Local Landing Page Tactics for SEO

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I do not remember when I had to pick up the Yellow/White Pages directory to look for a service or a nearby restaurant. All I remember doing was picking up my phone and append “near me” very conveniently to whatever my search keywords were.
Are you running a business and still haven’t thought about building a Local SEO strategy?
In this day and age, if you don’t, then you probably should go over the first paragraph again.
We’re in times when we can easily look for shops, restaurants, or any other local businesses nearby with our phones or any device with an active internet connection.
If your business has multiple stores, you probably have a local landing page for your stores or offices.
But are you using those pages optimally to get the full potential out of them?

What is a Local Landing Page?

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Local landing pages are usually short and simple. Still, they serve a great purpose for businesses with multiple store locations or service-based ones who wish to inform their consumers about their geographical coverage.
Content on local landing pages should remain specific to the geography. It should address consumers according to their demographic interests.
Here’s an example of a local landing page from Slice Life.

What Is the Difference Between Home Page and Landing Page?

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A home page can contain multiple pieces of information like:

• Sales narrative
• List of services
• Business information
• The opening & closing hours

Landing pages are much more direct and mostly focused on only a few things like:

• Service
• Location and
• Special features like discounts or offers.

For example, if a pizza delivery chain had a landing page for their stores at multiple locations, it would include:-

• Contact information
• Address
• Average waiting time
• Order menu, and
• Services hours

SEO Benefits of Local Landing Pages

Local landing pages are a highly effective strategy to attract customers who make google searches with local intent. There’s a good chance that those users are highly motivated and could walk into the store the very same day.
According to Business2Community, 18% of smartphone searches with local intent lead to a purchase within a day compared to 7% of non-local searches.

1. Improve Search Authority

Ever since Google’s 2012 Venice update, local pages have boosted their search ranks irrespective of the searches being implicit or explicit.
Implicit searches do not contain geo-modifiers in their search terms. On the other side, explicit searches have them, such as “Hair Salon near Downtown, Houston.”
Google will always try to make a local connection to increase the relevance of their search results. Searches will result in Google’s trademark three-pack. It displays the top three local search results along with their contact information and business names.

2. Opportunity to Publish Locally Relatable Content

Having a local landing page allows you to publish content relevant to the locality. It could help generate traffic from local listing sites.
Depending on the nature of your business, the landing page could contain any of the undermentioned.

• Virtual Tour of the premises
• Events happening at different locations
• Highlight the staff members service quality
• Include reviews from within the area
• Lists of local interest, such as local events

3. Chance to Increase Lead Generation

Local landing pages provide an opportunity to publish unique content. Also, it offers the ability to get backlinks from:

• Local news sites
• Business listing websites
• Food blogs
• Vacation/travel guide sites

These mentions help improve the search rankings of your landing page in relevance to your location.
Adding to that, make sure you claim business listings on Google My Business. Also, claim your listing on sites like Yelp and YellowPages.

What Are the Ways to Optimize Your Local Landing Pages?

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The purpose of creating local landing pages is to generate more traffic. It makes it easier for customers to find your store. Also, it provides them with more information on the product to purchase.
It might be relatively simpler if you have only two stores. But it gets a lot trickier if you’re running a multi-store business. That is where you might want to take the help of data and analytics combined with traditional SEO.

1. Google Analytics

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’ve set up a Google Analytics property for your website. Now, navigate to Audience > Geo > Location.
An image snippet from Google Analytics
Clicking on a location will display a map, and some numbers indicate how much traffic is coming from different regions. Filter these results by the country, state, or city. Use this data to find which particular regions show a better engagement rate. You can find it by looking up stats like average session duration, bounce rate, and goal conversions (if you set any). Data may also reveal if you’re attracting any traffic from regions outside your coverage. It can help you plan business expansion strategies.

2. Insights from Facebook

If you’re a business page with a decent following, then go to your audience insights section:
Your Facebook Page>Insights>People
Facebook Page Insights with an option to export data This shows you the demographics of the people who like and follow your page. Even though it is not groundbreaking data, it is still a good place to start.

3. Headline and Sub-Headline

Include location and major keywords specific to the business in the heading and sub-heading of the landing page. Here, we’re talking about the visitors’ content first on your website. Do not confuse them with title and meta description.

4. Title and Meta Description

These are the content that shows up in the search result of your website. Try to incorporate your store’s location and the target keyword in both the meta title and description.
Example of Title and Meta description

5. Optimized URL

URL not only acts as an address for your website but also reassures visitors on whether they’re on the correct site. For this reason, you must use a clear structure for your website’s landing page.
Example:
https://www.example.com/location/storenumber (or)
https://location.example.com

6. Embedded Map

Google Map location pins help visitors better than having to find store location using landmark references. Embedding a map on the website allows people to scroll through the direction. Also, it helps them find your store’s physical location better.
CMSs like WordPress provide plugins that let users complete this task within a click of few buttons. You can find similar plugins in different site builders too.

7. Description of Offered Service

This includes the content that describes what service does the business to which the website belongs to offers. For restaurants, this includes food menu, and service-based businesses could outline their services whatever that may be cleaning, catering or plumbing, etc.

8. Images and Videos

Using multimedia can ensure that the visitors understand your website and what’s the content about. Over that, using images and videos have further SEO benefit as well. Ensure the images are of high quality and location-specific. Do not forget to include alt-tag in all your images.

9. Post Customer Reviews

Humble brags are fine when it comes to marketing. Customer reviews are considered to be one of the most effective strategies to increase customer visits. 94% of customers believe that online reviews impact their purchasing decisions.
Try to build more trust among visitors by using customer reviews that have local intent. You could embed reviews from Google and Yelp if needed.

10. NAP Citations

Name, Address, and Phone Number are major impact factors for the site’s SEO. Other search engines and Google use this information to verify your business and location. It is recommended to use the same name throughout all online listings.

11. Location Specific Hours

It is essential to include the opening hours/service hours on local landing pages. Make sure to include on what days the local store remains open. Mention if the store remains closed during public holidays or on weekends. This information is often pulled in to Google’s knowledge graph. So, make sure you’re giving out correct information to the visitors.

12. Optimize for Mobile

In 2019, Google made it public that it’s switching to a Mobile-first indexing system. This meant that Google would prioritize website performance on mobile devices over their desktop version.
To remain in competition for search rankings,
Websites needed to perform better and load faster on mobile devices. It helps them to remain in competition for search rankings. This update made perfect sense in many ways, as more than 60% of Google searches were made from mobile devices.
Page builder tools may have the feature to optimize webpages for mobile. But, there are tools from Google that’ll help you check if your website’s mobile-friendly or not.

13. Internal Linking

Google uses internal linking to identify new pages. In a hypothetical situation, if you were to forget to include the new page in the sitemap, then Google’s web crawler won’t be able to find it.
Now, you could do this in two ways- Link from & Link to
From your local landing page : Link an already existing page from your newly created local landing page. It could be the Contact Us page or a page that provides more information on the service your business offers.
To your local landing page : The reverse of what we mentioned above. This step is usually forgotten while building new pages. While linking your newly built landing page, make sure you link it from an existing page with relatively higher traffic among other webpages. Higher ranking pages are likely to pass on their authority, which benefits the site’s SEO.

14. Sitemap

Now that your new local landing page is ready to face the internet re-submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. This step helps Google find your new page and crawl for indexing. If you don’t have a sitemap, you can build one here.

Are There Any SaaS Platforms That Help Build Landing Pages?

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When it comes to building landing pages, you could do it the traditional way. It involves writing HTML code. This method offers more control over design and scope for optimization.
That said, there’s a simpler method, which is to use landing page building tools.

1. Leadpages

Price: Starts at $25
Leadpages offers more than just a mere page building tool. It has 100+ free page templates to choose from.
Leadpages offers a drag & drop editor for users to customize their page. The free templates are customizable as well.
Source: Leadpages
Apart from these features, Leadpages allows integration with email clients, CRM, Payroll processing software. It also offers a plugin for WordPress, thus allowing seamless integration with WP sites. Additionally, Leadpages allows users to add pop-up form and alert boxes to their site.

2. Instapage

Price: $149/yr
Instapage is for all those data nerds. Similar to Leadpages, Instapage too offers a good load of customizable templates. The difference is that all templates are optimized for conversions, and most of them are mobile-friendly.
Source: Instapage
Instapage may not be the best choice if you’re only looking to create one or two landing pages.
It aims at being more than a page building tool by offering site owners advanced analytical features like:

• Heatmap
• A/B Testing
• AMP support
• Dynamic text replacement
• Integrations with other SaaS products like Salesforce, Zapier, Hubspot, and few other market leaders.

It’s ideal for a situation when you’re running a marketing campaign with multiple landing pages.

3. Unbounce

Unbounce isn’t much different from its competitors mentioned above. It also offers more than 100 templates to choose from for your landing page design. The editor lets you drag and drop elements onto the page, making it easier to build the landing page exactly as you want.
Source: Unbounce
Furthermore, it allows you to perform multiple formats of split tests. With that, you can run tests and identify headlines and content that work best.
Templates can be sorted by industry, best-performing, agency, eCommerce, and based on many more categories.

What Next?

To answer the question of if you need to use page building tools?
I wouldn’t, as I’d prefer a bit more control on the page’s design and structure. But it depends on the need of the marketer/business.
Try mixing-up some SEM tactics along with Local SEO so that you could generate some traffic in the early days. I’d recommend integrating Facebook Pixel and Google Re-marketing Tags to your website. It could benefit your business from returning visitors.
Are you looking to optimize your Local Landing pages?
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