Q: What are the main goals of location/city landing pages?
A: Location and city landing pages can best be thought of as a form of customer service. These pages have dual goals; one is to achieve high visibility in the search engines for specific branches of your business, and the other is to engage page visitors so that they are inspired to patronize the location being featured.
Too often, business owners take shortcuts and only focus on the first half of this equation, resulting in the publication of large numbers of uninteresting, duplicative pages that are over-optimized with blocks of keywords (like city names and zip codes) and have little to offer human visitors. Sitewide signals like Google’s Helpful Content Update don’t reward websites that have a habit of publishing low-value content. If you keep it firmly in mind that you want these pages to inspire real people to choose your business, your logical next step is simply to choose amongst the many options we’ve covered based on what you believe will be of most help to your community.
Q: How much content do I need on my location/city landing pages?
A: You may not need all 20 types of the above content on a given landing page, and you may also have other forms of content I haven’t listed that are the right fit for your business and community.
Some elements are essential, like your name, contact info, and hours of operation. Beyond this, think about what is popular in your industry — is video content a fabulous fit, will photos help sell your business, do you need to build up reviews to become competitive in Google’s local packs, do deals play a significant role in how your customers shop? Your answers will be unique to your business and customer base. Don’t be afraid of experimenting. For example, lots of videos may not seem like an obvious match for the plumbing industry, but watch Joy Hawkins’ interview of a local plumber who saw outstanding success via a YouTube marketing strategy. Read about “shelfies” and how these photos can bring in customers whose confidence has been boosted by seeing your inventory. Consider how showcasing your sustainability efforts offers local guidance that can set your business apart. There is so much you can tell customers about why they should choose you!
Q: How do I optimize my location/city landing pages?
A: As mentioned above, over-optimized location and city landing pages have been a longstanding problem on the web. Read I Want To Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works to determine what approach to these landing pages is actually suitable for your business model, and in creating this set of pages, avoid the temptation to stuff them with keywords. An approach with more appeal to human visitors will be to naturally incorporate your most important location and product/service keywords into your:
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Page URLs
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Title tags
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Headers
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Sub-navigation
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Internal links