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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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.
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.
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?
@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.
Thanks so much for this article. I am forwarding it to a client and hopefully we will have geotargeted landing pages soon.
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!
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
@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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
@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.
I would say this post would be 10x better if you actually provided us with a live example!
@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!
[...] 16th September – How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages (dailymoolah) With the increasing usage of mobile internet devices (e.g. iPhone, Mobile Broadband) and broadband take-up in rural areas, local search is more important than ever. Dev Basu looks at how to maximise the exposure that your business receives through this medium, ensuring that your site or contact details are above those of your competitors. Direct Link: Dev Basu [...]
[...] Dev Basu: How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages [...]
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..
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
[...] for local business searches. Here are 10 more ways to increase the effectiveness of your business landing pages compiled by Dev Basu. addthis_url = [...]
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[...] – Local Search Ranking Factors by David Mihm – Local search marketing advice by GetListed.org – How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages by Dev [...]
[...] How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages [...]
[...] How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages – Search Marketing Insights, Dev Basu. Why a landing page for each location? 10 “Landing Page Best Practices.” [...]
[...] How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages [...]
[...] How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages [...]
Some top tips here. Getting top for some local terms can increase conversion rates. Although the internet has global reach many people are using it for local services. By using your optimisation techniques local service providers, like dentists, can get people from the local area to their website.
[...] How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages – Search Marketing Insights, Dev Basu. Why a landing page for each location? 10 “Landing Page Best Practices.” [...]
[...] How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages – Search Marketing Insights, Dev Basu. Why a landing page for each location? 10 “Landing Page Best Practices.” [...]
[...] How to Create Effecitve Local Business Landing Pages Are you missing any of these essential elements from your landing pages? [...]
great help for the local business center-thanx. But:”you’ll score some neat rankings in non-competitive markets.” WHAT is the reason competitors rank better and having less directory entrys and a more bad webdesign (no adress in footer, no h1/h2) and so on….what do i have to do to score also in more competitive markets?????
Hello Webdesign Nurnberg,
to rank in a more competitive market, you have keep up with your link building for those tier 1, and tier 2 keyword phrases. One of our past clients West Coast Vinyl is ranked in the top 10 nationwide in the US for “replacement windows”
http://westcoastvinyl.wordpress.com
[...] Creating Effective Local Business Landing Pages — Landing Page Best Practices [...]
[...] you want to create a professionally designed landing page for local business with reflexive content (the content your prospective customers are searching for) and clear [...]
Great thoughts about landing pages. I guess I have a lot more web pages to build….UGH!
[...] How to Create Effecitve Local Business Landing Pages Are you missing any of these essential elements from your landing pages? [...]
[...] Local Landing Page Best Practices [...]
great share about landing pages….good work..! really helpful.!!
Great post. Does anyone out there have any examples of websites that do this well. Need them to convince a client.
Great post, always good to stay fresh with the info. Here’s a good source for more: http://blog.nomadicflow.com/2010/03/master-effective-landing-page-design/
[...] guide to Local Business Landing Page Design will teach you how to optimize your website for Local [...]
Dev,
Do you have some examples of local landing pages that reflect all these qualities? Would love to see some great examples of how to fit this all together.
I’m personally a big fan (no pun intended) of also including a “become a fan” Facebook button, too.
Excellent article!
We sticked to your ideas and within a month we saw our modelling agency climbing up into Google’s local results. We definitely notices a change after we added our address in the footer and changed our phone number to a local one. It even affected rankings into our women models section.
Many thanks!
The post is a really good guide, which helps every SEO-optimizer to reach better results. Different local landing pages are a thing that’s often fogotten. But due to the changing process of google’s regional search it’s a fact, that you HAVE to create local landing pages.
But heres a question, should the landing pages be as subfolders to the root domain or should they be subdomains?
@Ryan – I’ve found that subfolders seem to work better from both a PPC and SEO perspective. Subdomains are treated a little differently and don’t inherit all the trust from the main domain.
Thanx for this article. I had good results in creating unique landing pages for my key words. Thank you.
Nice article.I wanted to ask one quick question…
is it better to have subdomains to cover various topics or to have category as part of the main domain.which one is effective for good SEO
Hi Vinayak – Definitely categories as part of the same domain.
These are great tips, thank you. I have a new business and added about 50 local citations based off what competitors have been using and it’s been about 4 weeks and still none of them are showing up in the results on my places page. Is this normal? Anyway to get citations to show up faster?
Can’t find any help on this anywhere on the web.
Thanks much,
Kiwi.
Hey Kiwi – Citations can take anywhere between 1-3 months to show up unfortunately. I suggest you keep making small tweaks to your listing information to speed up the process.
Do you think using this local landing page strategy would also be good for SEO purposes on a flash website. I am trying to rank my website for vehicle wraps in Miami, but my website is all done in flash. I would think that if I create a regular html page on a subfolder of the domain for that one keyword phrase and start backlinking to it, I should get positive results.
Any advice appreciated.
Thanks
Great stuff, Dev, and entirely applicable years later. I’m a believer and have just bookmarked.
To Kiwi, indeed Dev is correct. Have patience and keep building backlinks slowly but steadily….1st place here you come!
Dev, you really believe listing info tweaks will speed up the process?
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Great suggestions here for any local business looking to define where they market. Thanks for the great suggestions.
It’ll only work for you if you create a completely separate HTML site and not just an orphaned landing page in HTML. Hope that helps!
[...] How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages [...]
i know this is helpful. thanks for this cool post about local design guide!
[...] blogger on various other blogs, spreading his wealth of knowledge far and wide. I love this post How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages because of some timeless [...]
This is a brilliant article, thank you very much. I was looking at a landing page today, it was one generated by Yell – I figured that when you add a website to their directory they offer some kind of landing page service. So I started to google about this, and I found this article. I’m going to get to work on this straight away! Again, thanks for the great article – I have learned a lot from it.
Some great information here.
I was wondering if you can comment on any major changes as the post is 2.5 years old. For example I don’t think you can use P..O. boxes effectively in Places Pages anymore.
Has the Panda update had any effect?
Thanks
Thanks for the useful list of optimization tips. I only learnt about using H1 and H2 tags about a month ago. Up until then I made the basic mistakes that a lot of new guys do by focusing on keyword density only and my keyword meta-tags.
Will definitely be keeping the list as a reference.
Thanks again
All the best
Bill Jenkins
Webmaster, learnhowtobuildadoghouse.com
[...] Create Individual Landing Pages – If your business serves more than one location or community, create individual pages that feature content exclusive to each of these communities. Add information about local community news and events, nearby facilities, schools, churches, etc. Remember to customize your meta-tag descriptions and keywords in the HTML for each individual page! Local SEO Specialist Dev Basu provides very helpful tips on How to Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages. [...]
So if a business does not have a physical address in the area that I am trying to rank a page for following your format, how do I still get it to work like you said? The business definitely serves the other areas, just has no address to put there. So my question is both how to best compensate or get some kind of address, and can I still rank easily without the address with normal good on page and off page for service+area keyword?