10 Local SEO Copywriting Tips to Skyrocket Your Traffic

Are you using a local SEO strategy to increase your traffic?

If not, you might be missing out on some serious business, especially if you run a small to medium brick-and-mortar company.

Local SEO copywriting is an important skill to nurture if you want to grow your business’s traffic, particularly in the city or town your business is based.

In fact, 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search. So if you want people to visit your website, you need to focus on crafting a good SEO strategy.

Ready to boost your traffic organically? Check out these 10 local SEO copywriting tips to help you skyrocket your business’s traffic.

Local SEO Copywriting Tips and Tricks

1. Use local keywords.
2. Include testimonials from happy customers.
3. Optimize for voice search.
4. Write content about local news and events.
5. Make your content mobile-friendly.
6. Make your webpages location-specific.
7. Use the bucket brigade technique.
8. Improve your link building strategy.
9. Add the right metadata.
10. Write for humans, not machines.

1. Use Local Keywords

Local keywords are a small tweak whenever you’re doing SEO copywriting, but this can go a long way, especially over time.

Think about it: somebody visiting your area, say Tennessee, might be searching for a local flower shop. Which do you think they’re more likely to search for: “flower shop” or “flower shop in Tennessee?”

Include local keywords in each of your posts, be it a blog or a social media post. By doing this, you’re more likely to get people to notice your business.

2. Include Testimonials From Happy Customers

When people are browsing for products and services online, one of the biggest factors that will tip them to actually purchase from you is seeing great online reviews.

Sprinkling your site and social media pages with testimonials can be a great boost for your local SEO – with happy customers raving about you online, your business is more likely to turn up as a search result on just about any search engine.

Start by asking regulars or loyal customers to leave a review about your business. Or as new customers visit, don’t hesitate to prompt them to leave a testimonial about your service.

They can create one on your Google My Business page, Facebook page, or a dedicated page on your website.

Better and more testimonials can help you rank better on search engines. Take a look at this donut shop in New York, for example, which has over 1,000 reviews averaging 4.6 stars on its Google Business listing.

You’d best believe someone looking for a donut shop in New York will make the trip, especially based on all these rave reviews.

3. Optimize for Voice Search

With the rise of wearables supporting voice functionality, this should come as no surprise.

Many people use voice search to look for a business nearby, so if you want AI assistants like Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant to pick up your brand, be sure to optimize your pages.

One actionable way to optimize for voice search while improving local SEO is to create a Frequently Asked Questions (or FAQs) page.

People who do voice search normally search in the form of questions. Take some inquiries and questions you often get in your line of work and create an entire page answering these.

This can help your page get picked up as a valuable resource, more so in voice queries.

4. Write Content About Local News and Events

You can improve your local SEO by taking a look around your town and writing about what’s happening.

As long as you can relate your posts to any news and events happening around your area, you can churn out consistent, area-specific content.

For example, if there’s a big concert happening over the weekend in your city, create a post about the show while staying relevant to your brand. A clothing store might create a blog post on stylish outfits to wear to said concert, then linking to specific items on their online shop.

Take a look lululemon’s Pride-related video post to drive traffic to its New York City location. It featured some of their LGBTQ+ employees from the branch. Since it was posted in June during Pride Month, their post remained relevant to the local community and its events.

5. Make Your Content Mobile-Friendly

Search engines are particular about how your site looks from a mobile device, so your business needs a website that passes Google’s mobile-first index.

And not without good reason – over 60% of all website traffic was generated through mobile just in 2024. That number is expected to only increase. So if your website and content aren’t optimized for mobile, you’re missing out on a ton of traffic.

In order to make sure your site looks great across every device, you can use Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to see if it meets Google’s requirement for a mobile-optimized page.

This should apply to all your pages, including individual blog posts. Work with your website developer to make sure each and every page is easy to view and interact with from a smartphone, and that should help with your local SEO rankings in the long run.

6. Make Your Webpages Location-Specific

Include keywords and phrases like “near [local area]” or “in [local area]” in blog posts, About pages, and especially contact pages. This can increase the likelihood of your website or business page getting picked up by search engines.

If you have more than one location for your business – say, a second branch or satellite offices – you might benefit from creating individual pages for each of these branches.

Include location-specific keywords in the page titles and sprinkle them in throughout the page content as well.

Here’s an example of an Italian food retailer that uses location-specific pages for their Rittenhouse Square and Comcast Center branches.

This also doesn’t need to take up too much of your time, as you’re essentially using the same content and just replacing some portions to reflect the specific locations your business is in.

7. Use the Bucket Brigade Technique

Bucket Brigades is a SEO copywriting trick that helps visitors on your site stay longer and reduce bounce rates – significantly improving your overall ranking.

One way to use this technique is to use shorter paragraphs no longer than 2–3 lines each. Using transition words like “and,” “then,” or “so” also keeps people hooked to your content.

You might also want to sprinkle in these classic Bucket Brigades throughout your pages, such as in the intro of your posts:

• Here’s the deal:
• You might be wondering:
• Have you ever…
• It gets better.
• But wait – there’s more.
• So you want to…
• Listen:

Being able to keep people on your web pages for longer signals to search engines that your website is valuable for visitors. This in turn is a virtuous cycle: the more valuable search engines think your site is, the more they will push out your site in search queries.

8. Improve Your Link Building Strategy

One foundation to an effective SEO strategy is link building. There are a few ways you can build backlinks to your web pages, especially to boost your local SEO.

First, try to partner with local influencers or experts within your community. You can offer to collaborate with them or give them a free trial of your service in exchange for a backlink on their website or blog.

You might even want to host a local event, such as a workshop or charity, and get the local press to feature you, where they will definitely link back to your page.

And yet another way to help build your local SEO through backlinks is doing a link building exchange with other businesses, especially those that aren’t directly in competition with you.

Offer to create content for each other, where your business links back to theirs and vice versa. This way, everybody gets a link, and everybody wins.

Also look for local SEO tools to help you build your backlinks and create an overall better SEO strategy. Check out this play-by-play of different SEO tools you can use, as well as the services that they offer.

Many of the tools on the list offer ways to review your strongest backlinks, as well as other functions to help you analyze and find keywords you can try to rank for.

9. Add the Right Metadata

Metadata is the data that comes out in search engine results. Make the most of this to improve your local SEO.

If you’re on WordPress, you can easily edit your blog posts’ and pages’ meta titles and descriptions with the free Yoast SEO plugin. If not, talk to your website developer to implement these tweaks on your site.
Once people see you’re the most relevant to their query – remember that most people will only read your meta title when browsing search results – they will most likely click on to your website over others’.

10. Write for Humans, Not Machines

Last but not least, make sure in your local SEO copywriting, you’re writing for humans and not machines.

We mentioned before that humans make voice search queries usually in the form of a question, so create content with headings asking that question to appear more relevant to search engines.

This also applies to your keyword strategy. Even if you’re using long tail keywords, be sure to include them in informative paragraphs that provide context for your pages or posts.

If you’re in a niche industry, use relevant jargon and phrases that people in your niche understand and would use in a search query.

After all, you could be implementing all the best SEO practices on the web, but if you’re not writing with the end reader in mind, your efforts will go unnoticed.

Bottom Line

Optimizing your site for local SEO plays a key role in getting your business discovered by people right around the block. You might not have the marketing budget of a multinational corporation, but local SEO gives your small to medium businesses the leg up you need.

Take some time to review these tips then implement them across your site and webpages to improve your local rankings.