The Local Business Content Marketing Guide

What kind of content will help my local business achieve its marketing goals?

This is the essential question every local business owner asks as soon as they step online and discover that both their real-world customers and search engines expect them to become a publisher and a marketer. This guide is an all-in-one resource designed to help you answer this question with the right strategy for your unique local business. It will teach you how to research, write, and publicize the best content for the local communities you serve, and how to differentiate your business from its competitors.

While there is a lot of excellent content publication and marketing advice scattered around the internet, it can be hard to piece it all together. The goal of this guide is to gather all the best practices and current thinking into one place. Most importantly, this guide is specific to local businesses and their unique opportunities. Think of this as your book of local content ideas — a book you can open again and again for inspiration as you reach different stages of business growth. And because nature is the best teacher, we’ll liken that growth to the phases of planting a sapling and helping it mature into a well-established tree.

Mature forest trees can play host to over 1,000 different species of other plants. Similarly, your business can gradually and steadily become a great host to many different types of content that demonstrate and expand the role you play in thriving local life. But before you plant your sapling, let’s take a good look at the lay of the land and understand what modern search engines and potential customers need from today’s local businesses.

To reach the customers you plan to serve, think of all the online platforms as a box of gardening tools with your name on it. If you know how to use these implements well, you’re setting yourself up for success. Local business owners typically find that Google is the main publicity tool in their kit because it has succeeded so well in becoming part of people’s daily lives any time they need local information. According to Statista, Google’s search market share stands at 84.69% in 2023.

Whether someone is looking for “tacos near me”, or “best native plant nursery in San Francisco”, Google’s continued success depends on delivering relevant information so that searchers don’t look for their information elsewhere. And because the web is full of the opposite – low-quality content and misinformation – Google protects its reputation and revenue by gearing its algorithm and policies towards surfacing content people can trust.

As you go forward, there are five main resources with which you should be familiar to help you sow the seeds of success in Google’s landscape:

1. The Helpful Content Update
2. Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines
3. E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)
4. The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google
5. The Prohibited and Restricted Content Guidelines

1. The Helpful Content Update

This adjustment to how Google evaluates and ranks websites via its algorithms is based on a system that rewards content that humans find satisfying. Google wants to surface content that is written from a people-first perspective – not content that is published in an effort to game the platform. Websites that habitually publish high-quality content which helps people should have an easier time ranking well in this scenario, whereas those that are filled with lots of low-quality content will be made less visible by this machine-learning-based system.

If you’d like to watch a short video with further details about this sitewide quality signal, tune in here, but the main takeaway is that the reputation of your website, as a whole, for being useful to real people will impact the ranking chances of each of your individual pages. Determine that you’ll publish for people, not just for search engines, and always remember that your website’s rankings contribute to how visible you are in Google’s local search results.

2. Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines

Google employs 10,000+ people to evaluate website pages on the basis of the concepts in the quality rater guidelines, often called the "QRG." While the principles outlined in the QRG don’t directly impact search engine rankings, Google’s raters do the work of finding out whether algorithmic updates (like the Helpful Content Update) are actually working to deliver high-quality results. If not, Google will just keep tweaking their algorithms, which they do continuously.

Few people have time to read through Google’s documentation in its entirety, which is why we’ve summarized these takeaways that are especially relevant to local businesses. The overriding tone of the QRG is that Google wants to reward content that is useful to human beings and wants to demote content that has been published with an eye to exploiting search engines. By this point in our guide, this message from Google is already starting to sound familiar, and it will really sink in as we cover one of the most important updates to the QRG.

3. E-E-A-T

Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) make up this acronym that formed a significant update to the QRG. It can be broken down like this:

• Experience — Google wants to know if the author of a piece of content has first-hand experience with the subject. For example, if a plant nursery owner writes an article about the top 10 brands of bagged compost, can they demonstrate that you have actually used these products before writing about them? Local retailers should pay special attention to this signal, trialing their inventory so that they can recommend it with full confidence based on experience, and they should highlight customers’ first-hand experiences of their goods and services.

• Expertise — Google is looking for topics to be covered by authors with a high degree of knowledge, whether that is someone with formal credentials or practical, everyday experience. For example, if your website publishes an article about drought-tolerant landscaping, is the author a certified master gardener? Or perhaps the author lacks formal training but has built a large resource on re-doing their home garden to tolerate drought. Both individuals could be seen as having varying degrees of expertise. Keep in mind that some subjects (known as your-money-or-your-life or YMYL) can have such deep impacts on real-world people that Google may set the bar higher for the expertise of the publisher, but whatever the topic of your content, you will get the best results if it is authored by the most knowledgeable people in your business.

• Authoritativeness — In part, Google determines the overall authority of a writer by whether other trusted sources cite and link to their work. Are you a recognized authority in your field? You’ll need to grow your online reputation to reflect this, and be sure to publish your credentials, degrees, licenses, accreditations, memberships, awards, and other qualifications. Local business owners should seek to become known as the go-to resource in their town or city for a particular need, whether that’s bakery cakes, bee swarm relocation, or banking advice.

