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    The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

    How To Create Effective Local Business Landing Pages

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    Last updated: September 9th, 2008

    Why a Local Landing Page for Each Location

    Every local business I’ve worked with wishes 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 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 are my top 10 factors to include in a local landing page, starting from the top to the bottom of the page.

    1. 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’.
    2. H1 & H2 Tags – Use header tags that reflect your full business name and service type. Eg: ‘ Joe’s Bakery, Toronto, Ontario,’
    3. Full Business Address – Include this in an 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 in how to create an address in hcard? Try the handy hCard generator.
    4. 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 center. ALWAYS use a local phone number on each landing page in the format (123) 345-6789.
    5. 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.
    6. 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.
    7. 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.
    8. 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.
    9. 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.
    10. 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.

    Photo source: chegs

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