[Estimated read time: 12 minutes]
When tasked with developing a set of city landing pages for your local business clients, do you experience any of the following: brain fog, dry mouth, sweaty palms, procrastination, woolgathering, or ennui? Then chances are, the diagnosis is a fear of local landing pages. But don’t worry! Confusion and concern over this common challenge have made it an FAQ in the local column of the Moz Q&A forum, and my goal here is to give you a prescription for meeting these projects with confidence, creativity, and even genuine enjoyment!
Up ahead: a definition, a "don't" list, a plan of action, and a landing page mockup.
Quick definition: What’s a local landing page?
Local landing pages (aka city landing pages) are pages you create on a website to highlight a geographic aspect of a business for its customers. Local landing pages are most appropriate for:
- Service area businesses (SABs) that need to publicize the fact that they serve a variety of cities surrounding the city in which they are physically located. In this scenario, the goal of most local landing pages is to gain organic rankings for these service cities, as they're unlikely to earn local pack rankings unless there is minimal geographic competition for the services offered.
- Multi-location brick-and-mortar businesses that need to publicize the fact that they have more than one forward-facing office. In this scenario, the goal will often be to get multiple offices ranking in the local packs by linking from the Google My Business listing for each office to its respective local landing page on the company’s website. You may also achieve organic visibility, as well, depending on the competition.
Diminish your fear by knowing what to avoid
Knowledge is power. By avoiding these common pitfalls, you’ll feel confident knowing that you’re developing a new set of pages that will help your client’s website, rather than harming it.
1. Do not publish fake addresses on local landing pages.
Tell clients that PO Boxes and virtual offices are considered ineligible in Google’s guidelines, so it’s not a good idea to use them on the website in an attempt to appear more local.
Be especially cautious here if your client is an SAB and gives you a string of addresses. Of course, an SAB can have multiple legitimate locations (like a pizza delivery chain) but if it’s a small business, your due diligence is required to make absolutely sure the addresses are legitimate and do not represent your client’s brother’s house, aunt’s house, friend’s house, etc.
Look the addresses up via Google Streetview. Do you see residences, or even empty lots? Red flag! Let such clients know that Google can read street-level signage and doesn’t take kindly to falsified address information. Google understands that SABs may operate out of a single home, but operating out a string of homes may look (and be!) spammy.
2. Do not engage in creating local landing pages for clients who lack a reasonable amount of time to discuss their business with you.
A minimum requirement is that they can have a phone session with you for each city you’re going to cover, but a much better hope lies with clients who are willing to make an active contribution to the project. *More on this later.
3. Do not engage in creating local landing pages if you don’t have enough information about the business to avoid creating thin or duplicate content.
This is related to point 2. Writing a paragraph and swapping out the city names on a set of pages is not a good plan, and you’ll encounter this lazy scenario on countless local business websites. Don’t be tempted to go this route just because your client’s competitors are getting away with it. Properly view them as weak competitors whom you can surpass with a superior effort.
4. Do not create city landing pages if no one involved in the project (including yourself) can discover a genuine reason (apart from a desire to rank) to differentiate cities and services from one another.
Don’t create these pages unless you can honestly say that you believe they will be useful and interesting to the company’s customers. *Suggestions for inspiration to follow.
5. Do not stuff local landing pages with blocks of city names, zip codes, or keywords.
Google’s Webmaster guidelines specifically state that they do not like this.
6. Beware call tracking numbers.
If your client wants to use call tracking numbers, be sure you fully understand the risks and options.
7. Do not bury your local landings pages somewhere deep within the architecture of the website.
Link to them from a high-level menu.
8. Finally, do not build an unreasonable number of landing pages.
At some point in your work as a local SEO, you will be contacted by a company that serves most or all of a state, or multiple states. They will say, “Our goal is to rank for every single town and city in our service area.” If your client serves California, there are some 500 incorporated cities in the state, not to mention thousands of tiny towns.
