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According to HubSpot, 46% of all searches done online are local. This means that owners of local businesses can and should leverage this information to their advantage through search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing. In this article, Julian Narchet, a marketing and mass communications expert explains how to create high-quality content that drives better local search rankings for your business.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Search engines use bots to crawl pages on the web, looking for relevant keywords and phrases that are being searched locally and nationally. These results are indexed and ranked, resulting in pages that are linked to each search being ranked by the number of times that keywords or phrases appear in their related content.

In simple terms, your page will only be visible to those searching for your business if there are enough keywords and phrases available for the bots to rank your page in the first 10-15 results for each search. This is why SEO content needs to be the cornerstone of any marketing plan.

How to Use SEO to Rank Higher in Local Searches

Using SEO optimization is easiest if your website offers up blog-style or article-style content. These types of marketing materials can organically include high-ranking keywords and phrases to help make your website and web pages appear at or near the top of local search results.

There are various tools and applications that can be used to find out what the most relevant keywords and phrases are for your type of business. You then use these keywords to create content and information for your web pages that will target these keywords and key phrases. The next time that someone searches for your business, the keywords that you have added to your content will rank your website higher than where it ranked before.

The process of optimizing this SEO work is mostly about staying abreast of the changing popular keywords in your marketing space. You will need to search for relevant keywords frequently and generate content that includes these new keywords or key phrases. If you neglect this consistent production of new SEO content, your rankings will slip, and you might see a dip in sales or page traffic.

The best kind of optimized content shows added value to the consumer but also leverages SEO keywords to keep your website at the top of the search results. This is a win-win relationship that is necessary to maintain a good marketing strategy and for good business visibility.

Using SEO optimization research to master your content marketing will take a bit of work at first, but once you have learned more about the system, you will find that it is quite a logical process. SEO is like a roadmap to drive traffic to your website and business, and following it is as easy as learning to read the road signs that point you in the right direction.

About Julian Narchet
Julian Narchet is a marketing and mass communications professional, and a Communications Specialist at the University of Miami. He has extensive experience in customer service, market research, academic research, social media, public relations, and event management. He is passionate about making a difference in the lives of others through cooperation with non-profits and healthcare organizations.