With the ways that e-commerce has expanded and continues to expand, a well-designed website is no longer a choice a business can make, it’s necessary. These websites need to be easy for customers to find and once they are there, easy to navigate.
Search engine optimization is one of the ways to make being found easily by possible customers your focus or goal. With Search Engine Optimization (SEO) you want to make sure that the content contained on your website matches what possible customers will be searching for. Each additional page that is added to your website provides additional information for search engines to determine what your website is about and what keywords are present. This is done to increase your website’s potential ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Businesses with multiple locations can benefit the most from creating location landing pages by giving each location a unique feeling and increasing its overall interest and visibility.
Purpose
Location landing pages are the pages on a website that represent a specific area or location allowing customers to find information about their nearest location. These also provide information so search engines can provide local results and improve where they are shown in the ranking on the SERP.
Businesses with multiple locations can benefit the most from creating location landing pages by giving each location a unique feeling and increasing its overall interest and visibility.
With more generalized searches it can make it difficult to narrow down products or services that are available locally. Location-specific search terms can be used to target a specific local audience. Possible customers are already searching these terms, location landing pages allow for a place for those keywords to be found. Customers benefit from this as well as they can find information quickly and easily.
Businesses with multiple locations are able to use location landing pages to create a unique feel for each location and increase overall interest and visibility.
Benefits
Search engines, like Google, are designed to be user-friendly and provide a benefit to their customers. Businesses that provide that experience typically end up ranking higher on the SERP. Creating location landing pages that include accurate and up-to-date local information, helps search engines match your business to the users looking for it.
Even though there is a benefit to the customer by having location landing pages, effective SEO is the main benefit. Location-based search terms end up being more effective at converting possible customers than wide or broad search terms.
Creating Location Landing Pages
How Many?
While it’s important to have location landing pages, having too many of them can be a problem. Not only can having too many pages make your site look like it contains spam or is just cluttered but also it runs a risk of following bad SEO practices.
Bad SEO practices are also known as black hat SEO and focus only on SEO and not the customer. When following a black hat strategy rules are stretched to get a site to rank higher up in search results. This can also include duplicating content and stuffing keywords, all to trick the search engine. This can result in lower rankings, banned pages, and even full bans from search engines.
Each business will have a different amount of landing pages that will make sense for them. For example, businesses with multiple locations can have location landing pages for each individual location when businesses covering large areas may have a landing page that covers individual cities, zip codes, or neighborhoods.
Areas containing the most traffic should be targeted first when landing pages are created or added. Each landing page needs to contain unique individualized content to provide a positive experience, the opposite of what black hat SEO practices provide. This is called white hat SEO and focuses on having content that’s relevant, complete, and unique. Since this process can take time, focusing attention on where the highest number of search results and keywords is coming from can provide the highest Return on Investment (ROI).
What Should it Contain?
Even though multiple locations may have very similar information or provides the same message, it is still important to make sure that information is unique on each location page. It isn’t enough to copy and paste the information on different locations only changing one or two pieces of information like the city name. Search engines can see this as duplicate content and as mentioned previously with black hat strategies, can hurt search engine results and appear spam-like on the actual website.
With each location, you want to make sure that any important local details are added to the location landing page. For example, the products and services that are available within that area or any other local information that’s pertinent to your business. General keywords along with location-specific keywords should be included along with contact information. Information such as social media information, maps, and photos can also be included to increase the customer experience.
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