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Why a Local Landing Page for Each Location
Every local businesses I’ve worked with wish to rank for multiple city + service oriented terms for each of their locations, but only 20% realize that each location deserves its very own landing page.
In a way, it’s like asking to get business to from all over your business service area, without actually having brick and mortar locations to service local customers. In this case, Google is your customer, and it needs to see a separate ‘landing page’ for each of your locations to be a satisfied ‘customer’.
Local Landing Pages for Each Location = Good Local Search Engine Rankings
In fact, having a local landing page for each business location or area served will not only enhance your your organic rankings, it’ll most likely be a cited website picked up by Google Maps as well. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.
Landing Page Best Practices
What’s useful for people to find your location faster, is useful for the search engines as well. Here’s my top 10 factors to include in a local landing pag, starting from the top to the bottom of the page.
- Optimized Title Tags -’Business Name + Service Type, City, Province/State’ | Keyword 1 & Keyword 2′. Eg: ‘Joe’s Bakery, Toronto, ON | The Best Wedding Cakes and Twinkies in Toronto’.
- H1 & H2 Tags - Use header tags that reflect your full business name and service type. Eg: ‘ Joe’s Bakery, Toronto, Ontario’,
- Full Business Address - Include this in a easy to use hCard microformat. hCard may help the search engines separate address information such as business name, street address, locality, and postal/zip codes. Interested on how to create an address in hcard? Try the handy hCard generator.
- Regional/Local Phone Number - Local phone numbers build trust - both from customers, and from search engines. Often, businesses such as plumbers only have one service location but multiple local phone numbers to gain trust from small town customers, which they then forward to a singular call centre. ALWAYS use a local phone number on each landing page in the format (123) 345-6789.
- Services Offered & Business Hours - Services often differ from location to location based as do business hours. Save your customers time and add to your body content by adding this valuable information.
- Embed Google Maps on your Landing Page - This is imperative to include on your landing page. Not only will it provide an interactive way for a customer to map their way to your location, it will also count towards a better ranking in the Google local ten-pack listings.
- Include Driving Directions Anyways - Unless your customers are relatively savvy with the concept of using Google Maps to get driving directions to your location, you’re best off by providing a brief paragraph of directions from the NSEW (North, South, East, West) end of your city.
- Single Line Business Address in Footer - Having your address in the format ‘Business Name + Service, Street Address, City, Province/State, Country’ can provide an easy format for search engines to pick up on your address.
- Meta Tag Descriptions with Local Address + Phone Number - This one’s self-explanatory. If you’ve got an additional phone tracking number handy, you can include the spare phone number in your meta tags to see if customers would rather call you via seeing the search results, or prefer to click on the results and view your landing page. This tactic is also specially useful for folks that use Skype (which makes phone numbers clickable) and on the iPhone.
- URL Naming Structure - Last but not least, it’s important to include keywords in your url. Separate keywords by using hyphen’s and only include your most important keywords minus your business name, unless you have a highly recognized brand: Eg: domain.com/toronto-rexdale-ontario-bakery.html
I can promise you that if you’re diligent in your landing page design and follow the tips above, you’ll score some neat rankings in non-competitive markets. Subscribe to my RSS feed today to keep updated on a future post on how to capture local rankings for competitive search terms.
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Andrew Peek 09.09.08 at 10:34 pm
Excellent post… I can’t stress enough that the long tail is not just an online phenomenon. If you didn’t get prime location ‘A’, this is the way to jump ahead of the corner store.
Michael D 09.09.08 at 10:47 pm
This is excellent. I love the recommendation of multiple landing pages. We setup individual call tracking numbers for each page when measuring results for local clients. Very powerful to view charts at months end and see what cities/pages perform best.
Gab Goldenberg 09.09.08 at 11:01 pm
Won’t you end up with a lot of duplicate content, in the assumption that you don’t have multiple locations, as is the case for most local businesses?
Dev Basu 09.09.08 at 11:09 pm
@Michael D - Thanks!!
@Gab - This strategy works best for businesses that do have multiple locations or franchises for sure. That said, I haven’t found duplicate content concerns negatively affecting rankings for the multiple clients I’ve worked on over the last 2-3 months. These folks essentially have very similar landing pages for each of their different locations, but do very well in the SERPs for their respective keywords. This can be attributed to:
a) Google discounting the fact that it’s not blatant web spam. I truly believe that its got better at dealing with dup content.
b) If there’s different address information on the page or different service descriptions, its goes under the radar of any dup content filters.
Dan - Google Adwords Professional 09.10.08 at 1:30 am
Thanks so much for this article. I am forwarding it to a client and hopefully we will have geotargeted landing pages soon.
Erica DeWolf 09.10.08 at 2:46 pm
Excellent post! Creating unique, relevant landing pages is the key to increasing your conversion rate- what better way to create a relevant landing page then make it local! Thanks!
Michael Vlaicu 09.10.08 at 8:08 pm
You never cease to amaze me at the wealth of knowledge you have Dev…. keep it up one day we will partner up and do something great buddy
Dev Basu 09.11.08 at 8:15 am
@Dan - Good luck!
