One of the first things that locally-oriented businesses are likely to know about search engine optimisation (SEO) is that targeting the most general search terms just won’t do.

If, for instance, your firm is a restaurant in Bristol or a hotel in Peckham, you will want to rank well for exactly those terms, not least as there will almost certainly be too much competition anyway for such more general keywords as ‘restaurants in southwest England’ or ‘hotels in London’.

Great backlinks back up great content

Google’s recent public disclosure that content and backlinks are two of the top three ranking factors in its search engine will come as no surprise to SEO professionals – but what does it mean for your hyperlocal business?

What it means is that such local firms as florists, coffee shops and amusement parks need to start working on their link profile, in large part by creating the most compelling and relevant content that people – especially local people – will actually want to share.

There are a lot of ways of creating the most shareable content 

You may create pages – known as ‘landing pages’ – that casual searchers are likely to ‘land on’, having searched for a relevant term in Google. These could include a top 10 list of the best local tourist attractions, ‘how to’ pages and/or blog posts dedicated to upcoming local events like sporting fixtures or arts festivals, to name just a fraction of the possibilities.

Remember that the key to boosting your link building efforts with such content isn’t just ensuring that people will click through to it from Google – it’s also making that content shareable on social media and linkable from the perspective of other respected local businesses. Thankfully, these objectives tend to go hand in hand.

“Build it and they will come” is not enough

As much as those of us in the business of link building so often wish the above adage was true, it isn’t. A great content marketing campaign intertwines with great SEO and link building campaigns to maximise the chances of your captivating and relevant content actually being shared and linked to.

Get in touch with Jumping Spider Media today, and we will immediately get to work on your business’s local search profile to help you reach so many more of the right people.