We work with hundreds of local businesses — from hyperlocal, single-location businesses to nationwide, multi-location companies — at the company I run, Bowler Hat.
One pattern we often see is that larger and seemingly more authoritative businesses don’t perform as well in local search as they should.
There are many reasons for this, and having multiple locations amplifies the need for solid local SEO foundations.
A common issue we come across is the lack of a well-optimized and well-performing landing page for local businesses.
In this post, we aim to illustrate what we believe to be the perfect location landing page, based on our experience working with local businesses.
We must tick our SEO boxes here, but we must also maximize the leads generated from these pages — to do this, we have to look at the intersection of lead generation and local SEO.
Where lead generation meets local SEO
There are two key elements to consider here:
- Local SEO ranking factors
- Landing page conventions
We want to create a perfectly optimized page from a Local SEO perspective but also a finely tuned lead generation machine.
These pages should allow the user to achieve their goal — much like a traditional lead-focused landing page.
Clearly, there is some synergy here.
To create pages that are highly visible, they should also be highly functional and allow the customer to get in touch and generate us those all important leads.
1. Local SEO ranking factors
Last month, I took a look at the local SEO ranking factors from a recent Moz survey.
I wanted to break these down and help local marketers understand what exactly needs to be done to optimize for the primary ranking factors.
We can further analyze this information in our quest for the perfectly optimized landing page.
The following are the ranking factors that are relevant for local SEO landing page optimization:
- City, state in landing page title. Easy enough — let’s make sure the page title is optimized!
- Click-through rate from search results. This highlights the importance of relevance and a well-optimized title + meta description.
- Topical keyword relevance of domain content. It might be a challenge to make the whole domain relevant for the keywords you are targeting on a single landing page, especially if you are a multi-location business with separate pages for each location. But you can certainly ensure your whole domain is relevant for the service keywords. If you only have a handful of locations, ensure you mention them on the service pages, or at the very least link to your “our locations” pages on all service pages. Create a clear link between service and location for your users and the search engine.
- Quality/authority of inbound links to landing page URL. This is a given, and if we have a local link, then we should point it to the local landing page. This is only made easier when those landing pages are of a given quality.
- Product/service keyword in landing page title. This is a no-brainer, and the page should be titled for the big terms we want to rank for.
- Page authority of landing page URL. Some authority will be inherited from the site, but often it takes some direct link-building to this page to help move the dial — so the better the page, the easier it is to build those links.
- City, state in landing page H1/H2 tags. This is just more common sense, and if you can mention what you do and where you do it in your landing page header tags (heading or sub-heading), then it will only help with relevancy.
- HTML name, address and phone number (NAP) matching location NAP. More common sense, and if we want Google to trust the address, we should use it consistently on these two key locations.
- Load time of landing page. Slow pages annoy users. Whether this is truly a ranking factor matters not, so keep your page fast and lean so it works well on mobile phones and skinny data connections.
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