metropolis, has an extensive service area, or relies on tourism, they can help get the word out to a broader audience and can be a source of new backlinks for your website.

Best practices for writing effective press releases include:

• Writing a strong headline that engages interest
• Having a clear angle to the piece
• Avoiding burying the newsworthy component of the story with too much introductory text about the business
• Avoiding too much industry jargon that could be unintelligible to some readers
• Including a quote from a trusted source
• Covering the 5 Ws (who, what, where, when, and why)
• Linking to the relevant sources, if allowed
• Including a CTA that supports what you want readers to do after encountering the press release

Option two is to build relationships with reporters. At a less formal local level, if your community is fortunate enough to have its own newspaper, research who reports on topics that relate to your business. This could include a variety of sections of the paper, including business, lifestyle, culture, environment, and events.

Many local newspapers feature the contact information for the reporter, as shown in the above screenshot from the San Francisco Chronicle, and if you can begin a conversation by sending them interesting news about your business, town, or industry, they may begin to consider you a good source. You may be able to introduce them to other people in your town and industry, and if you make a point of sharing their content with your audience, a sense of allyship can develop. Where trust has been established, requesting that a local reporter cover an important story about your business will feel less uncomfortable, and relationships with the local press are just one more smart way to be involved in your community.

At a more formal level, and in scenarios where you want to earn publicity beyond your community, investigate whether joining the Help A Reporter (HARO) infrastructure makes sense for your business. HARO connects journalists to sources. In the introduction to this guide, we covered the “expertise” portion of E-E-A-T, and being quoted by journalists is an excellent way for you to build up your reputation as an expert while also earning strong citations and, sometimes, links.

If you sign up as a source, you’ll receive emails asking for your advice on specific topics, and if you respond quickly and well enough, a journalist may include you in their article. This form of content marketing and publication is indirect, but if you become skilled at it, it can result in excellent PR for your business. If your model indicates that traditional PR might be a good match for your company, get further insight and tips from The Ultimate Guide to Digital PR.

For most forms of content publication and marketing, the cost lies in whatever time it takes to write and promote your assets rather than in having to pay to be visible somewhere. However, there are times and industries in which paid media plays an important role, either as a temporary stopgap while you work to build up your non-paid presence or as an ongoing part of your strategy.

In some cases, a judicious investment in local radio and TV advertising, or print advertising on billboards or in local newspapers or magazines, can bring in new customers. For each medium, your ad copy should be based on your customer and keyword research, using words and phrases you’ve identified as capturing how your customers speak about your business and its goods/services.

Paid ad best practices include:

• A hook that engages the attention of the viewer/reader
• A core message that explains what is being offered by who and where
• A clear CTA that tells the customer what you ideally want them to do next after encountering your ad (visit your site, call you, book an appointment, etc.)
• For audio/visual media, the inclusion of a jingle has been shown to increase engagement, and we all know from lived experience how memorable catchy ad jingles can be
• Small Biz Trends finds that effective local TV commercials focus on the first three seconds, avoid a boring presentation, use a good voice-over, tell a good and authentic story, and tie to a social media campaign. If you can get a recognized local figure to appear in your ad, all the better
• If your town or city has strong online community hubs, like a very active Nextdoor community or independent forum, you can explore paid advertising options such as banner ads

For Google Business Profile categories and geographic markets that Google has absorbed into its Local Services Ads (LSA) program, as shown above, “paying to play” may be necessary to remain visible for core search phrases. When clicked on, the LSA display that appears at the top of the organic search results takes you to an expanded view of all the businesses in that area that are paying for inclusion in this lead-generation program:

Because you cannot add targeted keywords or write extensive content for LSAs, ad copy for this format largely hinges on review content. Treat this as you do your Google Business Profile, ensuring that you are actively acquiring reviews and responding to them in a way that convinces readers that they will be taken excellent care of by your local business. Google is continuously expanding the list of categories for which it is showing LSAs and a calculator for managing your LSA budget can be found here.

This excellent video chat featuring three LSA experts can get you up-to-speed more quickly with the benefits and pitfalls of the program.

Finally, in competitive markets, some local businesses may need to invest in Google’s main paid advertising program, Google Ads (formerly known as Google Adwords). Unlike LSAs, Google Ads feature multiple options for optimizing your ad copy with keyword phrases you’ve identified, and like all forms of paid advertising, they can be used to help you become visible for terms for which you’re not yet ranking organically. Watch this video on avoiding common mistakes in Google Ads and consult this small business Google Ads survival guide for more tips.

Social media marketing is the practice of promoting your local business on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok… and the list goes on.

There is a lot of flux in social media marketing platforms at present, making choosing a platform for your businesses a bit more complicated. If you have the opportunity to share short-form, catchy, trendy videos, then look into Instagram and TikTok. If you have long-form, helpful, how-to videos, then give YouTube a try. If you’re not yet sure which platform will be your best fit, Facebook can be a place to test out your general skills in social media marketing, particularly if you can find value in local groups and communities. Growing an audience on X (formerly known as Twitter) can be a challenge for local businesses, and the platform is currently experiencing a volatile rate of change. Starting from scratch? It’s always worth exploring where other businesses in your areas are having success.

Social media risk vs reward

The biggest risk for local businesses investing in social media marketing is the loss of time. The amount of time a local business commits to marketing itself on social platforms should be informed by how much return on investment that platform is delivering. While social media is a great connector and source of customers, businesses that operate solely on social channels are often impacted by changing policies, functionality, and algorithms. For example, Facebook debuted live video shopping and then retired it. Instagram abruptly changed its emphasis from photos to videos, causing small business owners to have to suddenly adapt. Businesses reliant on these features have to adapt quickly or risk losing income.

Being present and active on social media gives businesses the opportunity to tell stories beyond the hard sell. Businesses can engage with the community and get involved with initiatives they care about. Here’s an excellent strategic example of a company that sells flower seed balls promoting the #NoMowMay hashtag on X. No Mow May is a movement in the UK highlighting the benefits of abstaining from mowing grass to encourage wildflowers to bloom. By sharing the hashtag and an educational resource, this business is adding value to the movement in a meaningful way.

You have lots of options when it comes to social media marketing, we’ve briefly covered X, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube to highlight some of the benefits, opportunities, and challenges for local businesses.

X, (formerly Twitter)

The social platform X (formerly known as Twitter) has experienced some fluctuations in popularity recently, but according to the Twitter Connect Playbook, it has about half a billion global users. Twitter may be a good fit for some local businesses.

What works on X is in flux at the time of publication of this guide. X owner, Elon Musk, is discouraging posting links, encouraging posting long-form threads, and changing how content is displayed nearly every week. Being present on X as a local business, even if you don’t get a massive amount of response (e.g., “go viral”), can still be valuable as it shows your potential customers that you are a functioning business. If you set up a profile, don’t let it go stale; keep the fresh content coming by sharing stories and pictures, like the PEI Potatoes Association.

Instagram

Instagram has evolved from primarily being a grid of Polaroid-esque photos to a place where users can share and consume short-form vertical videos. Effectively absorbing features from Snapchat (Instagram stories) and now TikTok (Instagram Reels), Instagram has the ability to entertain users for hours on end, one short video at a time. Simply sharing a picture with text and hashtags won’t go far on this platform these days. Although there is nothing wrong with this approach, it will limit your reach. Himalayan Java, based in Nepal, has gained millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes by creating content that capitalizes on the latest trends. Their video shows what looks like security footage of a thief stealing a bag in the coffee shop, which ends up being a promotional asset for the Buy-one-get-one-free promotional offer.

Viewers’ comments commended the marketing team for their ingenious idea. While others lament being “tricked” into watching an advert.

Facebook

Facebook has the benefit of acting both as a listing for your local business and as a place to tell longer stories.Facebook posts can include text, photos, videos, links, and hashtags and can be up to 33,000 characters long, though multiple studies have found that keeping posts to less than 100 words tends to improve performance. A key goal with Facebook is to build up a large number of local followers over time so that nearby customers regularly see new content from your local business and are inspired to both follow and shop with you. You can work at this by entertaining, informing, and engaging your audience with your Facebook content.

