Unfortunately the phrase is reductionist and ignores many of the realities small business owners face. Most small business owners are already well educated on the importance of content. What small business owners lack is an understanding of how to create high-quality content efficiently.

The hardest part to creating content is coming up with an interesting topic to write about. Unless you happen to be sitting down at the computer during a special creative moment – your brain might run itself in circles trying to come up with a unique subject that warrants writing about.

Coming up with a list of several hundred topics only has to take a few minutes if you do it right. Below are the strategies top bloggers use to stay efficient:

1) Learn from Your Competitors

There’s a saying that successful people often use. They say that they got to where they are by standing on the shoulders of the giants before them.

When you’re blogging you should take a similar approach. Rather than wasting time to find out what types of content will work and what won’t – you could just examine where your competitors have seen the most success.

But looking through hundreds of pages of content on your competitors’ websites is simply too time consuming. It could take you days to get a proper idea of what’s going on.

Fortunately the social analytics company Topsy is here for the rescue. When you go their homepage, all you have to do is enter in a competitor’s URL.

After you’ve pressed enter you will be presented with a page like the one above. Now all you need to do is select a time period that you’re interested in and your in-depth detective work has been done. You’re now the new Sherlock Homes of the 21st century… except far faster at gathering the evidence.

Topsy automatically sorts the articles by the number of comments and social shares they have. Once you have found an article that is well shared you can create your own version of it. Just be sure to add your magic sauce to the article or else writing it won’t do you much good. Be in-depth, personable, and detailed in your post.

You’ve hit the jackpot if you do a better job writing on the topic than the original author.

2) Find Out What’s Hot

Social media has revolutionized the world. Anyone with an old Nokia burner phone can have their voice heard across the world in a matter of microseconds. The Arab Spring is the ultimate demonstration of the power that it has.

With 1.2 billion people on Facebook alone there are tons of potential conversations that you can tap into for a source of inspiration.

The problem with social media mining is that there’s an ocean’s worth of information sent out each second. Imagine trying to control a firehouse with millions of pounds of pressure.

With SocialMention however, you can quickly examine content across Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and more in one easy interface.

Once you enter in a search term you’re left with a page much like the one above. At first glance a lot of the shares might seem useless – but with the right twitch of imagination you can get some pretty awesome ideas.

Take the post highlighted above. If you run a dental clinic you could write a quick article on reasons why a patient could be experiencing pain after a visit; if you’re feeling ambitious you could also add to the article by discussing pain tolerance and severity.

There’s only one rule when using SocialMention. To get value from it you need to let your imagination run as wild as an antelope.

3) Scrape Top Sites

Close to 40 billion searches are performed on Google each month. Each and every search contains valuable information on what people are interested in around the world.

UberSuggest leverages a feature that Google released a few years back called instant search. You may have noticed it during searches when Google guessed what you were going to look for as you were typing into the search bar.

When you enter a search term in Ubersuggest you are presented with an A-Z list of keywords related to what you were looking for. For instance when you search for lawyer one of the suggestions it brings up is ‘lawyer client confidentiality’. Those three words might be all you need to begin writing a post.

4) Examine Your Analytics

One of the best ways to come up with topics to write about is to dive down into your site’s analytics.

After logging into Google Analytics simply push back your time range to as far back as you have data.

After that click on Traffic Sources -> Search Engine Optimization -> Queries.

If you go back far enough in your queries report you will begin seeing interesting keywords that will spark your creativity.

5) Think About What You’re Asked

If you’re running a client based business, chances are high that your clients ask you a lot of questions.

Well guess what? If your clients are asking you those questions in person, don’t you think that they also might be searching for them online.

Setup an Evernote where you can quickly write down the questions you get asked. Later on – when you’re ready to write a post – you can pull out your list and go, go, GO!

6) Find Out What Will Be Popular in the Future

I can’t say I am much of a sports fan but there’s a quote that’s stuck with me over the years. The quote by Wayne Gretzky goes as follows:

“A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

If you’re constantly going after the gold nugget that you think will bring in the most traffic today – then you’re likely going to miss catching bigger opportunities when they’re early in development.

One way that you can somewhat predict the popularity of blog post topics is by using Google Trends. After you’ve typed in your potential post topic you will see a chart at the top of the page. If there’s a significant and continual decrease in the average search interest, consider using a word in the ‘related terms’ section just below.

Conclusion

As a busy small business owner it is extremely important for you to be efficient. While efficiency is important, it should not be trumped by results. Quality search engine optimization results follow from high-quality content. If you lose sight of that you’re wasting your time.

As you go through the process above, keep track of ideas in a central location. Evernote or Google Docs are excellent options.

How else do you come up with good content ideas?

Google is the dominant player in search with 67% of market share. Each percent of market share is worth close to one billion dollars in annual revenue to the company. Last year they managed to monetize their traffic to the tune of $50 billion dollars.

There’s clearly value to search when Google is able to grow such large revenue numbers year after year by an average of more than 20%.

But what about local search engine optimization? Do businesses actually benefit from search engine traffic – or is most of the traffic they receive mostly irrelevant to their business model?

To answer that we only need to take a quick look at some of the biggest brands online.

