Frank Schulte-Ladbeck

Creating local content needs
to fit in with your business to make the site relevant.

I read recently that you should consider whose website you are developing. Does it belong to you or to your customers? I found this statement as a good guiding principle to keep in mind when working on a site. I may have a vision for the site, but the users (my customers) will have their own reasons for coming to my site, and if I want them to come back, I need to meet their needs, not my desires. This thought came as I was going over my top landing pages to see how I can improve my bounce rate. Moreover, I had been reading some advice on creating local content to focus your audience to a group who may be my potential clients. It caused me to examine some business sites which I felt were missing the mark, making a mistake that I have made myself.

Let us deal with some basics first. You may consider a landing page to be your home page- the page that you want visitors to see; however, as your site grows, you will see that visitors come to various pages on your site through searches, and they will never see your home page. For a new site, the owner will have to determine the pages that will be the ones most visited. For a site with a few posts or pages under its belt, you will find that visitors are coming to your site for a page that you did not consider a landing page. Once they come to this page, you will want them to explore your site. The longer they spend on a site and the more pages they read could lead them to becoming a client. If they are leaving your site can be seen by looking at your Bounce Rate, which is the percentage of people who leave the site.

Who are you trying to attract to your site? Real World Scenario: a Realtor wants people in a certain neighborhood to come to her site, and she has heard of the idea of being hyperlocal. An eagle flies overhead. This is not a common site in this market, so she writes about it. It appears that she has written an article that fits her hyperlocal goal, but I believe that she failed in the larger goal of bringing more visitors to her blog, who could turn into potential customers. Yes, she did include the keyword, the neighborhood name, but if somebody searches for a home in this neighborhood her post does not come up. You have to search for eagle in neighborhood name to find her post, which is an unlikely search term her potential clients are entering into their search engine. If she tied her post into the idea that this area is filled with natural wonders which makes it so nice to buy a home there, she would have been on a better path. The idea is do not write about community events for the sake of writing about community events. Tie the story to a subject that your potential clients may want to discover.

My problem is slightly different. When the local natural gas supplier offered assistance in purchasing a natural gas generator to produce electricity when a hurricane has effected the power supply in the area, I wrote about it. As a home inspector, I could delve into some facts that would help people make a good choice. It also tied in with a theme on my site: examining your home after a hurricane. The idea being that a homeowner would possibly need an inspector. The story was a good one for my blog because it was local and I had knowledge of the subject. However, someone searching for information on these generators would not be my customers (yet). The post took off reaching the second position in the results page. I did not tie it into the site well. People called me to install their generators, even though my post stated that I did not do this service. That frustrated my callers, so I could see them not becoming my customers.

How did I handle guiding readers to come back to the blog? First, I moved some pieces of information around the post. I made it clear sooner that my goal was to help them understand, but that installing generators is not my business. Then I looked at my keywords and tags to ensure that relevant posts would be displayed when the related posts feature comes at the end of the post. I looked at a few other aspects of the site (not just the post) to make the potential client feel that I could be a resource for them. I changed the paragraph in the sidebar that states the purpose of the site, and I changed the header for the post to help reinforce the idea of my being a resource. This increased exploration of the site, keeping my name in front of the potential customer.

Another aspect to finding what to write about is to listen to your readers. Home inspectors spot problem areas, but we do not really get into the possible cause or solution in our reports, because we may not have the time to discover the truth. I realized that this is information that my clients would want, so I began writing about repairs or how a home is made. In my mind, these were throw away posts, but to my readers, these were the heart of the matter. When one reader referred to my blog as a home repair site by a home inspector, I thought “oh great, he missed the point”. It dawned on me that I had missed the point. More readers were coming to my site because of these posts, and they got the message that I was a home inspector. That is what I wanted, so I embraced the home repair concept. A caller from another state asked if I would place a Q&A section on my site. Now this person may not be a potential client, but she gave me a valuable piece of information- clients would want a Q&A section. In my mind, I have an area on the site set up for this, but obviously my readers do not think that I do, so I have to find a way to meet their need in a way that they understand. My point is that think about each comment that you receive, because it may lead to something useful.

Look at your site. Did you write about something that would drive locals to the site? Does it tie into your business?

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