Hyperlocal website content is content focused on a geographical location such as a town, village, or other small community such as a housing development, street, or place. Hyperlocal content is often created for commercial websites based on specific areas where your customers potentially are (or will be) located.

hyperlocal content

Most people searching for hyperlocal content ideas are restaurant owners, real estate brokers, real estate agents, or other business owners / professionals looking for ways to gain more traffic / sales from these geo targeted locations.

Note: Hyperlocal websites include websites such as a small town chat board or forum, where residents communicate with each other about local happenings and events. Some townhomes and other communities also have chatlists or small websites where residents communicate.

Creating hyperlocal content presents a plethora of ways it helps businesses.

  1. Excellent content resources are genuine SEO. For example, if you generate content about a small town, and none of this information was previously online, it is going to rank well. People in the town will take eventually see it and take note. If it is a valuable resource people are going to want to share it with their friends. Inbound links will naturally occur. These are also geographically relevant links to your site. This not only gives you highly sought after natural backlinks, it gives you local backlinks, boosting your domain’s authority.
  2. Local backlinks make your website an authority in its niche. I call this topically relevant. I have seen websites so topically relevant they can throw up a post about anything without even mentioning a city name, and rank on page 1 the very next morning for “Post title + city name”. Some people call adding city names geo-modifiers.
  3. Assuming it is valuable and unique content, it is likely going to show up in search. If you are a real estate agent and cover a particular community you will rank in all sorts of long tail searches. Believe it or not, not everyone types in “Real Estate, Raleigh NC”. Many people will search for terms such as “Homes for sale near Walnut Creek Elementary” or “House near Garner with a basketball court” or “Houses in Dorthea Gardens”. (Note: I just put up a post on Real Estate SEO Copywriting you might want to read.)       (Note 2: I just googled these phrases and nobody has covered them yet- despite all the buzz on Real Estate Agents should market there is a lot of opportunity just in content alone).
  4. Unexpected and delightful surprises. You will start to rank for things you did not intend on ranking for, and benefit in unexpected ways.
  5. Building Trust. Adding your expertise, your photographs, local statistics, information, and more to your content proves that you visit these locations, or know something about them.

What Hyperlocal content is not:

  • City Landing Pages. These can actually work, but not in a tough niche. I just saw a local HVAC company earlier today who had 25 pages up: city name + Air Conditioning Repair. Each page was slightly tweaked so that the content was not duplicate content. While this may work for some niches, if your competition hires someone like us you will be replaced in search faster than you can say Google.
  • Keyword + City Name. This can work as well, if your website is extremely relevant to the product or service which you are selling. Still, Google’s algorithms are getting better and better and they have no desire to display a Dallas Texas based Orthodontist’s page to someone 274 miles away in San Antonio.
  • Keyword Stuffing. When making Hyperlocal content the first thing many people do is try and stuff their content full of geo-modifiers, meaning they touch on a city name over and over again, hoping that they will rank for a certain key phrase. A better idea is to write up some content that educates someone. A real estate agent could describe a neighborhood in a blog post as if he or she were writing a letter to their mother. Just like apple pie, good content has a little love added to it.

Need assistance creating Hyperlocal content?

As you can see, hyperlocal content can help a business in numerous ways. If you need assistance coming up with ideas for your own hyperlocal content, we are available for consulting. We create hyperlocal content for businesses in the Southeast as well. Read more about content creation here or give us a shout.

Len
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On August 22, 2014   /   Content Creation   /   Leave a comment

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