Can you honestly build thousands of unique, high-quality pages?
With enough funding and a large staff of copywriters, this might be possible, but it’s going to be the exception rather than the rule for small-to-medium local businesses. It’s generally more reasonable to have the client designate their most important cities and target these first. Then, if need be, move on from there, provided that you can avoid all 7 of the above pitfalls in creating further landing pages. Recommending PPC for more minute coverage may be a wiser alternative to prevent website quality from suffering.
Sigh of relief! Now that you know the major errors to avoid, you can move forward with the landing page development project feeling confident that your work is going to help your client, rather than harming them. Gather that tension up into a ball and cast it away!
Jump-start landing page inspiration with tools, talk and action
Here’s a ready-made process for generating ideas for the content you’re going to be developing. I’m going to make the assumption that you’ve already had your client fill out some sort of questionnaire prior to taking them on. This questionnaire may have been really detailed, or kind of generic. If it missed geo-specific questions, the following process will help you glean the initial information you need from the business owner.
1. Ask your client (more) questions
By now, you’ve assessed that your client is willing to be engaged in the landing page process. Now, either create a second questionnaire, or, if preferable for both of you, get on the phone and cover all of the following:
- Every service offered
- Every major city/town served
- Most typical type of client
- Most typical client requests/needs/questions
- Services, tips, or advice that are unique to each city (such as different requirements based on laws, weather, terrain, style, precautions, codes, etc)
- Types of satisfaction guarantees offered
- Specials offered
- Why the business is better than its competitors
- Who those competitors are
- Participation in or support of local events, teams and organizations
*As you take notes, be sure you’re jotting down not just what your client says, but how they say it. Language matters, not only as a means of learning the lingo of your client’s industry, but in discovering whether corporate lingo actually matches customer speech.
2. Assess their local landing pages
From your notes from conversation #1, you’re ready to first pay a virtual call to the websites of every major local competitor your client mentioned. Assess their local landing pages, if they have them, for content quality, usability, and usefulness. There’s a good chance that you'll see lazy efforts that you can surpass with your own work. Take notes about what you like and don’t like in the competitors’ landing pages. Note, too, what keywords they're targeting.
3. Transform your notes into content
Now, it’s time to take your notes and turn them into:
- Unique, introductory text regarding the client’s services in each city
- At least one unique customer question and owner answer per page
- Specific advice/tips for that city that are unique to that city
4. Discover common questions and find their answers
Next, let’s fire up a really awesome tool to start generating additional topics. Hat tip to Linda Buquet who first alerted me to AnswerThePublic.com, a free tool that enables you to type in a keyword and generate the best list of related questions I’ve ever seen. It’s available in 5 countries, and even a simple search like "house painting" turns up 24 questions you can sort through to discover what types of queries people are commonly making about your client’s business model.
Return to the business owner for expert answers. Bingo! By now, you’ve got some very useful content already taking shape to help differentiate one landing page from another. I also like combing through Google’s "related searches" at the bottom of SERPs for further ideas.
5. Incorporate appropriate visuals
Now we turn to the visual documentation of your client’s business. Have them equip a designated staff member with a camera, either to take before-and-after photos of projects or to do a full video documentary of a minimum of 1–3 projects per city.
If your client’s industry isn’t of exceptional visual interest (plumbing, HVAC, accounting) a modest visual documentation, accompanied by a text transcript, should be sufficient to give customers a good idea of what it would be like to work with the business. If your client’s industry is highly visual (landscaping, architecture, home staging), the more you can show off their best work, the better. For the sake of authenticity, be sure that photo labeling and tagging are specific to the target city and that video narratives mention the target city.
- While you’re shooting footage, consider getting 1–3 video testimonials in each city from very happy clients and write transcripts. If competition isn’t stiff, even a single video testimonial can set the business apart. In tougher markets, go to extra effort with this step.
