Something that every business needs in the current digital age is a quality website. A website increases a company’s visibility, reach, and overall legitimacy, and a functioning, attractive web design is vital to a user-friendly experience that keeps customers coming back. Good web design is essential across every industry.
Local businesses need to utilize digital marketing and a quality website to reach the most potential customers. It’s crucial to build a quality website with the user in mind, but this won’t do a business any good if it’s hard to find or impersonal. The point of having a website is to drive sales and impressions. Search engine optimization achieves the visibility a business needs to thrive in an online world. One aspect of SEO is optimizing websites through the creation of additional pages. The more pages and content a search engine has to work with, the more accurately it can decipher what the website is about and which search terms should be ranking in the search results pages.
One of the keys to visibility in companies that operate in more than one area is optimizing their websites to have location landing pages for each location they serve. Every multi-area company needs location landing pages to increase its visibility and make each service location feel unique. However, many businessowners still wonder: why create location landing pages?
Location Landing Pages and Their Purpose
Location landing pages are pages on a website dedicated to a specific area or location. They exist to help potential customers in particular areas find information pertinent to them in a business. Location landing pages also help companies raise their search engine rankings in each location through the employment of long-tailed search terms.
Location landing pages connect businesses to customers who are actively searching for the business’s products or services. The pages simply make the search terms more specific to certain locations to target a more condensed audience.
As an example of how creating location landing pages benefits a business, plumbers often work in more than just one town or neighborhood. Perhaps the plumber is based in one town but regularly works in the surrounding seven towns. The plumber should have a website with eight different location landing pages—one for each of the eight towns he or she services. Creating each of these location landing pages opens up a considerable number of keywords for the plumber to target, which helps the website’s local rankings. For example, if the plumber makes a location landing page for a town called Raymond, some search terms the plumber can target now include location-specific ones such as “plumbers in Raymond,” “Raymond plumbing,” and “best plumbing services in Raymond.” These long-tailed search terms are easier to rank for because there’s less competition for “plumbers in Raymond” than for “plumbers,” since there are plumbers everywhere.
This practice also helps out consumers because a person searching for a plumber in Raymond would not find a plumber who doesn’t service the area very useful. Optimizing for locations online is a win-win situation.
Remember, even long-tailed location keywords are chosen based on meticulous keyword research completed by trained search engine optimization specialists. Keywords chosen without proper research may not yield the desired results. They may provide little to no positive change in website rankings.
Benefits of Location Landing Pages for Businesses
Location landing pages bring many benefits to businesses in all industries as well as to consumers. Searching for area-specific keywords helps consumers decipher what local companies provide the products or services for which they’re searching. People want convenience, and one of the most convenient things is finding a company that fulfills a demand and that’s close to home. Search engines may increase rankings of websites with properly optimized location landing pages because these pages, when optimized for local users, improve user experience with search engines and tailor the experience to users’ needs. Search engines strive to make their sites user-friendly and beneficial to the consumer more than to businesses.
Location landing pages do pose some advantages to customers, but their main benefit is better, more effective search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is a process that increases visibility and, ultimately, impressions and conversions for a business’s website. Creating location landing pages is mainly for SEO purposes, as it helps the business target location-based customers and service areas. Location-based keywords offer much more obtainable rankings than broader terms.
Targeting smaller service areas and locations increases the chances of finding a customer who will become a conversion. Targeting long-tailed keywords means you can rank more quickly for search terms and achieve more visibility with people in your service area. Appealing to a more succinct target audience is one of the most beneficial changes you can make to your website for SEO.
Consult a professional, trustworthy SEO company to find and research the best key terms to optimize your website. It can also be beneficial to have your SEO company create your location landing pages so that they’re explicitly built for optimization and uniqueness. Copy-and-pasted content on every single location landing page may appear as spam to search engines and hurt optimization rather than help it.
Choose How Many Location Landing Pages To Create
Most businesses struggle with not having enough location landing pages, but some can make way too many. Finding the right number of location landing pages is key to balancing search engine optimization without making the website appear spammy or as if it’s using bad SEO practices. Bad SEO practices, also known as black-hat SEO, can quickly have significant ramifications spanning from lower rankings to an all-out search engine ban. It’s essential for businesses to only invest in white-hat SEO practices.
The first step to deciding how many location landing pages you should create for your site is to figure out where exactly your service area is. Whether you run a product-based or service-based business, you cover a specific area of demand. For companies with multiple locations, this may be a little bit easier to decipher than for companies with one central location and a comprehensive service area.
Make a list of all the areas you regularly service. Once you have a comprehensive list, prioritize the areas you service most often. It’s usually most effective to go by town or city. If your business is located in a large city, targeting specific neighborhoods might be effective. However, neighborhood landing pages are a bit redundant in smaller communities. Many businesses also divide their service areas by ZIP codes.
Once you’ve compiled a list of all the areas you service, it’s time to decide which location landing pages to create first. Building out adequately optimized pages with quality, unique content can take time, so prioritization is essential. Decide which pages to build out first based on keyword research, addressing key terms with higher search volumes first.
Creating many location landing pages is beneficial to business’s search engine rankings, but it’s important not to make too many. If you’ve reached the point of making location landing pages for different streets, you’ve gone too far. Too many and too hyper-specific search terms don’t tend to have high search volumes, and the pages can start to look like spam. It’s also challenging to create quality, unique content for each location when the streets are mere blocks away from each other.
What Should Be on a Location Landing Page
Simply creating location landing pages and leaving them blank isn’t an effective strategy. You must choose long-tailed, area-specific key terms and work those keywords into the content on each location landing page. Each page should have unique content, although it may be telling a similar story or message. Ensuring you have unique content on each location landing page will ensure you see the desired results.
Location landing pages should contain custom information and design for each area. Write content pertinent to that specific area only, curating the page for people in your target audience for that area. Cover the kinds of services and products your company offers in that particular area.
Setting up location landing pages is essential for businesses with multiple service areas. It helps customers feel more connected to your brand, and it also helps your business stand out more in the search results for area-specific products and services. Targeting specific areas helps your business reach consumers in certain areas, expanding your target market and audience. Location landing pages are useful to your company because they help you increase impressions and improve your rankings for local, long-tailed keyword terms. These pages are helpful to consumers, too, as they help them find businesses by providing area-specific information.
The most important thing to remember when you’re creating location landing pages for your website is to ensure each page is unique. Simply copying and pasting content with a different city or neighborhood name thrown on each page will not increase rankings. Search engines may flag it as duplicate content, which can hurt rankings for the website. Duplicate content makes a website look spammy, and the sites may not show up in the search results at all if site crawlers notice.
To ensure your business is visible on search engines and properly optimized for your desired locations, consider hiring a professional digital marketing company. At Logical Position, we pride ourselves on our ability and dedication to create unique campaign plans for each of our clients. We build out the desired location landing pages for our clients based on meticulous research. We place unique, quality content throughout websites to properly optimize them in order to continuously improve search engine rankings for key terms in specific industries. Our dedication to following ethical guidelines and collaboration with our search engine partners is what sets us apart from other search engine optimization companies. We strive to help businesses meet their goals. Contact us today for more information and for a free digital marketing consultation. We provide search engine optimization, Google Ads for local business, Amazon ads, and more.