Why Create Hyper-Local Content?

Hyperlocal content is tailored to the specific needs, interests, and characteristics of a local audience. For multi-location businesses, this means creating content that resonates with the local community's culture, events, news, and issues. This type of content is more likely to engage local users and is seen as highly relevant by search engines for local search queries.

For multi-location businesses, creating unique hyperlocal content for each location's webpage or social media ensures that each location is accurately represented and optimized for its specific local audience.

Provides Additional Internal Linking Opportunities

By linking hyper-local content to specific location pages, you reinforce the geographical relevance of these pages to search engines. This helps in ranking for location-based queries, a key factor in local SEO, especially for businesses with multiple locations.

Links from high-quality, hyper-local content can improve the authority of your location pages. Search engines view these links as a sign of the page's relevance and usefulness, potentially boosting its ranking in search results.

Improve Local Rankings

Hyperlocal content is highly targeted to specific local areas or communities. This means it's naturally aligned with the queries people in those areas are entering. By answering these local queries, your content signals its relevance to search engines, thus improving your local rankings.

Hyperlocal content allows you to optimize for specific local keywords and phrases that are less competitive but highly relevant to your target audience. Including these in your content, meta titles, descriptions, and headings can boost your visibility for local searches.

Competitive Edge for Topic

Hyperlocal content addresses the specific needs, interests, and concerns of a very localized audience. This targeted approach can be more effective than broader strategies, as it directly appeals to a specific segment of the market, potentially capturing their attention more effectively than competitors who use a more generalized approach.

When to Create Hyper-Local Content?

Create Solid Core Pages First

I highly recommend that you make sure that you have exhausted your optimization opportunities on existing services and location pages first.

Your key service pages should already have optimized content, existing internal links, quality page titles and headings, and schema implemented first.

Before creating new content, we should always optimize what we have to the best of our ability.

Hyper-Local Checklist

Location-Specific Topic

If the content can be written about any city in the country then it is not location-specific. It is generic.

While content like this does rank at times for established websites or for low-competition cities, it is not a good long-term strategy. Any content that falls under this category could easily be overtaken by a competitor who put a little more effort into the content.

Our goal isn't just to make content, it's to create resources that visitors will want to share and appeals to that specific local audience.

Service-Related Topic

There needs to be a relationship between your topic, location, AND service. “Best tacos in Houston” is not a logical topic choice for a roofer in Houston. A better topic would be “What to do if your roof is damaged in a Houston hailstorm”

You would be surprised by how many websites have blog posts that do not meet this criteria. We are not focused on finding local keywords with the most search volume. Our goal is to write about the topic with a local spin. Not to just talk about the city alone.

Interesting Data Points

While a story or informational content is nice, it can easily be copied and produced by anyone else or an AI tool. Research-backed content takes more effort and has the ability to appeal to more groups. It also brings validity and authority to your content pieces as well. Another benefit of using data points is that they are unique to the city and provides a more community-driven view of the topic.

Customer/Local Stories

Show that you actually know the local community and the relationship you have with it by sharing truly local insights on the topic. 

This could mean a quote or testimonial from an employee, business owner, customer, or supplier. This is another way to hyper-localize your content. A direct quote from Suzie Q from Denver saying "This is the best coffee shop I've ever visited" is a much more power statement than someone writing "many of your customers say we make the best coffee ever."

Content Promotion

Creating content isn’t enough. You should be promoting your content through your community. This includes sharing it on your social media but also reaching out to organizations that this information could be useful to.

If you have truly worked to create valuable, timely content then getting traction isn’t difficult.  If you create something you truly believe is valuable then pitch it to community outlets that could see it as a valuable resource.

You won't know how much your content can do for you unless you distribute it. Medical and mental health content may resonate with local businesses that support patient health and they may want to share your content. A local museum may be interested in your historically accurate article about the history of ice cream in your city. Nearby parks may be honored to find that they were mentioned in the top hiking trails in your city and choose to share the article. 

Steps to Creating Hyper-Local Content with GPT

Step 1: Collect Data and Request Topics

Here, we're going to put together the data that GPT will need to give us a quality output. We want to gather information about the city, the local community, and the industry or business type you want to write about.

Give GPT your prompt. If you don't get the type of results you want the first time, you may need to provide additional information or instructions to GPT to get the type of result you are looking for.

Step 2: Create Your Content Outline

Use GPT to draft content briefs. Input the local topics and ask it to suggest headings, subtopics, and key points to cover that are specific to the location.

Make sure you reference any local data you provided as well and provide sources.

Ask GPT what page features could be included to improve local relevance such as references, stories, and exampes.

Some additional information you may want to give GPT would be the word count for the finished content piece, any specific keywords you want to include, and tone for the content as well.

Step 3: Use GPT for Initial Content Drafts

Use the content briefs as a basis for GPT to generate initial drafts. The AI's capability to understand and create context-specific content will be crucial here. Make sure you include the additional informatino like word count, keywords to be used, and tone.

Ask for links to any sources used so you can corroborate for yourself. I also recommend asking GPT for media/additional content or information they think may be useful for this content piece.

Step 4: Refine & Personalize

Review and edit the content to make sure it fits the tone, voice, and personality of the website. Make any edits you need as well.

Step 5: Ask for Images

Once you’ve created your article, ask GPT to create images based on the headings for each section. You may not use all of them but having a variety to choose from can be useful.

It may be helpful to specify local landmarks you would like included and provide artistic direction such as lifestyle, photography or vector images.

Step 6:  Get Recommendations for Promotion

Ask GPT for types of local websites or organizations that would be interested in this type of content.

You can also ask for general tips or recommendations for sharing this content and for posts copy for your social media platforms.