@Erica - Hope you subscribed. I’ve got more local search marketing posts coming up.
@Michael - I’m looking forward to that day. I’ll market the heck out the brick and mortar biz we’ve talked about.
Tanner (does Utah marketing) 09.16.08 at 7:06 am
Local search is quickly becoming regular search, as more and more people begin to become search savvy. As for duplicate content issues, if you are creating localized pages how will there be an issue? Each page/site should be customized for each location (regardless of whether or not there is an actual physical location).
Big businesses have been doing this for years, great advice!
Teddy - NC Local Search Marketing 09.16.08 at 11:00 am
At the recent SMX Local and Mobile conference in San Fran, a representative from Google confirmed publicly that duplicate content is not an issue for business profile pages. In fact, the opposite is actually true. They want to see you using consistent content across ALL your profile pages, particularly your phone number. Using different tracking numbers on different sites for the same business location can actually hurt you unfortunately.
Kyle James 09.16.08 at 5:03 pm
Embedding Google Maps on your landing page both for usability, but most importantly to help your local ranking… Now that is so simple AND genius. Definitely just brought out one of those duh moments.
Thanks for these tips.
JustinM 09.17.08 at 2:00 am
Great post. I’ve subscribed.
I have a question if you dont mind. How do you usually go about getting enough link juice to those pages? I have a client that currently has 5 locations and we just have those locations linked to in the navigation of the website, they’re all ranking very well by getting all that link juice (I’ve used the same content you’ve mentioned in your post, high five!) but the client will be doubling locations soon. Obviously I will have to use a different navigation structure which will mean less link juice flowing to each page. I worry that I will not be able to flow enough page rank to those pages and my local rankings will drop. Have you had any experience with this issue? Cheers!
Dev Basu 09.17.08 at 8:50 am
@Kyle James - You’re welcome! Incidentally the Yellow Pages has become more savvy as well and as also implemented maps in its listings.
@JustinM - Great question. I’ve dealt with clients that have 30-40 locations nation wide, and yes sometimes it is difficult to get good link juice to each of them. Instead of having 30-40 links on your locations page, focus a 2nd level heading by province/state. This would look like:
Top level domain -> Locations (1st nav) -> State/Province (links) -> Drills down into City/Town/Locations.
Of course that only addresses internal linking, which still leaves off page seo to be addressed. One way of approaching this is to get deep links from paid directories (the free one’s dont’ offer em often and aren’t nearly as good). Look for websites with regional targeting as well. If you’re in the US, this process becomes much easier as each of the local seo citation sources usually also provides a juicy regional link back to your location pages.
Kenneth Dreyer 09.17.08 at 8:11 pm
I would say this post would be 10x better if you actually provided us with a live example!
Dev Basu 09.17.08 at 8:42 pm
@Kenneth - The only examples I have are actual client sites, which I don’t have consent to show. 90% of what’s needed is already here, but the rest is up to you!
Henk 10.01.08 at 7:58 am
Hi
I have a question. I have one smaller mental health business just launched and are at this stage targeting local search (no one is doing this, i.e. wide open market, amazing!!).
I want to rank for 4-5 keyphrases in 4-5 locations. My Q is if it is better to actually build separate landingpages/domains with different domainnames targeted at these keyphrases and then send the traffic to our main site. That is, different domains ranking high both organically and in Google maps in their respective location, but a very tiny site not connected to our “real” business name. Hopefully this gives google an impression of real businesses. I´ve tried it with smaller samples and done properly “fake” businesses can easily rank at the top spot for local search and remain there.
The main purpose would be to use all the domainnames out there that is perfectly suited for local search and nobody is using. Example would be for searches done for “dentist and london” as follows..
dentistsouthlondon.co.uk
dentistsnorthhlondon.co.uk
dentisteastlondon.co.uk
etc..
All these domains presented with postboxes and individual numbers as well as in other local search catalouges would without problem rank both in google search, maps and ad-words. Ad to that the proper way to structure landingpage outlined by you above (thanks). Do that with main top key phrases in your local nish and you should dominate your competition big time. (at least this far for us).
If you then link it to your main corporate site and you´ll profit. At least in theory.
Sorry for the long post. Do you know anybody who has tried this for the long term?
Thanks..
Dev Basu 10.01.08 at 8:53 am
Hi Henk,
Here’s the short and skinny on what you should be doing.
- Go ahead and buy all keyword rich domains, and start 301 redirecting them to your main site, especially to individual local landing pages. So dentistsouthlondon.co.uk redirects to londondentist.com/southlondondentist.html
- Build the landing pages on the main company site with keyword rich titles, content, and topical inbound links. If the city is situated into different districts, borought etc, obtain local links from your chamber of commerce, and business directories. Try and see if you can submit to local business directories with the different domain names you’ve bought (this is a long shot as most directories see the redirection).
- Buy PO Box addresses at the central downtown core of each suburb. So if you are in Whitehall, then find the ‘imaginary downtown’ of Whitehall, and buy a PO Box address there. Then use that address in your Local business listings.
I’ve had a fair number of successes following this method! I hope that helps