What is a Local Landing Page?
A local landing page is a standalone page designed to target a specific geographic location. This physical location could be a specific city or an area in a city. For example this is a local landing page we built for Kelowna SEO.
The purpose of localized landing page is three fold
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Drive organic traffic for a specific keyword or phrase
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Improve user experience (UX)
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Increase conversions
The first bullet point is fairly straight forward. Every local business wants more relevant, high-intent traffic from organic search results. This type of traffic tends to convert extremely well compared to marketing channels.
A lot of business owners don’t understand the value local landing pages add for customers. These location landing pages make it crystal clear which areas you service. Customers don’t need to guess if you service their city or town. For home service businesses this can be very important. If your business is located in San Diego, are you willing to service a customer in Del Mar? Customers don’t need to guess your service area if you have local landing pages.
Which brings us to conversions. You can leverage these local landing pages to show off your services, customer reviews and frequently asked questions to make it easier for local customers to to make their decision. These pages can often serve as landing pages for Google Ad campaigns as well.
To create a successful local landing page, you should choose specific and relevant keywords, include location-specific content, and optimize your page for local and search engine optimization. Additionally, you should consider including local reviews, calls to action, and contact information to help convert visitors into customers. By following these guidelines, you can create effective local landing pages that rank high and drive conversions.
A Bulletproof Structure To Build Local Landing Pages With
While we don’t prescribe to the one size fits all approach, this will provide a template that you can use to build your own local landing and web pages with.
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Page URL
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SEO Title
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Header Tags
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Meta Description
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Introduction & Call To Action
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Map & Contact Information
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Customer Testimonials
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Services
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Locations
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Benefits
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Call To Action
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FAQs
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Misc. (Sweat The Small Stuff)
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Local Landing Page Examples
Page URL, SEO Title, Header Tags and Meta Description are basic SEO elements that every well optimized webpage should contain
Introduction & Call To Action, Map & Contact Information, Customer Testimonials, Services, Benefits, Call To Action and FAQs are all part of the content.
Tip: You don’t need to have 100% unique content on every page. It’s OK to reuse sections of the content on your own local pages or landing pages. I generally recommend at least 50% of the content is unique.
Page URL
The page URL is part of the three horsemen. These three elements (URL, SEO, Title tag and H1 tag) are the most important part of any webpage’s SEO. They help search engines understand what the webpage is about.
There are a few ways to structure your website depending on how large the site is. Generally, you want to stick to 2-3 words.
Here are a few good examples of a page URL:
example.com/california/san-diego-handyman
example.com/san-diego-handyman
And a bad example of a page URL:
example.com/home-repair-san-diego-handyman
You want to stay away from keyword stuffing.
SEO Title or Meta Title
The SEO title or a Meta Title is what what shows up in the Google Search Results. You have 60 characters that will show up. 50 on certain devices.
The SEO Title has two jobs.
First, be optimized for SEO. Using San Diego Handyman as our keyword, you want to start with that keyword. Ie: San Diego Handyman.
The second is to get the user to click. A few good examples:
San Diego Handyman | Low Cost and High Quality.
San Diego Handyman Highest Rated In San Diego County.
You don’t need to stuff keywords here but you can include variations naturally for example.
San Diego Handyman | Home Repair Services
Pro Tip: Google will often rewrite your SEO Title. Approximately half of the time they’ll use your websites H1 tag as the SEO Title. Make sure you optimize both
H1 (or Page Title) and Header Tags
Header tags are headlines on the actual webpage itself. Think of Header Tags like a table of contents.
Your H1 tag is the the title.
H2 tags are chapters
H3 tags are sub-chapters
And so on.
Your H1 tag is one of the most important on-page elements to a web page. There is technically no character limit but I try to limit these to the primary keyword and variations. For example
San Diego Handyman Services
Use H2 and H3 tags to capture secondary keywords.
San Diego Home Repair
General Contractor Serving San Diego County
etc.
Pro Tips:
#1 – An easy way to check a websites H1 tag is by using this tool https://www.seoptimer.com/h1-checker
Plug the URL in and it’ll show you the H1 tag it uses.
