Can anybody guide me with the very basics of local SEO and content marketing for small business website?

The short answer is yes, if you’re still looking for a good beginner’s guide to local SEO and content marketing for small business websites – now you’re in the right place. But before showing you some of my featured smart findings to that point, let’s think hard. Ask yourself, whether your multi-targeted SEO strategy and custom content marketing tactics should be employed for just one small business website? Or it may be far better to be proactive, having multiple sites individually tailored for each target location you’re serving? Anyway, I personally believe that creating one rock-solid business website serving all your regional brands and every single locale you're targeting with your products/service – is actually the only reasonable way of maximizing your SEO performance in local search. 

And this really simple yet too critical assumption has been recently reconfirmed by the lion’s share of local SEO experts with big-time experience in the industry. With this important condition in mind, let’s finally get down to the real-life situation regarding the “ideal” basic strategy in local SEO and content marketing for your small business website. Here are the main elements and requirements for your own hyper-localized on-page content that can serve your top performing online promotion in Google’s local SERPs.

What Makes a Killing Website SEO & Content Marketing for Small Business Owners

• Tip One – differentiate each location served with your business using not unique landing pages, but via offering different location-targeted promotions and other specific commercial offers. Ultimately, to have each individually-tailored endeavor represented by its own unique on-page content, embedded with the best hyper-localized long-tail search terms you are targeting (i.e., those including the name of the city/town or a given target region).
• Tip Two – join sponsored events, media news releases, expert roundups, or any other dedicated subject discussions hosted throughout different areas of your local targeting. Doing so, you will always have a piece of enticing content for engaging a wider local audience of potential clients/buyers.
• Tip Three – try to uncover your full ranking potential in Google’s local SERPs, and make most out of your content marketing strategy, simply via submitting user-generated content. The thing is that too often such type of interactive content (like customer reviews and testimonials) can be far more benefitting, rather than, for example, maintaining a concise content calendar or writing a precisely-targeted marketing blog to address your target audience locally. Understanding a great potential of this approach to local SEO and content marketing, for small business websites in particular, below I’m going to focus namely on this really promising area in greater detail.

How to Drive Your SEO via User-Generated Content Marketing for Small Business

Given that high-quality, targeted content is clearly seen as one of the top important ranking factors that differentiate the best local businesses from the rest, the way of its actual creation is nothing but a really time-consuming and labor-intensive doing. Seriously, it always takes time and energy – but at the end of your hard work, the whole business will gradually become far better over time, particularly in the longer run. But how to keep creating a lot of engaging local content, without getting overwhelmed after all? So, you will apparently need at least to minimize your daily content volume, right? And, as I’ve already said, there is a really great way of local business promotion – you can simply try to make most out of the user-generated content. Sounds not too difficult, but how can we convince your local audience to create a great unique content that will measurably improve total online performance of content SEO and local marketing for your small business website? Well, here two different methods for your further consideration.

Setting Grounds to Pull Together Tons of Quality User-Generated Content

Creating Advanced (Expanded) Service Pages

Don't skimp your time or resources on creating expanded service pages that can push your clients to start developing your generic “services” page. Ultimately, such mode of engaging user-generated content will most likely pay off – simply because:

• You are most likely to see the lion’s share of existing typical local service pages actually characterized as too thin, at least so far. 
• You can quickly set a flow of unique and fully relevant content spreading the main core keyword (or its long-tail expression) much wider than you can imagine. 
• Each service page is a great opportunity to positively impact your local ranking positions in the longer run, and with the actual amount of your received organic traffic flow growing over time.

Emphasizing FAQ-Based Content Sections

The thing is that you double down on your FAQ content sections, without necessarily having to think only of a generic page with those good old frequently asked customer questions. Anyway, even despite the fact that all traditional FAQ-based pages are always boring at some point, emphasizing this type of user-generated content can still become a powerful item in local SEO and content marketing arsenal for your small business. Why? 

Simply Because FAQ content can give you the following core benefits:

• You will always have a real ton of user-generated stuff, with its best pieces fully capable of becoming your secondary source of keyword-rich local content with really precise targeting.
• FAQs make things much easier for the lion’s share of potential clients/buyers and well as every potential customer – owing to those little tips and useful guides that people need to know before taking the final decision to buy/order with you, rather than elsewhere locally (also known among the modern Digital Marketing community as “decision simplicity”).
• Given that such simple content type is actually providing a clear added value to the readers (i.e., addressing to their most frequent “pain points”, gathering a lot of trustworthy information purely relevant to many different business subjects you’re dealing with, and developing your strong business name), FAQ-based content sections will always deliver you a certain positive ranking weigh – all in one.