• Trustworthiness — Google says this is the most important component of E-E-A-T, and your task is to ensure that whatever you publish about your business, its goods, and its services are factually accurate. Your contact information, customer protections, security policies, and claims should be accessible, truthful, and error-free, and you should make a habit of citing other trusted sources when relevant to your topics. When it comes to showcasing customers’ reviews on your website, don’t cherry-pick. Meanwhile, be wary of hiding content behind too many ads, or engaging in other website practices that create a poor user experience.

Taken altogether, E-E-A-T is a blueprint for building an honest online mirror of your real-world business. Google’s quest for its search results to remain relevant in the midst of spam, AI, and misinformation has prompted them to continue developing these systems that are meant to reward high-quality content. Adhering to their guidelines is a better plan than taking shortcuts when a business hopes to achieve longevity as a local brand.

4. The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google

This pivotal set of rules and best practices is what governs how local businesses should list themselves on Google. They are critical for comprehending the system that makes up most of the content found in Google Business Profiles, local packs, local finders, and Google Maps. These guidelines help you determine your eligibility for being listed as a local business by Google, and this is the main document you will consult to understand how to fill out each field in your listings in a Google-approved fashion.

Failure to adhere to the guidelines can result in listing suspension and removal, but guideline-compliant usage of Google’s local search components is key to your online visibility. Google Business Profiles will form a significant part of your content strategy, and they have become an increasingly sophisticated vehicle for business discovery, customer service, interactivity, and even transactions.

5. The Prohibited and Restricted Content Guidelines

Finally, this separate set of guidelines outlines what you should not be publishing within Google’s local search platforms. These rules are especially relevant to the topic of local business reviews. Review spam has become one of the largest sources of disinformation in Google’s ecosystem, and honest business owners will read these guidelines to be sure they never accidentally engage in forbidden review tactics that jeopardize public trust and company reputation, as well as risking legal repercussions in some countries.

With these five resources in hand, you will be able to grow your content publication and marketing strategy the right way in Google’s environment. It’s important to add here that, at the time of authoring this guide, the state of search and Google is at an inflection point. The rise of both AI chat and social media alternatives to traditional organic search are putting new pressure on Google to keep its main products relevant, resulting in a volatile SERP. For local business owners, Google remains dominant at present, but you’ll find that this guide covers a wider menu of options beyond Google to keep your business current with evolving trends.

Finally, in addition to keeping the above five resources in your back pocket, it’s important to know that search, itself, is in a state of flux at the moment with the experimental developments of AI chat features like Google Bard, New Bing Chat, and Open AI’s ChatGPT, as well as the Google Search Generative Experience (SGE), which is due to end in December. It’s very early days for each of these features, and the degree to which they may impact your content strategy depends on how widely the use of such features is adopted by the people in your town or city. You’ll find more information about these emerging features in this guide.

Customers have become deeply accustomed over the past two decades to using the web to navigate their local commercial landscape. But both the COVID-19 pandemic’s acceleration of buy-online/pick-up/home delivery fulfillment solutions and the coming of age of younger patrons are creating new trends impacting local consumer behavior. So how do local businesses hope to win loyal customers? 96% of consumers read local business reviews — that’s a unifying statistic that includes almost everybody you hope to win as a customer. And according to an Intuit survey of 1,500 Americans, 70% are now shopping locally either solely online, or via a mix of both online and offline transactions. Local content marketing serves all age groups because all groups now expect to be able to do at least some business with you on the web. However, to keep earning new customers from the groups that have only recently reached adulthood, you should embrace their particularly high expectations for a seamless, informative, actionable digital experience with your brand.

Meanwhile, a trend to pay close attention to in serving the younger generations is their concern for the environment. Gallup found that 70% of people aged 18-34 are worried about climate change compared to just 56% of people aged 55+. Meanwhile, Pew found that when Gen Z and Millennials were grouped together, a notable 60% of them had taken personal action in the past year to help address the climate crisis. It’s important to understand that this could affect how younger generations choose to spend their money.

Shopping locally is widely recognized as a way for individuals to reduce personal fuel consumption and can be a key point in your content marketing strategy that will resonate with increasingly aware younger customers. According to the Intuit survey cited above, other incentives for all age groups shopping nearby include:

• Keeping money circulating within the local economy instead of ending up in the pockets of remote entities (57%)
• Connecting with the community (38%)
• Enjoying better customer service (28%)

You can form bonds with your community by recognizing their aspirations and learning to fulfill as many of their needs as possible with a mixture of both online and offline services, and it is your content marketing strategy that will form the basis of communicating exactly what your brand offers.

In sum, you’ll build your offline business for people, and Google urges you to publish online content for people, too. It’s this customer-centric approach that will enable you to enjoy maximum returns from your investment in local business content publication and marketing. With this in mind, you’re absolutely ready to get planting! Let's head over to Chapter One!

Next up: Foundational Content Assets

Written by Miriam Ellis and the Moz staff.