Location Landing Pages for SEO Success

Digital marketing and, specifically, search engine optimization are all about getting your brand or company highly ranked on Google and other search engines. That is really only one half of the equation though — once you are highly ranked (and, presumably, getting the traffic that goes along with that) you need somewhere for potential customers to go.

You need a landing page.

So far, pretty straightforward. Your landing page can be more than just a tool for converting visitors into customers though. In fact, it can (and should) be used to further improve your local search engine ranking position (SERP). You can achieve this by engaging the services of an SEO agency, or you can try to navigate the world of locally optimized landing pages yourself with our handy guide.

Want to learn more about the Digital Authority Partners approach to SEO? Watch this video!

What Is a Location Landing Page?

A location landing page is a page that is designed specifically around a particular locality. Commonly, that means a city or town, but you can optimize your pages for individual boroughs or districts if that would benefit you and your business.

Essentially, what we are looking for here is for your business to ‘speak’ to searchers in each of those locations. So, when an individual on the strip in Las Vegas searches for ‘nearest florist,’ your business shows up for them. At the same time, an individual in Reno might search for their nearest florist — and you show up again.

That is because you have a landing page that tells the search engine algorithms that you are a trusted and reliable florist in central Las Vegas, and you have one that says the same about Reno. There is no limit to how many local landing pages you can have, so be sure to create one for each of your different locations.

How Do Location Landing Pages Help Your Business?

There are actually a number of ways in which having individual local content can help your business:

Firstly, you will naturally have more pages for the search engines to crawl, evaluate, and index. This means that if your content is good, you have more opportunities to rank for it and become a credible and trusted site for your search terms.

Secondly, local searches make up a large proportion of searches where an individual has the intent to buy a product or service. Your locally optimized pages will help you to attract those searchers, who are among the most likely to convert to customers — which is, after all, the point of ranking highly in the first place.

Third, being able to target your message to different audiences helps your business to resonate with those localities. Yes — a potential customer in Las Vegas is probably very similar to one in Reno, but if your business has a larger footprint, then you should tailor your content appropriately: the difference between a potential customer in Nebraska and one in Texas is much bigger and needs to be accounted for to truly leverage your digital footprint.

Fourth, you can use your various landing pages to provide quick and easy links. Links are an important part of the SEO tapestry as they confer a sense of authority and value; so correctly linking between your content gives you those benefits with almost no effort.

Next, running a number of landing pages for the same business simultaneously also affords you a great opportunity to play around with your layout, your calls to action, your tone, and other aspects of your content. Find out what works best in terms of keeping people on the site for longer (a good sign that your content is engaging and informative and that your page is set up for fast loading and different device usage) and what is getting you the most conversions. Then, use that tweaked and perfected formula across your local pages (remembering to keep the actual content unique), and you should see higher traffic and increased sales across the board.

Finally, there is a good competitive advantage to having well-targeted local landing pages, helping you stand out from other businesses in your space. This then has the knock-on effect of you being able to spend less on your overall digital marketing strategy: money that can then be spent elsewhere to further grow your business and separate yourself from competitors.

What Are the Best Practices for Building Location Landing Pages?

Deploying a local landing page strategy without careful research and analysis could work against you in terms of SERP, so it is important to follow a few simple guidelines to make sure that you are avoiding some common mistakes and making the best approach.

It can be tempting to write a solid landing page for your head office/home city and then simply replace any locations mentioned with different local terms for each page. This can cause the search algorithms to see your pages as duplicates of each other though, and you will run the risk of being penalized for it (as well as putting off your visitors).

Instead, you need to create content for each location that has a significant variation from your ‘original’ piece. This can, of course, be time-consuming as well as difficult — after all, if you craft your perfect message for one location, then you will naturally want to use the same or very similar page for the business operating one town over.

You should also identify your ideal customer in each location. This means conducting some in-depth demographic research—you need to know what your potential customers believe in, what they care about, and what their values are so that you can then align your message appropriately.

Ask For Help

If all that seems too complicated or time-consuming, then it may be time to enlist the help of an SEO expert like Digital Authority Partners. We have helped to create, deploy, and manage the digital marketing strategy for numerous businesses of all sizes across the United States, and we are well-positioned to help you as well.

You can find out more about location landing pages, search engine optimization, and effective content marketing by getting in touch today.