A major component of your local business listing on Facebook is the presence of customer reviews. Unfortunately, Facebook’s review component has a tendency to suffer from spam, but if your customers count on this platform to see neighbors’ sentiments about local businesses, your content marketing campaign should include earning reviews.

LinkedIn

The “A” in Google’s E-E-A-T factors stands for “authoritativeness” and largely hinges on whether third parties recognize you as an authority on a particular topic by linking to and mentioning you. If your local business has earned press, like this native plant nursery being mentioned in a conservation organization’s article about landscaping, LinkedIn can be a smart place to share this content to prove that your business is viewed as a source of expertise by others.

LinkedIn supports a range of media types (text, images, video, PDFs) in its posting function, but it tends to be seen more as a professional networking site than just a fun social site. Posts can be quite long — up to 3,000 characters — and members can even use the Articles feature to publish complete content pieces to the platform.

YouTube is one of the most popular and visible social channels. You can create a channel to post videos related to your business' products or services, earn views, and grow subscribers and comments from the public. You can use it to re-publish your videos from other social platforms, like the above Instagram Reel on identifying spring wildflowers. Moreover, your YouTube videos can be easily embedded on your website and have the opportunity to be featured directly in the SERP. Make sure you optimize your content, including video titles, tags, and description text, to improve visibility on YouTube and in the search results.

Other social media options include video-sharing sites like TikTok, image-sharing sites like Pinterest, newcomers to the scene like Mastodon or Threads, and basically any other platform that enables public sharing and commenting.

Choosing the right platform

Five main challenges tend to present themselves to local business owners when stepping into this lively part of the internet:

1. Which social platforms are best for your business?

The best answer to this tends to be whichever platforms are preferred by your customers. To discover this key information, you can survey your existing customer base to find out where they are hanging out online. You can also look at your top competitors’ profiles to see where they are investing the most energy and earning the most public engagement. Or you can invest in formal software like SparkToro to help you discover your audience, analyze what they talk about, and make decisions about where to connect with them.

In addition to these options, your business should take into account the types of content that are a good fit for your business model. A landscaper might earn lots of followers if they take outstanding photos of flowers and wildlife and are able to do really well on Instagram with this approach. However, a business that repairs cracked windshields might find it harder to earn an audience with pictures and might find that informational videos on YouTube about pitfalls and dangers are a better content marketing path.

2. How much time should your local business invest in social media marketing?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. It’s entirely based on the competitive level of your industry, the engagement of your local community on social platforms, the naturalness of the fit between your business model and social sharing, and the performance you see resulting from efforts spent on specific platforms. For some local businesses, social sharing and conversation are key customer service and reputation components that drive lots of conversions. For other companies, social media can end up wasting time and resources while delivering little or no results.

Most social platforms have some sort of analytics component, but to get the big picture of measuring performance across many channels, your local business may need to invest in software like SproutSocial or Keyhole. There are many software options like these to help monitor when your brand is mentioned on social media channels so that you can respond for the purposes of reputation management. Many of these tools generate sophisticated reports to help you gauge the ROI of your social media efforts.

3. What should your local business be posting to social media?

All of the forms of content we’ve covered could be worth exploring; text, visual, and audio media can all be winners when the relationship between the brand, platform, and audience is right. It’s important to know that there is also an 80/20 rule associated with social media. Brands should consider spending 80% of their time sharing non-sales-related content on their channels and just 20% actually selling.

In the example of the native flower seed company given at the start of this section, you’ll see how a hashtag inspired a piece of content on their website that further details the idea behind No Mow May. By linking to that page from their social posts, the business can move the visitor from a third-party platform to their own, which then exposes the potential customer to the fact that the brand offers products. The social post itself doesn’t always have to sell. Rather, it can engage people and create brand awareness. Your task is to use your market, keyword, and customer research, as well as competitive research, to discover which media resonates most with your customers and earns the most engagement.

