Like most SEO elements, that ever-present “Locations” tab on a company website doesn’t seem like too big of a deal. You’re trying to locate a store, a plumber, or a mechanic nearby and you can go there to find the address closest to you. That’s all it’s for, right? Wrong. In this article I’ll talk about why location pages make a huge difference to your online presence, why they’re an absolute SEO goldmine for the physical businesses they serve. Here’s how you can properly launch location pages for your business to rake in some incredible Google ranking rewards.
Why Location Pages are a Big Deal for Your Website
For businesses that have a physical location and seek to attract local footraffic or sales, location pages can be a lifeline to the Google search algorithm. 46% of all Google searches are local – people looking to buy a specific service or product from someone nearby. Because there are so many locations in the world, locality-focused keywords tend to be pretty easy to capture, and because locations are so specific, people who search for them in the right context are very likely to convert.
Jet Dental, a mobile dental clinic, is one company that has put this strategy to work and reaped delicious fruits for their effort. Unlike traditional dentist offices that have an established location where people come and visit, mobile dental clinics like Jet dental have a team on wheels that travels to office buildings, sets up shop in the office break room, and knocks out all the employees’ dentist appointments in one visit.
When I started working with them at first we thought the most valuable SEO keyword was just “mobile dental clinic”, but soon we realized that those searching for mobile dental services are probably more likely to attach a city or state name to that search. For example: “mobile dental clinic Austin “
Following this insight, we set out to build a locations page campaign. We created a location page for each state in the US and a location page for the biggest and most key cities they wanted to target. Each page was correctly built to make sense to the Google algorithm and to give off Google’s preferred signals when rewarding websites with ranking power.
What do you think happened? You guessed it. The location pages started picking up traffic and now they’re passively collecting a hearty number of leads each month. These location pages have become some of the highest trafficked and highest converting pages on the site.
How You Can Set Up Your Location Pages To Win At SEO
As previously mentioned, location pages obviously don’t work for all companies. If you work in an industry like ecommerce that isn’t tied to geographical locations, this approach probably won’t work. People who search for “Buy shoes in {city}” are looking for directions to a physical shoe store, and will probably be less than thrilled if they come to your site and find out your products are only online.
For construction companies, restaurants, hair salons, used clothing stores and all other businesses that have an on-the-ground team or a front door and an open sign, location pages will help you dominate the Google rankings for the keywords that matter and enjoy a hearty increase in sales at your location.
These pages need to be built correctly, however. Some SEO principles to remember as you build out location pages:
- Have your desired location and your product or service keywords in the URL, the page title, and the headers of your web page.
- Know what your keywords are, and focus on them. For example, if your company is called Joseph’s Photography and your domain is Josephphoto.com, the URL josephphoto.com/provo-utah isn’t going to help much. Why? Because no one searches in Google “photo provo utah”. They search “family photos provo utah”. Therefore, your URL should be josephphoto.com/family-photos/provo-utah or josephphoto.com/family- photos-in-provo-utah
- Make your location pages informative! Google reads text closely and having lots of text on your location pages will help you compete for more keywords.
- Include attractive pictures and videos of your product or service. These location pages serve as landing pages for those who come to them, so they need to really sell your business. Beautiful photos are a big part of that.
- Make sure your page loads quickly and is mobile friendly. People are impatient online. They don’t wait for websites to load and if they’re searching on their phone and the site looks clunky, it will be a sure turn off.
I hope these thoughts and tips about creating location pages for your business help. From my experience in SEO I’ve learned that very few SEO campaigns are as easy and successful as this one. Good luck!
Guest post courtesy of Ryan Cook