- An alternative (or addition) to video testimonials is use of an on-page traditional review app. And don’t forget that brick-and-mortar businesses can link to their various profiles on third-party review sites (Yelp, Google, etc).
- Have widely recognized customers? Get their permission to brag about it! For example: “We clean the carpets at every branch of Bank of America in San Diego,” “We designed the Transamerica building in San Francisco,” or “We groomed the Pomeranian who won Best in Class at the Boston Dog Show.” Be city-specific with this content.
- Consider the usefulness of interviewing staff who either operate each brick-and-mortar office or who travel to serve the SAB's customers. A short, welcoming video that displays professionalism, approachability, and company ideals can help customers feel comfortable even before a transaction occurs.
- If there is an element of the business that changes from location to location (brick-and-mortar) or from city to city (SAB), be sure you are aware of this and describing this on the page. Some examples would be a class schedule for a yoga studio that's unique to each location, or a landscaping company’s recommended schedule of yard cleaning at high elevations versus valley floor locations. This content should be highly visible on the page, as it’s highly relevant to city-specific user groups.
- Finally, think back to your assessment of your client’s competitors. Is there something they weren’t doing and that isn’t mentioned above that your client’s business inspires you to showcase? Maybe it’s something funny, extra persuasive, or extra local in flavor that would help your client stand out as particularly individualistic. Don’t hesitate to go beyond my basic suggestions to provide a creative edge for your client.
Pulling it all together
Fear is now a thing of the past. While you may be a bit buried under a heap of notebooks, spreadsheets, and docs, you’ve gathered both confidence and a wealth of resources for getting these local landing pages built. Whether you’re working with the owner’s webmaster or are implementing the development yourself, I hope the following basic mockup will help you get organized.
*I’m using an SAB for my example — a fictitious house painter who is targeting the town of Mendocino, California as part of his service area. If your landing pages are for a multi-location brick-and-mortar business, be certain that the very first thing on the page is the complete name, address and phone number of the respective location, preferably in Schema.
Click the image for a larger version in a new tab.
Key to the mockup
- This section covers your introductory text — including a basic description of what the company does — plus geographic-specific advice, satisfaction guarantee information, and a mention of well-known clients served.
- Here is a vertical section featuring 3 project showcase videos + text project summaries.
- The reviews section features an on-page review widget, a request for customers to leave a review, and an invitation to see further reviews on third-party platforms.
- Here’s where we put our question research to work, with the owner answering questions he says customers frequently ask, plus questions generated by a tool and other research.
- Here’s an area for extra creativity. We’re featuring a "Meet the Owner" video, some relevant local news, and mentioning company support for local entities, including a special deal.
- While we’ve sprinkled calls-to-action throughout the page, never forget that final CTA in closing up!
Speaking of closing up…
Your landing pages won’t look exactly like my sample mockup (hopefully they'll be a lot nicer!) but I do hope this exercise has helped you gain confidence in moving fearlessly forward with these projects. I want to stress again the importance of owner involvement in this scenario. Your questionnaires and phone conversations are invaluable, and even if you have to use a crowbar with some clients, the effort truly shows in the authenticity, usefulness, and persuasiveness of the finished product.
I did want to take a minute to talk about scale, because this also comes up pretty frequently in our forum. Depending on available funding and creativity, the approach I’ve described is likely scalable for a medium-to-large business with anywhere from two to a few dozen target cities. Once you get beyond that, the project might get out of hand in terms of ROI, but I want to provide a couple of real-world examples.
- I’ve cited REI before, but I’ll do it again. They operate 143 stores across 36 states, and I continue to be impressed by the effort they’ve made to differentiate their landing pages for each location. An interactive map drills down to pages like this: https://www.rei.com/stores/san-diego.html. They’re not quite as text-intensive as my mockup, but the inclusion of a schedule of interesting local events makes these pages feel cared-for and worth visiting.
- If you’re operating at a similar scale, like Orchard Supply Hardware with 91 stores, and don’t feel you can or should make the investment in landing pages, you’ll likely end up going with something like a city/zip code search that shows store NAP in a given radius. Granted, this approach is going to be lacking in SEO opportunities, but if your brand is big enough and your competition isn’t too tough, it’s an option.
Do you have any other good ideas for making your local landing pages valuable? Please share them with the community!
Thank you so much for this. I can't even count how many times I've ran into questions about local landing pages. Now I have a universal reply. It's like MOZ's guide to SEO that I reply with to every "Where do I start to learn SEO?".
And I've learned a lot from your article too!
Hi Igor!
That is so gratifying to know this will be a resource you'll point to. I'm delighted! Thank your for the kind comment.
Hey Miriam, this post is great.
These two pieces to consider really make me stop and think:
4. Do not create city landing pages if no one involved in the project (including yourself) can discover a genuine reason (apart from a desire to rank) to differentiate cities and services from one another.
5. Do not stuff local landing pages with blocks of city names, zip codes, or keywords.
I feel like both of these are something that make companies do—but instead of just building pages to build them, we need to make sure there is an actual purpose behind them. If you build out hundreds of localized pages on your site just to rank, will these pages actually generate more traffic to your site? Or are you simply diluting the link juice and/or slowing down your site by adding more pages?
At the end of the day, one of the most important things for Google is user experience. So this is a great reminder to consider how the users' experience will be impacted next time you want to build out a bunch of local pages.
Thanks again for the insightful piece!
Hey Miriam love the post, thanks for sharing this tool AnswerThePublic, this is something new for me and realy effective.
Great post, Miriam. I especially like the idea of having a testimonial (video) from people in the respective city. That can add a lot of credibility, and the testimonial will likely naturually use geographic keywords.
Yes, it is quite important get a lot of actionable insights about creating, optimizing as well as succeeding with local landing pages. My ideas include Implicit vs. explicit searches, site architecture and page hierarchy, localized meta data, localized meta data, property/region specific reviews, internal links, make sure that your customers find you in their areas, etc. Hope that they are beneficial! Thanks for your interesting post!
This is a really good tutorial for local landing pages. It´s a good resource to go through and especially train staff on also. What i like especially is that you mention not to do "fake" local landing pages. I´ve seen these heaps of businesses which use these fake doorway pages.
I came across something where a competitor used 50+ fake pages, I reported one to Google and all of them got removed.
I think following your guide will help a lot of businesses, thanks again.
So glad this one hit home with you, and thanks for sharing your experience with this!
Well, for the local search, the intent of each user is different. Searchers are finding very specific information or services in a very specific locale. As such, people who design for the local audience must be mindful of design that will directly speak to these very specific searches. I think that it is a good idea!
Hi Miriam!!
Excellent advice. I have some clients that operate at local or regional level and which alos expose the tips we can come very well
Thanks for the post !!
Post very interesting, in fact most of our clients are local businesses and even we apply some of the techniques you mentioned in the article other ones represent a novelty for us. The mockup you present will be very useful. We will try to apply. Thanks for sharing
That's great if there were some new tips for you, when you are already engaged in this form of marketing. Yay! Thanks for the nice comment.
Great suggestions for local marketing! Local marketing can be very difficult, but moz made it much easier. We have a local SAB, and relevant location pages can be difficult..will use your suggestions.
Great read- one thing, In GA how do you make google take note of a landing page, I have 4 local landing pages and google doesn't recognise any bar the homepage, I set up adwords for one area and the landing page appeared, then disappeared when i cancelled the ad.
Hi Scott!
Hmm ... 3 things I'd check here:
1) Be sure you've linked to all four of the landing pages from high level navigation
2) Be sure the content is unique on the pages
3) If the pages are literally not being indexed, you should be sure you don't have the links no-followed or in some other way exlcuded
If it's none of these things, and you are a Moz member, I'd suggest starting a thread in Q&A about this and sharing your business so that our traditional SEOs can take a look
Yo can tell something is good by the # of people interacting with. This method (not article) is one dam good "how to win local SEO tutorial". Loved it.
Especially:
"Your questionnaires and phone conversations are invaluable (so true, and thanks for your brief-questions), and even if you have to use a crowbar with some clients (is in this a standard practice now)"
Seriously keep em' coming.
Hi Carlos,
So glad you're digging this post and discussion! Regarding the crowbar ... I can remember when I was a youngster copywriter several instances of feeling panicked when asking a business owner what their business did and the reply being, "Well, it's hard to explain." I'd feel a reluctance to push them. But, I quickly learned that it was my job to push. That's the only way to get the answers the copywriter must have if the content created is going to be relevant. So, push away. Use that crowbar, if necessary :)
Hello Miriam,
Thanks for sharing a detailed post.
I have developed individual landing pages of all location my client serves and noticed boost to local ranking for its respective location landing pages. Could you please share your knowledge regarding at what extent it will be beneficial to create individual landing pages for multi location business.
Cheers!
Hi There!
Yes, just like you would build landing pages for Service Area Business' service cities, you would also want to build a unique landing page on the website for each physical office of a multi-location business (like a gym with 3 different locations). Doing so will:
A) Enable you to create content specifically for the customers of each location
B) Help keep the locations totally separate when you are building citations for them, as each citation set will link to its respective landing page on the website, rather than all citations for all locations linking to the homepage
Hope this helps and than you so much for asking a good question!
Thanks a lot for sharing your valuable suggestions and its really helpful. Keep posting such useful post in future.
Thanks, Amardipsingh! I'll try to do that. Working on an idea right now :)
"7. Do not bury your local landings pages somewhere deep within the architecture of the website."
What negative impact will this have on my local pages? Is this just for the user experience, or does this actually diminish the value of my pages?
Hey Jordan,
Yes, there are actually 3 reasons for this:
1) You want users to be able to find these pages easily, so link to them in an obvious, easy-to-find way.
2) Because these pages likely represent a company's best effort to rank for various cities, you want the pages to be easy-to-find for search engines rather than buried.
3) I highly suspect that Google may look askance at buried landing pages for local businesses, because it is as if the business is trying to hide them, but unlike #1 & #2, this is my theory rather than a guideline.
Hope this helps!
Miriam, How would you apply this for actual SEO professionals building there own site. I have local pages for several cities in my state. Obviously I cant have a gazillion location pages, but I usually build a deep content location page after I have developed a customer in that city. I always wonder if I should use local schema on my own site or does it make me look to focused in Google. Your thoughts?
Hi Blair,
I'm so sorry - I'm afraid I'm not at all familiar with Schema for virtual businesses. You might want to consult with David Deering's company, Upwork.com, to speak with a very smart Schema expert.
Thanks for this great go-to-all-the-time resource. There is surely a lot to learn and apply.
Thank you, Georg, for taking the time to read. Wonderful to think this is one you'll return to for future reference.
Local landing pages is something I’m so curious to know about when I’m still a baby in the world of local SEO. I’ve already read many topics, articles, or even guides about it, but this one absolutely summed up all the important details. Many thanks for sharing your ideas. As one of your readers, it really helps me shape my knowledge and discover more the value of the topic you had written.
Marvelous! I'm awfully glad this is helping you feel better-educated about a field that is relatively new to you. Thanks for taking the time to say so, and good luck with the studying. In Local, we are all always learning and learning!
Hello Miriam
Thank you so much for all of the help!
I have three questions that are keeping me up at night.
1. Are local landing pages no longer ranked without a local address?
We ranked 4th for a nearby small city with a very simple page 300 words. Now we are not even in the top 51 with a good 2500 word unique article.
https://www.buyabuddyllc.com/dequincy-la-movers/
2. How do we expand into new local services?
The site has ranked 1st locally as movers for years. We Recently started marketing landscaping as well and have had mixed results. After adding Landscaping to all local listings, the change only stuck for Google listings (ranked 5th), and the landscaping page does not rank at all.
https://www.buyabuddyllc.com/landscaping/
3. Recently our DA dropped to 13 from 19.
Do you have any advice?
I found a lot of copied content and removed it.
I disavowed bad backlinks.
I nonindexed all pages without good content/ deleted everything useless.
I 301 redirected all 401s to new versions
SEO Spyglass PR dropped by 50%.
Moz DA stayed at 13.
Thank you so much!! I hope my questions are still getting better.
[Links removed by editor.]
Hi Michael! Just a heads-up—you may get more of a response if you post in our Q&A forum. You actually may find that your question has already been answered there. ;)
Thank you !
I will take a look.
Thank you so much for this content. I cannot tell you how long I have been struggling with this (service area landing pages) very problem. I do have one question. I have a client who has close to a dozen cities he services, and I was wondering what content specifically is okay to be more "duplicate" when making these pages. I noticed in your example with REI that all their landing pages had the same exact content for the first couple of sentences.
Thanks again!
Now here's a coincidence, Ryan! I wrote a post recently about this very topic in which I make the rather shocking point that large brands are getting away with quite a bit of duplicate content on their store locator pages. In fact, I used REI as one of the examples in that. Please, check this one out: https://moz.com/blog/getting-local-store-locator-s...
If you have any other questions after reading that, please definitely feel free to follow up with me. I'm so glad you found this post helpful, and hope the other one will be just what the doctor ordered!
Kudos for Miriam Ellis, The way you taught us for optimization of local landing pages. This article change my mind totally. But I have one question that my client have only one store at city or you can said that only one physical business location. Can he/she create one local landing page or he/she just mention him/her business detail at Contact us page with NAP? Please tell me? Although your post also can help me because one of my client force me to list its virtual business address at Google Local Business listing and also at website but i just refused to listing his address at that time and just said them It was not follow that Google local business listing guideline and now i also show this post to him.
Hi Vishal!
I'm glad if this post will help you explain an important concept to your client. While you can create landing pages on the website for non-physical locations (like a plumber located in City A, but who serves cities B, C and D) you cannot build citations for non-physical locations. And I do not recommend putting virtual office addresses on the website at all. They are not helpful for customers or search engines, as they do not represent a real office people can come to. So, yes, you can build landing pages for cities your client serves, but, no, you cannot build citations without a physical address, and should never build citations for a virtual address.
Does this help answer your question? Please, let me know!
Thanks you very much for guiding me Miriam Ellis. It's really helpful for me.
Thank you, Miriam!
After so many recommendation to go with location subdomains, this is really good to hear.
I am researching the topic for the business that is operating in two neighboring big US cities/regions, and has made unique EMD domains for each city, mostly with duplicate content.
Since it is really hard to make unique content for basically the same services he provides in both cities, My plan is to redirect services the business offers, like this:
domain1.com/services/service1 and
domain2.com/services/service1 to
brand.com/services/service1.
Also, I want to create new location landing pages, like
brand.com/city1 and
brand.com/city2.
I would register each city landing page with Google My Business, obtain local reviews, have citations pointing to each city landing page, and all the Local SEO stuff. I'll create also city specific subpages for full reviews, news, references and image galleries.
The main problem is that the current (bad) tactic with two different duplicate EMD's is giving some SEO results for some important keywords (Local search in a huge US City) which the owner wants to retain, and they have a ton of great Google reviews.
I am not sure what about redirecting the old homepages? Should I redirect
domain1.com to brand.com/city1, and
domain2.com to brand.com/city2?
Then I have nothing to redirect to the new brand.com homepage.
Also, I am having doubts between
(A) brand.com/locations/city1 and
(B) brand.com/city1.
I am leaning towards option B, since there are only two locations, and there will not be many more in the future.
I am referencing a lot of trusted resources, especially MOZ, before deciding on the final strategy, but this specific topic is not covered so much, so I felt it was a right thing to ask.
Thanks again!
Thanks for the post. I have a quick question - I was once told that duplicate content for local regions (Small towns etc) didn't matter - what are your thoughts? I've got a site up for fun and its ranking fine with 3 different pages targetting 3 towns with the same text just keywords changed.
Hey Matt!
Thanks for your question (and for your nice comment over on the Local SEO Checklist, too!). Short answer is - you should never really publish duplicate content on any page of your website. Obviously, some things will be the same on various pages (like a phone number, a license number, mentions of products, slogans, etc,), but if you are going to the trouble to uniquely market 3 different landing pages for 3 different towns, definitely do make the effort to write something unique for each. Hopefully, this post will help you brainstorm how to do just that, with confidence!
The top factors to include in a local landing page such as optimized title, h1 & h2 tags, full business address, regional/local phone number, services offered & business hours, embed Google maps on your landing page, include driving directions anyways, single line business address in footer, meta tag descriptions with local address + phone number, and url naming structure.Thanks for sharing!
creating landing page is the crucial part of any website success. It gives a clear first impression to a new visitor to the whole website. great article. also, don't miss
https://www.choozurmobile.com/2015/11/create-attractive-landing-page-Blogger.html
A fun read! Crowbar at the ready. :-)
Go crowbar! Thanks, Ewan, and I'm glad you found this one fun.
I meant to add I also found it very informative and useful, not just fun!
Thank you for the comprehensive guide, Miriam. I too love to geek out about local landing pages.
Question for you: Is there any scenario where it makes sense to list a local P.O. Box on a service area landing page or is it cut and dry that this is a no-no?
Hi Scott,
Good question! Unless a multi-location business has a specific need to accept postal mail from customers at different locations (which could theoretically be the case for certain business models) and they only have a P.O. box for this purpose, then there would not be a benefit to this, and I would not advise it. A case like this might be something like a fishing guide business with different guides in 3 different states on 3 different lakes who need to accept postal mail orders from customers who sign up for lessons. If the guides' homes can't be used as addresses for accepting this mail and they are using P.O. boxes, then, yes, you could list them on the landing pages. But this scenario is much more likely to be the exception rather than the rule.
A really helpful artice, I was looking for this nformation since long.
Glad to hear it, Matilda! It's great when the timing is right with something you've been looking for :)
This is what everyone needs to read great job!!! I have been having local landing pages be my main secret sauce when helping small to medium businesses locally. If you do it right then you have a great chance to help them grow, but it takes getting the right information from theme and having a strategy of where to put it on the site and how effective it can be.
You really gave a great overview of the entire life cycle to creating these pages and I love how it shows the involvement of the SEO'er and also the business owner to getting great results.
Hi Tim!
Yes, I really wanted to be sure to highlight the fact that the best content will stem from a partnership between the business and the writer. The business owner's mind is like a treasure trove of expert information, so having a method for unlocking that is so important. I really appreciate that you took the time to read this and comment. Thank you!
Excellent, thanks Miriam. Local exposure is something I need to work on. This article is a great sum-up and a fantastic place to start doing some local stuff.
My pleasure, Trevo! So pleased this gives you a good starting point, and good luck in the work ahead!
Thank you so much for the article, it was a pretty good read, I am definitely going to include all the points mentioned in the article while training our new recruits!!..
Yay! Training is such an exciting opportunity to turn a new employee into a real go-to staff member who can get great work done for your business. I couldn't be more pleased that this post will be part of your training docs from here on out. Thanks, Mohamed!
This makes for an awesome checklist and definitely a resource that I will be forwarding to anyone who asks me about optimising their local landing pages. Off the top of my head, I really can't think of anything general that's missing from this article!
There's a couple points here too that you've just reminded me that I need to address... So I better get back to work now with this still fresh in mind XD
Haha! That's terrific that you're ready to get back to work with some new ideas! Thanks, Ria, for letting me know you'll be sharing this with colleagues.
Ok thats great, but one question. How could I build Link to a landing Page for a Service area business wich sounds usefull for visitors/clients and makes sence to have on a site menu
Hi Andreas,
I believe you are asking how to link to your local landing pages. You can (and should) do so within the text of other pages of the site, yes, but I advocate also having a high level menu labeled something like 'Cities We Serve' that lists out all these cities, provided there aren't too many of them to make the list crazy long. If if would be too crazy to do that, then I recommend a location finder approach like the REI example linked too in the post. Does that help?
that helps. I normally use a location finder for Multi-location brick-and-mortar businesses. For an SAB with one location and a lot of more citys they serve (without a physical location) it's crazy :)
But "Citys we Serve" is a better way to link to these pages than my clients "references" :)
(I edited my question for better understanding ;) it was to early to think and write in english)
Hey Andreas - no worries :)
I've always been partial to 'Cities We Serve'. It's very clear for human users. Thanks for reading this post!
Wonderful read. Local based project needs local links with the right approach. There are ways to get links from local newspapers, local directories and other helpful resource.
Local landing page require few main information like Proper address, Contact person, quick contact number and mainly few proofs that refer you are awesome in that local area in terms of your work profile.
Overall great read.
So glad you enjoyed it, Hiren. We're glad you're here :)
Hi Miriam..thank you very much for share.
Good post, We are a local real estate agency and I'm sure your advice will be useful, I'm going to treat with our marketing team. Thanks for sharing.
That's excellent! I hope your team gets use out of it.
Very complete and good article about local business pages. Don't forget to create a Google (my) Business page with a link to your local page.
I liked this, good work.
The link to REI is a particularly good example of a local page having a purpose beyond targeting search terms. While it's obviously useful to have the basic NAP information available, making the page engaging is even better.
A brilliant post, congratulations :)
Knowing that most of the companies are local, this article will help us know what to do for these businesses, thank you very much and greetings from Spain
So glad you enjoyed it, and my greetings to you in Spain, too!
Create just real information about yout is the way to get right things. But it's difficult to control everything
Hi Miriam,
Thank you for the article. We have been facing a particular challenge in this regard and were hoping you could share some advice. We have a client is say - country A, there target audience and present client base is in country B. They have a virtual office in country B and also have a sales representative when needed. Since Google takes your location as a default and the results are location based even if your results are not, could it be beneficial to have a location added in your contact us page. Similar to a single location landing page. The goal is international SEO but the challenge is Google default location setting.
Hi Vineet,
If it were a genuine physical location, then yes, I'd be saying definitely put complete NAP on the landing page for the city landing page in country B, but as it is a virtual office, I would not recommend it. Best thing here would be to simply build a city-focused landing page for wherever your sales rep is, and then, if you are able to get a physical address in future, you can take that page to the next level by adding the street address and beginning citation building for the location. Until then, no, I would not include virtual office NAP. Hope this helps!
Hi Miriam,
This helps. Thanks a ton!
Hello Miriam Ellis,
Thanks for sharing this wonderful stuff and now i think i can make landing pages of my client's more engaging and appealing. You have seriously shared a well researched article here.
Thanks for that :)
Wonderful to hear, and please allow me to wish your client's improved landing pages greater visibility and higher conversions :)
Hi Miriam ,
Thanks for sharing this post, very interesting, it’s very helpful for local business, most of clients need local business so you have mentioned all details in post, Thanks a lot!!
Thanks for the article. Very interesting. At this very moment I am working local seo my website.
It's was a good read for local business. Thanks a lot!!
please stop doing spam..!