HomeAdvisor – (formerly ServiceMagic) – is an online directory that connects homeowners to local contractors in their area. More than 80% of the company’s traffic comes from search engines, bringing in more than $205 million dollars in revenue last year.

Since HomeAdvisor’s entire business model is based on connecting homeowners to contractors in their local area – we can be assured that there is massive value to local search engine optimization.

About 20% of overall searches are for local products, services, or events, accounting for more than 2.5 billion searches a month.

Why should I care?

As a small business owner local search engine optimization should be important to you because it’s still in its relative infancy. While search engines have existed since the early 90s – poor ranking algorithms often thwarted local search engine optimization efforts.

While search engines made big strides towards providing better local results in the 2000s, they still weren’t able to understand user intent without local keyword modifiers. In other words – if you typed ‘lawyer’ into Google throughout the decade, you would have been presented with results to websites that rank well nationally – NOT links to companies that were nearby.

In March of last year – Google released an algorithm update called Venice. It fundamentally changed the way that Google reacts to millions of keywords.

As a result of the update Google will now show you hyper local results for a term as broad as ‘lawyer’. Google quickly determines where a user (even one with no search history) is located – often by looking at their IP address. After determining a searcher’s location they then localize the results.

Prior to Google’s Venice update all ten of the first page results shown for lawyer were for broad national companies. Afterwards only two of the top ten results are nationally targeted.

What does all of this mean?

Before Google’s Venice update came out last year it was more difficult for your ideal customers to find you. They had to type in a search term with a city or state modifier like the one shown in the example below:

Phoenix lawyers OR Arizona lawyers

Now that Google understands local intent they have begun blending local information into search engine results pages (SERPS) even when users are only doing basic research.

If a homeowner is researching different types of paints they can use on their house – some of the results may end up being from a local company who wrote great content on the topic.

Local companies are getting a bigger slice of the pie these days – bringing them more traffic and revenue than was previously possible.

More traffic is great but how does that help me with sales?

Newspaper ad revenue is crumbling by about 6% a year these days. But before the Internet newspapers were one of the dominant forms of marketing for local companies.

The problem with newspaper advertising is that it’s like throwing a hook into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and praying for a giant yellowfin tuna. You might catch something but it may not even be the right fish.

You can be assured however, that when people search for something on Google they are already interested in the topic. If you search for a dentist in Google – it’s extremely likely that you are looking for one to go to.

When you market your company on search engines your customer acquisition strategy has gone from needle in a haystack to potential customers reaching out to you who are significantly more willing, able, and ready to pay.

With search engine optimization you have gone from shouting about your company at the top of your lungs to people passing by to a really well targeted, self-sustaining source of cost-free leads.

So how do I go about local search engine optimization?

Local search engine optimization is a complex process. While it would be impossible for me to cover all of the advanced tactics and strategies that go into it in this post, I can leave you with a good idea of how to get started.

Focus on High-Quality Directories

When Google is determining where to rank local companies it tries to determine how much people are talking about them. To do that it looks for the business’s name, address, and phone number across the Internet.

The more frequently credible sources mention your business online, the higher the likelihood is that you will rank.

An important source of such local citations is high-quality directories.  Google’s job is to ensure that the results that show up in its engine are the highest quality possible. Focusing on quality results is the very reason Google was able to crush giant competitors like Ask.com, GoTo, and Yahoo to oblivion.

Google values top directories because it knows that they verify that your business exists. When you signup to have your business show up on the Yellow Pages – the first thing they do is call you to make sure that you’re a real person in the first place.

The harder a directory is to get into, the more Google values the resulting citation. As a result you should only focus on getting in the top 30 or so directories. Beyond that your citation profile may begin to look spammy.

Start with these directories:

1. Google Places
   
2. Yahoo Local 
3. Yelp
4. Yellow Pages
5. Insider Pages
6. CitySearch
7. LinkedIn Company Profile
8. Local.com
9. Super Pages
10. BBB

Once you have added your company to the directories above start focusing on ones in your niche.

Practice NAP Consistency

When you’re setting up your directory listings you want to ensure that you have maximum name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistency. Everything from the spelling of your company name to the formatting of your phone number should be the same all across the Internet.

NAP consistency provides clarity to Google’s web crawlers and ensures that the bots always know when your business is being mentioned.

You should setup standard conventions to be used across your company for this purpose.

Use Proper Categorization

Another important thing to do when optimizing for local search is to ensure that your business is categorized as correctly as possible across the major directories. Categorization is one factor that search engines look at on directories to understand what your business does. 

Get Reviews from Real Customers

Online reviews of your company are extremely important from a local SEO perspective. Reviews provide Google with information on the quality of your services as well as trustworthy third party review content that it can scrape for keywords.

27% of people search for online reviews of local companies before purchasing from them – so added reviews are going to benefit you substantially in a variety of ways.

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Local search engine optimization encompasses hundreds of factors. While directory citations are important – much of the algorithm is based how well your overall website is optimized. In future articles I will write more in depth about specific factors you should be looking at – so signup for the newsletter below to get notified.

Conclusion

Local search engine optimization is a promising way to gain a competitive edge in your market place. Traffic from search engines is well qualified and high converting.

Building up your local SEO profile is an arduous process but the rewards for years to come make it well worth it.

Which tactics have brought you the most success?