Community Discussion - What are your experiences creating local landing pages?
-
Hi there, Moz Community!
In Tuesday's post on the Moz Blog, "Overcoming Your Fear of Local Landing Pages," Miriam Ellis asks:
When tasked with developing a set of city landing pages for your local business clients, do you experience any of the following: brain fog, dry mouth, sweaty palms, procrastination, woolgathering, or ennui? Then chances are, the diagnosis is a _fear of local landing pages. _
Which brings me to today's question!
What are the toughest challenges you've faced when creating local landing pages? How have you overcome them? What successes have you had, and what lessons have you learned along the way?
-
Lessons:
- Sometimes you need more than 1 landing page even if it's for 1 service and even if you only serve 1 neighborhood. Why? If you know your target audience and it's mixed it will be more likely to convert with more personal landing page rather than a general message for all of them.
- Don't be afraid to use different CTAs and more than 2 times. Again, it might vary, but if your page is well designed and has some good flow you can use CTAs (I had "pre-conversion" CTA to get emails and also conversion CTA). For some people it's enough to read about your brand and they will convert, for others - it's important to know how you do it - then they convert/pre-convert. Having CTA in front of their nose helps, but of course don't overdo it.
- Mobile first. Always. 60-90% of all conversions came from mobile. CTR is higher, and CPC is lower. I don't know why, but it happened many times with different local businesses.
-
They can be incredibly effective and in some instances a necessity. The problem with them is the number of potential issues that can see them quickly change intent from high quality, helpful pages to keyword-stuffed trash.
There are three major issues we come across here on a semi-regular basis and they come down to communication, though none of them are easy to resolve:
**"Our service is the same everywhere" **- Every now and then we get a client who insists that their product or service is exactly the same everywhere, even when we know for a fact that it isn't. This makes it incredibly hard to build effective local pages because all we can do is offer info on the generic differences of their vertical rather than the unique characteristics of this particular business.
"All the top ranking competitors are using the keyword constantly in their content; the fact that you haven't leads me to believe you don't know what you're doing" - We take the educational approach right from our original proposal all the way through but sometimes, there is a not-so-silent business partner or the owner's family member who "knows SEO" and claims that our lack of spam means we're a waste of money after a few weeks of a campaign. Fun!
**"We need a landing page for every combination of location and service" **4 services across 10 locations? We need 40 landing pages!!! Obviously, this is always an absolute "no".
Irritating as these things really are, the solution is always the same. Run through the project plan again, educate them on why we're going down this route, provide some external sources like Miriam's great post and encourage questioning. The vast majority of the time this gets everyone back on the same team and a productive, well-optimised site. Every now and then it means we simply don't work for that client anymore if they continue to insist on spam.
Miriam's guide on this echoes our internal thoughts and process almost exactly and the key message is to never create local landing pages if they have no business existing in the first place. A question we so often ask here: if Google didn't exist, would you still perform that task?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Content Page URL Question
Our main website is geared toward the city where we are located and includes the city name in content page URLs. We also have separate websites for three surrounding cities; these websites have duplicate content except the city name: MainWebsite.com
Local Website Optimization | | sharon75025
City2-MainWebsite.com
City3-MainWebsite.com
City4-MainWebsite.com We're restructuring to eliminate the location websites and only use the main website. The new site will have city pages. We have well established Google business locations for all four cities. We will keep all locations, replacing the location website with the main website. Should we remove City-IL from all content page URLs in the new site? We don't want to lose traffic/ranking for City2 or City3 because the content pages have City1 in the URL. Page URLs are currently formatted as follows: www.MainWebsite.com/Service-1-City1-IL.html
www.MainWebsite.com/Service-2-City1-IL.html
www.MainWebsite.com/Service-3-City1-IL.html
www.MainWebsite.com/Service-4-City1-IL.html Thanks!0 -
Leveraging the authority of a blog to boost pages on a root domain.
Hi! Looking for some link building advice. For some background, I work for a company that has over 100 locations across the US. So we are deeply involved with local SEO. We also do a ton of evergreen/ national SEO as well and the spectrums are widely different for the most part. We also have a very successful blog in our industry. It really is an SEO’s dream. I do not even need to worry about a link strategy for this because it just naturally snatches them up. I’m trying to find some unique ways to utilize the blog to boost pages on my main root domain, more specifically, at the local level. It is really hard, besides the standard methods for local link building, to get outside sources to link to our local office pages. These pages are our bread and butter, and the pages we need to be as successful as possible. In every market we are in, we are at a disadvantage because we have one page to establish our local footprint and rank, compared to domains that have their entire site pointed at that local area we are trying to rank in. I’ve tried linking to local office pages from successful blog posts to attempt to pass link juice to the local pages, but I haven’t seen much in terms of moving the needle doing this. Are there any crafty ideas on how I can shuffle some internal linking around to capitalize on the blog’s authority to make my local pages rank higher in their markets? Thank you! -Ben
Local Website Optimization | | Davey_Tree0 -
Question About Local SEO
Hey all, If a business operates in one city but works with associated organizations across multiple regions how would this impact a local SEO campaign? For example, a transportation company is located in Texas but services the Northwest and New England by outsourcing to smaller transportation companies in each of those regions. Would it be wise to create pages for each region they service on their website and then break that down in further into specific cities? Also, would it be worth targeting local search terms even though specific cities are serviced by the associated organizations and not the parent company itself? Thanks in advance, Andrew
Local Website Optimization | | mostcg0 -
Company sells home appliances and commercial appliances. What is the best way to differentiate the two on our site for the best user experience/SEO?
Should we structure it starting at the homepage with the user selecting for home or for business, that way they have to make a selection before moving further OR should we somehow differentiate in the navigation using the top menu tabs, dropdowns, etc?
Local Website Optimization | | dkeipper1 -
Question about landing pages
I currently have a service based website with landing pages for surrounding towns. For example the keywords targeting and url for the town are "service+town+state". I recently noticed that I am not showing up at all for "service+zip" even though I have the zips included in all the landing pages. I was told if I made more landing pages dedicated to zip I would risk killing the rank on other landing pages. Would it be advisable to make another totally different website that focuses on just the "service+zip" landing pages. The name of the page would be the same the company obviously but the phone numbers and content would be different along with domain url. Any advice or suggestions are welcome. Thanks.
Local Website Optimization | | Spartan221 -
Not displaying the address and its effect on local rankings.
I have just started working with a plumber in my local area to provide a website and generate leads from a combination of SEO, social media and advertising. The issue is that he is adamant that his address should not be displayed anywhere on the site or on any of the citations we are looking to build. This is even after I explained the importance of this information to rankings and the fact that his address can be hidden from view in local listings. I have already come to the conclusion that getting in the typical 7 pack will be near impossible without verifying the address or building citations without a address. But I would like to hear your thoughts on whether you believe ranking organically is still a possibility or whether I should just focus on social / advertising.
Local Website Optimization | | yabyy140 -
How to improve optimization of this page
http://www.atomicx.com/cincinnati-web-design.php I am trying to get this page to rank for "cincinnati web design" and related phrases. I redid the landing page with all new content, images, url, etc about 3 months ago. Since then the site is still not showing up in the top 50 results. I see no reason that the page would not be. Our seo and compute repair phrases have all gone up but our web design phrases are being very stubborn. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | Atomicx0 -
URL structure for local SEO
Hi fokes, question; which url structure is best for local rankings. For example: when I want to rank on the keyword: "Plumber Londen". And I dont have plumber in my brand. What is the best url structure: example.com/plumber/londen example.com/plumber-londen
Local Website Optimization | | remkoallertz1