#2 – The header area doesn’t ALWAYS have to contain the H1 tag. You can use an H2 tag and a catchy header.
For example a local HVAC company might use an H2 tag at the top of the page.
Providing Calgarians With Year Round Comfort
And then in text below that an H1 tag of:
Calgary Plumbers
Here is an example of a septic company in Colorado that does this well.
Meta Description
Meta descriptions shows up below the SEO title on the search engine page.
You have 160 characters to write a compelling, attention catching description.
Every SEO worth his salt knows Meta Descriptions aren’t a direct ranking factor.
It’s why they’re often ignored.
What it can impact is click through rate, and a click through rate impacts rankings.
You want to entice the customer to click. For example
San Diego’s Highest Rated Handyman Service. Timely Service With Accurate Estimates. No Job To Small!
Introduction and Call To Action
A solid call to action should be prominent both near the top of the page and also in the header of the website.
Try to include the primary keyword and variations where appropriate in the first section of the content. Again, avoid stuffing keywords, write naturally and talk about what makes your company or service unique.
Map & Contact Information
In addition to ensuring that you include a call to action, near or at the top of the page I recommend clients include a map with a link to their local Google Business Page and their contact information at or near the top of the page.
If done correctly this will show your star rating and location right on the map. Ideally you’re taking care to nurture your review profile and this should be an element you want to show off.
As for contact info, you don’t need to include all of it but do include the best way to get in touch. If it’s by phone, include that. Want your site visitors how to fill out a lead gen form? Use that.
Customer Testimonials
Customer testimonials serve two very important purposes.
First, they’re one of, if not the best form of social proof. Use real testimonials. These can be pulled from your Facebook Reviews, Google Business Reviews, Yelp or any other place you collect reviews.
Second, they add unique, user generated content. The amount of content on a page still matters in 2023. The best way to serve this content is to make sure it’s USEFUL information for clients. Reviews and customer testimonials absolutely check this box.
Pro Tip: Make sure the text can be read by search engines (like Google) and is NOT an image so you get credit for the content on the page. Google can’t “read” images. It uses alt text to determine what an image is about and that’s not nearly as powerful as written content for a bot.
Services
Adding your service pages is another great way to add useful content.
If you’re a plumber this may be hot water tanks, sink repair and replacement, toilet repair and replacement, poly-b pipe replacement, hot water tanks, new construction plumbing and so on.
I always tell clients not to get lazy. More is more. List out your services explicitly. The layman doesn’t know if all plumbers handle toiler replacements or if they all do new construction.
I wrote a guide to local SEO keyword research here.
Drop down menus often work great for this type of content. This allows you to hide larger sections of text so users don’t get distracted BUT if they want to learn more about a specific service they can expand that field to read more.
Locations
This is similar to services. You can list out all of the service areas you cover. Again, this can be highly useful for potential clients. Do you service my area of the city? Do you service that specific suburb?
Adding the locations you serve can be an effective way to help potential clients answer that question.
Like services, don’t get lazy. More is usually more. You don’t want to add specific addresses or zip codes, but certainly include neighborhoods or suburbs where appropriate.
Benefits
What are the benefits of hiring your company? What unique elements make you different than other companies?
Do you pride yourself on customer service?
Do you offer affordable pricing?
Do you offer same day service?
Are you highly rated or reviewed?
Do you offer online booking and payments?
What about discounts for seniors or military veterans?
Do you respond to inquiries in a certain time frame?
Free quotes?
This section should be used to highlight the advantages of working with your company.
Call to Action
Another call to action. When users scroll down the page you want to give them an easy way to book or contact you. Ideally instantly – I think in general forms aren’t great, most businesses should offer text or call.
For service based businesses forms are likely an ineffective way to capture potential leads. Talking to someone when they’re ready to take action is always more effective.
FAQs
FAQs are an underrated way to add additional length to your content. They let you capture more keywords in a natural, useful way. (There is that word again).
How do you bill out projects? Per hour or flat rate?
How much do you charge per hour?
When is your store or business open?
What is your typical response time?
Do you offer warranties?
You can add specific FAQs for your service as well. For example:
Do you dispose of old toilets?
Can you install a garburator?
Do you offer tank-less hot water tanks?
