Are you wondering why you should spend time focusing your efforts on local SEO and building the perfect location page for your business? The answer is simple: you want to be found where users are searching.
In fact, 78% of local-mobile searches result in offline sales. If you don’t show up in these results, you’re missing out on a large portion of your potential customers.
How do you increase your chances of customers seeing your website when they perform a local search? Well, you need to have an optimised location page that guides potential customers to you! Let’s look at what location pages are, why they matter, and how you can optimise your page to show up in organic search results.
For example, let’s say you are a plumber that serves multiple states across Australia. Below you can see how a perfectly optimised page is appearing on the first page for ‘Plumber Melbourne’. A keyword with almost 3,000 searches per month and high CPC (bye-bye ad budget).
This page ticks all the boxes (or maybe most of them) of what makes a good local landing page:
✔Includes a clear Call-To-Action
✔Integrates keywords into the title tag
✔Has a specific page just targeting Victoria
✔Implemented local schema
If done correctly, your local landing pages have the potential to rank for your desired keywords in whatever niche you serve. Turning a blind eye to building these pages, will guarantee that you are missing out on gaining more traffic when trying to reach a local audience.
The good news is that these local landing pages are easy to set up once you know what you’re doing. So let’s dive into it!
What are Local Landing Pages?
Local landing pages are pages made specifically for certain or multiple locations a business serves (e.g. Melbourne, Sydney etc) to serve local search intent. The aim of these pages is for businesses to inform users about the geographical areas they serve and offer their services.
Why Do Local Businesses Need a Killer Location Page?
According to Google, 46% of all queries across the web have local search intent. Yes, you saw that…that’s almost half of the searches everyone makes!
Now more than ever local businesses need to make sure they have killer local landing pages by providing useful and valuable information a local searcher is looking for. Essentially, these local landing pages help provide customers with the information they need to contact your business and enquire about your services.
Having these pages set up means that there’s potential for more Organic users to come to your website, which in turn gives you more leads. Through your landing page, customers will know how to contact you, where you are, and can find out more about your business.
Higher Visibility = More traffic = More Leads
Now, there are multiple local ranking factors that will help with determining if your page appears on the first page. We want to keep this simple and provide you with a checklist that we have seen our local SEO campaigns benefit the most from and you can implement right away!
Ideally, in a perfect world, the below image sums up the key components every local landing page should have. This might look like a tedious job, but trust us, in the long run, it will pay off with all the local traffic your website will be receiving.
The Ultimate SEO Checklist for Local Landing Pages:
Now that you know why these pages are important, it’s time to look at how you can optimise them for the best results. Using this simple checklist, you can draw more customers to your website and generate more leads. Thank us later.
1. Clean URLs
You want to have really clean and structured URLs on your local landing pages – a URL that both humans and search engines can easily read when they see it. For example, a clean URL for a local landing page would look something like this: www.yourdomain.com.au/locations/vic/plumber-melbourne/
2. Incorporate Keywords into Title Tag
The title tag is the blue clickable link that appears on search results. As shown previously, ensure you include the keywords and location you are trying to rank for in a natural and easy to read format.
3. Have a Map Embedded on Your Page
Pin a map on your local landing page indicating the areas you serve, so users can quickly and easily understand if those areas match up with where they are located.
4. Include CTA
Include CTA on the page that is clearly visible for a user to see and most importantly easy for them to book if they find your services are a good fit. This is an easy element to implement but can be also easily overlooked. Below is an example of a good and clear CTA.
5. Include Special Offers
Another easy way to entice users to enquire about your services is to include any special offers that you offer. They don’t have to be anything over the top, just simple and to the point like the below.
6. Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP)
Make sure that your NAP information is the same across your location page, Google My Business, Yelp, and other websites. Doing so will help your customers get accurate information and build trust.
7. Implement Local Schema Markup
This is such an underestimated feature that local business owners don’t leverage enough. We urge all local business owners to embed local schema markup to have your reviews, opening hours etc featured on search results.
8. Create Separate Location Pages
If your business offers services across multiple areas/states you want to create separate and unique content on these pages to increase the chances of you ranking of a variation of keywords (e.g. plumbers Melbourne, plumbers Sydney, plumbers Brisbane etc.)
9. Social Proof
Who doesn’t love seeing a good review on a website? Noone! Embed recent reviews/testimonials of customers that have used your service. This helps with reassuring users that are in safe hands and builds trust and credibility.
10. Internal Linking
Internal links are important for any business because they allow you to move the customer through your pages. With these links, you can also pass on the link equity juice to these important location pages. Below is a good example of how a plumbing business internally links to other location pages.
11. Mobile Page Speed
We saved the best for last. This is an important one and has a major impact on both user experience and rankings. Given Google’s mobile-first indexing rollout, this means Google looks at your mobile site first, not your desktop site.
Make sure you are using Google’s mobile-friendly test to ensure you’re website loads fast and does not suffer from any major issues.
Do You Need Help With your local SEO?
If you want to attract more customers to your website and improve your online visibility, we’re here to help! We’re a Google Partner Specialist agency that focuses on responsive, ethical, and authentic SEO services and have ranked and worked with a range of local businesses across different industries.
Time to stop hanging with the Turkeys and soar with the hawks! Contact us today to find out how we can help you.