At my company, Bowler Hut, we work with hundreds of local businesses, from hyper-local single-location companies to national multi-location companies.
One pattern we often see is that large, authoritative-looking businesses fail to perform as well as they should in local search. There are many reasons for this, and having multiple locations increases the need for a solid local SEO foundation. A common problem we encounter is the lack of well-optimized and performant landing pages for local businesses.
In this post, we aim to explain what we believe to be the perfect place landing page based on our experience working with local businesses.
We need to tick the SEO box here, but we also need to maximize the leads generated from these pages. To do this, we need to look at the intersection of lead generation and local SEO.
Where Lead Generation Meets Local SEO
There are two important factors to consider here.
- Local SEO Ranking Factors
- Landing page rules
Not only do we want to create fully optimized pages in terms of local SEO, but we also want to create a fine-tuned lead generation machine. These pages should help users achieve their goals, just like traditional lead-focused landing pages.
Clearly, there is some synergy here. To create a highly viewable page, it must also be highly functional and allow your customers to reach out and generate all those important leads.
1. Local SEO Ranking Factors
Last month, I looked at local SEO ranking factors from a recent Moz survey. I wanted to analyze these and help local marketers understand what exactly they need to do to optimize their key ranking factors. , where you can find fully optimized landing pages.
Below are ranking factors related to optimizing your local SEO landing pages.
- City, state included in the landing page title. It’s easy — make sure your page titles are optimized!
- CTR from search results. This highlights the importance of relevance and well-optimized titles and meta descriptions.
- Topic keyword relevance for domain content. Relating your entire domain to the keywords you’re targeting on a single landing page can be difficult, especially for multi-location businesses with separate pages for each location. However, it is certain that the entire domain is related to the service keyword. If you only have a handful of locations, be sure to mention them on your service page or at least link to the “our locations” page on all service pages. Create a clear link between
- The quality/authority of the inbound link to the landing page URL. This makes sense, and if you have local links, you should point them to your local landing page. This only becomes easier if your landing page is of a certain quality.
- The product/service keyword for the landing page title. This is a no-brainer, and your pages should be titled to match the key terms you want to rank for.
- Page permissions for the landing page URL. Some authority is inherited from the site, but in many cases you’ll want to create a direct link to this page to help get the dials rolling. So the better your page is, the easier it will be to create these links.
- Landing page H1/H2 tag city, state. This is more common sense, and being able to mention what you’re doing where in your landing page header tags (headings or subheadings) only makes it more relevant.
- HTML Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP) The NAP of the matching location. More generally speaking, if you want Google to trust your address, you need to use it consistently in these two main places.
- Landing page load time. Slow pages annoy users. It doesn’t matter if this is really a ranking factor, just make sure your page is fast and lean and works well on mobile phones and thin data connections.
- NAP of hCard/Schema.org in the landing page URL. This is actually one of the 1% ranking factors, but if you can mark up your NAP so that Google can use it and display it with confidence, that would be helpful.
- Geographic (city/neighborhood) keyword relevance for domain content. This is outside the scope of a specific landing page, but if possible, consider all locations operating in a sensible way across your site. Connect the dots between your services page and your locations page, and use your main location consistently.
This is not to say that all of these are relevant to every job, but we do want to consider as many of these as possible to get the SEO signals dialed in to your landing pages. I’m here.
2. A perfect landing page
Much of the science of landing pages comes from the PPC industry. After all, if you’re paying to drive traffic to a particular page, it’s natural to want that page’s performance to be the last to hit. No layout is completely perfect. The right page depends a lot on what you’re promoting. However, you can get some guidance from proven best practices.
- Ad copy and context. While this is pure PPC, landing pages allow for a much tighter message back and forth between your ad and your page. It doesn’t hurt to consider the context here and the language the user searches before visiting the page. Align your language to increase your conversion rate. Local SEO has some similarities. This is because keyword and location-based targeting is generally very narrow.
- Page heading. Page headings should lay out positioning and attract users. In many cases, primary headings can be backed up by secondary headings. This should clearly and concisely communicate your unique selling proposition (USP) and value proposition. Tell someone exactly why they should do business with you in the midst of all the competition.
- Product features. Product or service details should be listed. Exactly what you are doing. This helps you explain exactly what your service is to your customers and covers all the variations in how your customers search. For a 24-hour emergency locksmith with no call charges, check this page for more information.
- Product advantage. This is an old fashioned marketing source. Detail the features, but praise the benefits of the product or service. Really explain how your service will help your clients. how you take their pain away and what they get. This is the emotional element of your sales copy that encourages the user to contact you. Ignore this at your peril.
- location map. Since we’re focusing on a location landing page here, we need a map detailing where you are, or at least where you serve if you don’t have a local address. Ideally, this map should provide driving directions for users to navigate.
- call to action. You need a strong and clear call to action. Using the form and phone number will give you the best overall results for local business inquiries. I tend to prefer one big call to action (CTA), but you can also use small secondary CTAs at the bottom of the page to drive leads for leads crossing the entire page.
- social proof. We need reviews, testimonials and even case studies. Prove to your audience beyond reasonable doubt that you can do what you do well.
- your team. The strength of a local company is that customers can deal with local representatives. Not a call center. So put your team in front of the people. Humanize the landing page and show Tom, Dick and Harry in the office answering the phone.
Fully optimized local landing page
So, naturally, the perfect local SEO landing page is also a fine-tuned lead generation page. This satisfies Google’s criteria and, most importantly, delivers what customers are looking for.
To better explain this, I created the following infographic (click to enlarge) showing how to implement all these key SEO and landing page elements into a killer landing page.
Embed this image in your website using the following code:
<img src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2016/06/perfectly-optimized-local-landing-page.png"><p>The Perfectly Optimized Local Landing Page, by <a href="https://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/perfectly-optimised-local-landing-page/">Bowler Hat</a> and <a href="https://searchengineland.com/">Search Engine Land</a></p>
(Note: Feel free to download, use and share this infographic. But please give credit to this post or my site. )
Synergies between SEO and landing pages
Whether it’s SEO, PPC, landing page optimization, or a myriad of other digital marketing tactics, it’s easy to get too narrow-minded. My intention here was to illustrate how lessons from one area often complement and improve others.
I’d love to hear about your local landing pages and how you’re generating leads from your local SEO traffic, so reach out to me on Twitter. @MarcusBowlerHat.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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About the author
Marcus Miller is an experienced SEO and PPC consultant based in Birmingham, UK. Marcus focuses on strategy, audit, local SEO, technical SEO, PPC, and generally helping companies dominate search and social. Marcus is an SEO and digital marketing firm in the UK He is Managing Director of Bowler Hat He is a Director of helping WordPress owners do security, SEO and site maintenance without breaking the bank Focused on making things happen, he also runs wArmour aka WordPress Armor.