4. Can social media be your only marketing channel?

Yes, there are many examples of small businesses using their Instagram or YouTube channel as their only online asset, and some of these entrepreneurs see success. Trends in online consumer behavior have made it possible for business owners to forgo having a website, local business listings, or even many social channels, focusing instead on a single social platform. They may become a local, or even viral, success if their idea catches on.

That being said, while you will encounter headlines about people becoming billionaires on a particular channel, remember that these stories are newsworthy because they are rare. What is more common is that social media may be a strong driver of leads and loyalty in particular industries and when particular personalities at a business have a special appeal. For the majority of businesses, though, the safest approach is to develop your own website so that you are in full control of your core assets rather than existing at the whims of a third-party platform that could change its policies or emphasis at any time. This way, you have a secure home base and can work from there into the wider web.

5. What should you avoid on social media?

While social media platforms can be an excellent medium for social marketing, it’s vital to enter this space with a high degree of awareness. As mentioned above, modern customers want to do business with brands that reflect their values. However, the reality is that not all people share the same values. Because of this, if you take a stand on an issue, you can expect to win customers who agree with you and lose those who strongly disagree.

If, for example, the No Mow May campaign causes offense to those who insist on mowing their lawns weekly or who deny the reality of climate change and its impacts on plants and animals, these customers may address you on social platforms and declare that they are boycotting your business. Brands sometimes have to decide that being part of positive social change is more in line with their mission statement than trying to please everyone.

We’ve already discussed the importance of avoiding the hard sell on your social channels, but even more important than this is the avoidance of exploitation of people and social causes. Many people rightly take deep offense when businesses pay lip service to important societal issues simply for the sake of latching onto trends.

Walking the talk is essential for authentic brands, and knowing when to stay silent while promoting the efforts of others who are most impacted by issues can be an important social skill to develop. Social media is an unforgiving place when businesses appear to be exploiting pain, greenwashing, virtue signaling, excluding people or groups, or being performative in the absence of genuine ethics, values, and contributive work.

Social media is a place your business needs to be meeting its customers, responding to their mentions of your brands, and, where the scenario is right, sharing media that your community engages with. While there is much talk about “going viral” (getting thousands of social shares), this isn’t a typical use case for local businesses because it’s not typically a source of local customers. Rather, local business owners should see social media as yet another communication channel for carrying out good customer service while increasing community involvement and as a good place to build out and promote your content so that more customers find you in places they already like to be.

Social marketing is the practice of promoting messaging that influences people to make positive social change for the benefit of society as a whole, such as adopting inclusive practices or making greener consumption choices.

One of the best recent examples of this mindset is exemplified by the multi-location retailer Patagonia. Customers of this brand typically place a high priority on environmental stewardship. In 2022, founder Yvon Chouinard announced that going forward, all profits of the brand would be donated to fighting climate change. It made major headlines, but this grand and meaningful gesture is perfectly on-brand for the company and resonated outstandingly with loyal customers.

Your business may not have as large a share of voice as Patagonia, but if your community cares about the detriments of fast fashion, your clothing boutique’s decision to create a vintage section is important news. If your community is passionate about closing the gender gap, hiring for equality can be news. If more of your neighbors are switching to plant-based diets, debuting a vegan menu at your restaurant is news.

For local businesses, the tie between the two is that 72% of US adults want the brands they shop with to reflect their values. With nearly ¾ of the consumer public feeling this way, the big voice of your brand’s social media profiles won’t resonate deeply if it’s simply selling products 24 hours a day. Rather, your content publication and marketing strategy on these platforms should:

• Seek to discover what your community cares about
• Become an authentic ally to those values
• Actively promote what you are doing to contribute to community goals

Congratulations - you’ve reached a major milestone in learning to research, publish, and market your content. Well done! But more opportunities to become like a great tree in your town, hosting all kinds of thriving local life, await you. Put the final touches on your ability to compete by moving on to Chapter Four!

Next up: Further Content Opportunities

Written by Miriam Ellis and the Moz staff.