As well as this locally oriented blog, I have another one called the Real Perth Blog. I basically started it because I'd returned to this city after several years living in Sydney and I was amazed at the changes going on in this once very laid back "big country town" that I grew up in. I wanted to document them somehow.
I also did it as a bit of an experiment. Among other aims related to SEO, I wanted to see how much traffic I could get by targeting locally oriented keywords.
Over the last couple of years chipping away at it I've learned that there's a great deal of of easy to get, geo-specific traffic out there that you can catch with blog posts. They're also really easy to write. If you live here, you just have to report on what you see. And you can easily enrich your content by taking photos and making videos and embedding them in your posts. There are heaps of people within Australia as well as some overseas who find this stuff really interesting and are constantly Googling for it.
The other thing I noticed is that once I had a lot of city-specific content up there, I had some substantial heft in Google for general "Perthiness".
For example, I built a page under that domain advertising lessons in how to make money from home. (They are a bit like what I offer from this site -- just more oriented towards people starting up local services like dog walking, baby sitting, tutoring services, etc.)
Now, almost immediately after I built that page it ranked on the first page for "make money from home in Perth". Now that's not a hugely competitive phrase with massive search volume, of course. So it wouldn't have been all that hard to get there. But it usually doesn't happen so soon. And there were no backlinks to that page from from other sites. I don't think I even shared it on social media. So clearly it got there because it was an established domain, with lots of locally oriented content associated with it.
This is heartening. It means that I can add pages for other services I might want to offer. Odds are that they will rank pretty well for searches for them plus the keyword Perth. This won't apply if the phrase is super-competitive like "jobs Perth" or "Perth SEO". But for something specific, like "English tutor Perth" which is something I might eventually do, it could work quite well. I know that at the very least I will be hitting the ground running as opposed to starting from scratch.
So, doing something similar could be a good approach for residents of this city who have a range of products or services they might want to promote to locals.
If you are in this boat, here's a suggestion: Buy a domain name that includes your name and Perth. Then get good reliable hosting. Make sure that you have a blogging tool included so that the posts come off the main domain. Then just start writing about your city. When you work out what sort of services you want to offer, just build separate pages for them.
This isn't the traditional way to do things, of course. It's almost back to front. And it doesn't suit everybody. But as well as its SEO advantages, it's another way of giving yourself lots of options. It's also enjoyable. The content comes easily, after all.
It also helps for personal branding and reputation management. When people search your name you always want to have profiles and pages about you that present a good image. And a website like this will certainly rank highly for searches for your name, surely a good thing.
It certainly beats building a static five or ten page site around a limited number of highly competitive "money" keywords. This can be lucrative tactic if you do manage to rank highly for them of course. But it can take countless hours of work to get there. And given Google's propensity for constantly changing its algorithm, there's always the very real fear that your search engine traffic could dry up overnight.
I also did it as a bit of an experiment. Among other aims related to SEO, I wanted to see how much traffic I could get by targeting locally oriented keywords.
Over the last couple of years chipping away at it I've learned that there's a great deal of of easy to get, geo-specific traffic out there that you can catch with blog posts. They're also really easy to write. If you live here, you just have to report on what you see. And you can easily enrich your content by taking photos and making videos and embedding them in your posts. There are heaps of people within Australia as well as some overseas who find this stuff really interesting and are constantly Googling for it.
The other thing I noticed is that once I had a lot of city-specific content up there, I had some substantial heft in Google for general "Perthiness".
For example, I built a page under that domain advertising lessons in how to make money from home. (They are a bit like what I offer from this site -- just more oriented towards people starting up local services like dog walking, baby sitting, tutoring services, etc.)
Now, almost immediately after I built that page it ranked on the first page for "make money from home in Perth". Now that's not a hugely competitive phrase with massive search volume, of course. So it wouldn't have been all that hard to get there. But it usually doesn't happen so soon. And there were no backlinks to that page from from other sites. I don't think I even shared it on social media. So clearly it got there because it was an established domain, with lots of locally oriented content associated with it.
This is heartening. It means that I can add pages for other services I might want to offer. Odds are that they will rank pretty well for searches for them plus the keyword Perth. This won't apply if the phrase is super-competitive like "jobs Perth" or "Perth SEO". But for something specific, like "English tutor Perth" which is something I might eventually do, it could work quite well. I know that at the very least I will be hitting the ground running as opposed to starting from scratch.
So, doing something similar could be a good approach for residents of this city who have a range of products or services they might want to promote to locals.
If you are in this boat, here's a suggestion: Buy a domain name that includes your name and Perth. Then get good reliable hosting. Make sure that you have a blogging tool included so that the posts come off the main domain. Then just start writing about your city. When you work out what sort of services you want to offer, just build separate pages for them.
This isn't the traditional way to do things, of course. It's almost back to front. And it doesn't suit everybody. But as well as its SEO advantages, it's another way of giving yourself lots of options. It's also enjoyable. The content comes easily, after all.
It also helps for personal branding and reputation management. When people search your name you always want to have profiles and pages about you that present a good image. And a website like this will certainly rank highly for searches for your name, surely a good thing.
It certainly beats building a static five or ten page site around a limited number of highly competitive "money" keywords. This can be lucrative tactic if you do manage to rank highly for them of course. But it can take countless hours of work to get there. And given Google's propensity for constantly changing its algorithm, there's always the very real fear that your search engine traffic could dry up overnight.