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
-
Can High Traffic and Bounce Rate Hurt Local Rankings?
I just began working on a campaign for a dental office who happened to rank really well for some general search terms around post-op care. They received a ton of traffic for a small local site-- 26k organic visits YTD-- but since they focus on providing services locally, their conversion rate for organic search is pretty abysmal. On top of that, a couple of their high-traffic pages are contributing to a 90%+ average bounce rate on the site. Clearly the goal of the website doesn't involve attracting a national audience, but tons of traffic couldn't possibly be a bad thing... right? On the flip side of the coin, their local visibility is terrible. Their DA is comparable to their competitors, but in local SERPs they're nowhere to be found. Could one of these factors be affecting the other? Could their high visibility, but lack of conversions, from a bunch of organic traffic be hurting their visibility locally? I'd be interested hearing from other SEOs who may have faced similar situations in the past.
Local Website Optimization | | formandfunctionagency0 -
Ranking for keywords locally with multiple locations
If we have a company with multiple physical locations across multiple states, but selling the same products, what would be an optimal strategy? All local locations have been claimed, but the site is not coming up for searches with local intent. If the corporate site focuses on the "products", what is the best way to get that associated with the individual locations as well? When implementing json+ld, would we put the specific location on the specific location pages and nothing on the rest? Any other tips would be great! Thanks in advance,
Local Website Optimization | | IDMI.Net0 -
SERP: From page 4 to page 1 to page 4 again -_- ...
Hi there Moz Amigos! So I have this Website: campmusicaladagio.com Right now, our main target keyword is "camp de jour gatineau". The website was on WIX before. So, I created the worpress version and redirected the domain name to the new hosting server (outside of WIX). So before doing the changes, the website was on page 4... After the changes, it went in 1 week on page 1 (lol, WIX sucks so much). After 3 weeks on page 1, it went on page 4 again... I am so confused XD like what the hell happen... Any ideas?
Local Website Optimization | | Gab-SEO0 -
Location Pages
Hi all, Business who has 2 locations.. They have 2 separate pages for their locations https://www.jacobsallen.co.uk/contact-us/jacobs-allen-bury-st-edmunds/ https://www.jacobsallen.co.uk/contact-us/jacobs-allen-haverhill/ But the location and address details also appear on https://www.jacobsallen.co.uk/contact-us/ and the home page. Is this going to be hurting their local SEO? In my opinion yes and the address info should just be on the 2 location pages. Thanks in advance
Local Website Optimization | | LMW0 -
City Pages for Local SEO
Hey Mozzers, I have a local SEO question for you. I am working with a medical professional to SEO their site. I know that when creating city pages, you want to try and make each page as strong as you can, showcasing testimonials from people who live in those towns, for instance. Since my client is in the medical profession, i was going to include a list of parks from that town and say something about how, "we want to encourage good health, etc." However, i began to wonder whether i should just create one, large resource for the surrounding towns having to do with parks, dog parks, and athletic activities and link to it in the top nav. thoughts? