One of the best ways to get in front of local customers is using ‘local landing pages‘. If a customer is searching for your business in a specific area or even typing in ‘near me’ it’s important that your website is shown high in Google’s search results. So exactly what does it take to get your local landing pages to rank high in Google’s search results?
What is a local landing page?
A local landing page is a page on your website that highlights your services specific to the area the user is in or has searched for.
This is a powerfully effective SEO strategy that is in use in organisations of all sizes and industries.
Typically the local landing page will include key information about the services the business provides in that location, address details, contact information, opening hours and even directions.
Here are some examples of businesses of different sizes and industries deploying local landing pages as part of their SEO strategy.
Why you should be using local landing pages
Local landing pages provide a highly relevant experience for your users and often answer key questions about your business without the user needing to navigate through several pages.
From an SEO standpoint your most qualified web traffic is going to come from search terms that include a reference to the location. There users are not in the browsing part of their user journey, they are right at the end of the intent funnel where they are looking for where to buy from.
From an investment standpoint, you are really only looking at adding pages to your website. Local landing pages are cheap, effective and ultimately provide your potential customers with a great experience.
Local landing pages and SEO
Local landing pages are a powerful tool for SEO, they create new keywords and opportunities for your website to get traffic, especially since the Google Venice update in 2012. With the rise of voice search terms like ‘near me’ and ‘nearby’ are becoming more and more popular.
With local landing pages you can be more precise in your keyword targeting and ensure your page is optimised perfectly.
How to easily rank your local landing pages
So lets get into 5 things you can do right now to rank your local landing pages.
1. Make sure you are including essential information
When creating local landing pages you have to remember that this page may be the first interaction with your business that the user is experiencing so don’t forget to include on the page the business basics.
- Your businesses full name
- Local address
- Opening hours
- Contact details
- An embedded Google map
- Images of the local storefront
- Get directions button
- Nearby landmarks (especially if in a shopping center)
- Public transport details
- Lists of available services at that location
2. Follow basic on-page SEO
Customise your on-page SEO for your local keyword.
- Make sure the keyword appears in the headings
- Write a localised page title
- Write a localised meta description
- Include at least 300 words of content specific to that local landing page
- Include FAQ’s for that location
- Create internal links form the page to key pages on your website
- Make sure the URL structure is optimised, for example website/suburb/service
- Ensure your local landing page is optimised for mobile users
3. Highlight local customer reviews
Reviews are extremely important to build trust and proof on your local landing page. Up to 90% of users will read the reviews on these pages prior to converting to remember to include them up high in the page.
If possible include additional reviews on the page that are specific to the service/location the page is for.
Further to this if you can include case studies alongside these reviews and it is in relation to the location – even better.
4. Create ‘hub’ pages within your website
Often overlooked in a local landing page strategies is creating hub pages to tie all of the individual pages togther.
These hub pages can be a valuable source of highly qualified traffic and often cover wider location area’s such as councils, districts, regional names, counties rather than the specific city or suburb.
Hub pages can contain a list of the individual location pages or even act as a store finder, service finder and even standalone as a top level service page.
An example of a hub page and URL structure would be as follows:
/state/ – Hub page listing all your locations within that state
/state/city1/ – Hub page listing all your services within that city
/state/city1/service1/ – Local landing page
/state/city1/service2/ – Local landing page
etc…
Hub pages really tie the strategy together creating a solid internal link structure and great navigation for the users. Some good examples can be found here:
5. Update your local directory listings
A last and often overlooked step to ranking your local landing pages is to update the links in local online directories to link to the specific location (or hub) page.
You can also list your local landing pages in council website, local attraction websites and hyper-local community newboards.
These deep links are worth the effort and if completed effectively will ensure your local landing page ranks in Google.
Winning with local landing pages
If you have followed the above 5 tips then you will rank in Google for your location keyword. The next step is to continually improve and monitor your local landing pages. Just think each optimisation you perform is another step in getting highly qualified traffic to these page which means more leads and sales for your business.
To stay up to date with top resources for local service pages, local landing pages and local area marketing make sure to follow us at Legion Pages.
Let us know if you have anything we’ve missed, or feel free to add your own tips in our comments below.
Some great additional resources are:
Leave a Reply