How To Build a Local Audience for Your Blog

When you get started as a blogger, you might be writing without an intended direction and instead detailing your life comings and goings or personal interest projects. However, by just adding this sort of content without a keyword direction or intended campaign can result in very slow growth, unless of course you are hot on networking in blogger circles or similar interest groups or choose to invest in digital marketing services. Although, keep in mind, proper networking isn’t just popping into a group, leaving your link and never taking part, in fact this can be the fastest way to see your potential contacts disappear and not want anything to do with you.

If you are a blogger just starting out or a blogger wanting to increase your visitors, you need to ensure you have a plan and solid direction in place – are you creating a niche blog? Are you focusing on lifestyle, if so, what do you differently to your lifestyle competitors? Uploading content simply for the sake of it, is no longer enough in the grand scheme of blogging and being confident in your intended audience and the tone of the voice is an advantageous start to your blogging endeavour.

A fantastic way to quickly increase your audience is to start a local campaign, drawing people in from your village, town, city or even country. Here we’ve put together a guide on building a strong local campaign and attracting an increased number of visitors to your blog or website;

Research Your Keywords

Think about the type of content you are going to be writing, are you going to be answering questions people might have on certain topics – Quora and AnswerThePublic can be fantastic resources for finding the sorts of questions people are asking at the moment. Or are you going to be giving your perspective on day to day life, for example child-rearing, raising pets or your experience as a freelancer in a specific industry. Consider the sorts of things potential visitors to your site from your local area will be asking or searching for, find a tool to detail relevant and related keywords to these queries and write your content with these keywords and your location in mind.

For example, if you are based in Crawley, answering potential queries on “The Best Pet Harness to Buy” you’ll want to include keywords for “best pet harness Crawley” and/or “Crawley pet harness”, to tell search engines you offer quality content for people in that specific area.

Include Focused Local Content

Focused local content not only pushes you higher in the search engine rankings for local searches but can be beneficial and informative to your visitors and could even make you a go-to for local knowledge and events in the future. Include content on local events, community or local news, reviews for local businesses and you could even interview local authority figures or mini-celebrities in your local area.

Focused local content doesn’t need to be your sole direction, especially if you want to grow your audience beyond your community but is a great way to celebrate your hometown or place of residence, while drawing in visitors from your area and encouraging them to share content that is useful to their social circles. Don’t forget, you can always dedicate pages to a specific location, like this SEO Agency working in Cambridge. When a user makes a localised search, Google will consider pages such as these the most relevant, therefore placing the result higher up the SERPs.

Utilise Targeted Advertisements

Targeted ads, particularly those used on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow you to focus a very finely tuned demographic, going as far to include age, gender and personal interests in addition to keeping adverts showing only to an audience in your defined area. The targeted ads used on Facebook and Instagram will also only show to individuals likely to respond to the advert by clicking through or sharing, reducing the amount of cost and guaranteeing a higher return on your investment when compared to normal online advertisements.

Make Use of Local Hashtags

Have you already researched the hashtags used in your local area? You might have a general county one or one that is dedicated to your hometown or city, i.e. #Brighton or #Yorkshire. Using these hashtags is a great way to get more eyes from your intended area on your content and helps inform potential audiences that your content is relevant to anyone that lives in that area. Multiple social media platforms offer the option to tag locations, for example Instagram allows you to tag posts with the location, while Twitter includes a location option that allows you to set all posts to publish with the location and can be easily and quickly turned off where necessary.

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Getting started in the online world can feel overwhelming, especially with the number of blogs already available, however, many of the original or older starting blogs are starting to drop off as lifestyle and interests change and develop. With no time to start like the present, get your campaigns planned and get blogging!