Misc. (Other Small Details)
The above will get you 90% of the way there but there are a ton of small tweaks you can make to help your local landing pages rank.
Images
Relevant images can be useful to help break up the content but they can do more than just add eye candy to a page. Ideally, these images are unique to your business. iPhone quality images are more than sufficient. A picture of your tech in the field is far better than a stock image.
However, there may be instances where you cannot provide firsthand images. In those situations, stock pictures can be utilized to still make your page visually appealing. Resources like Freepik are often helpful in providing a good background for pictures.
Make sure you take the time to add alt-tags to your images to help Google understand what the picture is about. If you can weave keywords in, excellent but just describe the image accurately.
Mobile Friendly
This goes without saying but your website needs to be mobile friendly. A ton of potential customers will use mobile devices to perform searches. A website that hasn’t been optimized for mobile is unusable and an unusable website means that potential customer is gone.
Internal Links
I touched on this when discussing service and location sections. But you want to include links to other pages on your website. Internal linking is vital to local seo as they help Google crawl and understand your website.
Pro tip
If you migrate your site to a different hosting package or server, you need to check that all of the internal links still work. When we migrate sites we use the All-In-One WP Migration tool will make this easier, so long as you are staying in the WordPress ecosystem.
Too many web designers miss this very important step when they rebuild a website.
NAP (Name Address Phone Number)
Your business name address phone number should ideally be on every page in the footer. If you have multiple locations those can also be in the footer. If however, the landing page you’re building has a unique location add a google map and the NAP schema to that page.
Examples of Effective Local Landing Pages
One Hour Air and Heat
One of my favorite service websites is One Hour Heat and Air
There URL is clean /services//air-conditioning
They make good use of their H1 and Header Tags
They have a clean call to action in the menu that is large and red.
They list and link to relevant services they offer
They talk about the benefits to working with them.
They don’t include a map because it’s a franchise with dynamic locations. They also don’t include locations, because they have 1000s.
I would like to see them include customer testimonials but they’ve opted not to include these.
They get bonus points for including a live chat box.
Frequently Asked Questions
Local landing pages are very similar to homepages for local businesses.
A homepage needs to have better flow as the majority of your clients will land on your homepage. This will include direct traffic, social media traffic, branded search engine results and organic traffic It should provide an overview of the website and be easy to navigate.
A local landing page is going to capture almost exclusively high intent organic traffic. For this reason we want to tailor these landing pages to convert these specific search queries.
In summary, a home page acts as the central hub of a website, providing an overview and navigation options for all site content, while a landing page is a standalone page with a specific goal or conversion in mind, targeting a particular target audience, and promoting a focused offer or action.
Search intent refers to the underlying purpose or motivation behind a user’s search query. Understanding search intent is crucial for location and service pages because it enables businesses to align their content with what users are seeking, thereby increasing the relevance and effectiveness of their pages.
When you perform a Google search look at the Google Searches that show up. Your page needs to look and behave similar to those pages otherwise you won’t have a chance to rank. For example if you sell cookies on an e-commerce store and all of the search results are local stores, your e-commerce page likely isn’t going to rank.
If you’re interested in learning more about search intent, I wrote a whole article about it here.
Local landing pages play a crucial role in improving local search authority for businesses. Here are several ways in which optimizing local landing pages, can enhance your local search authority:
Targeted Location Relevance: Local landing pages allow you to create specific content tailored to different locations you serve.
Enhanced Local Optimization: Local landing pages provide an opportunity to optimize your content specifically for local search.
Improved User Experience: Local landing pages allow you to create content that is highly relevant and valuable to users in specific locations.
Local Backlink Opportunities: With dedicated local landing pages, you can actively seek backlinks from other local websites, directories, or organizations.
Enhanced Local Citations: Local landing pages allow you to mention and showcase local citations, such as awards, accreditations, partnerships, and community involvement specific to each location.
The short answer is kind of. Some of the content in this article have been generated with the help of chatGPT. That being said it’s been heavily edited because it tends to give very generic responses that aren’t particularly useful.
We touched on this in the map and contact section. But yes you can and should embed a local map to show your business location. You can also include your address and phone number.
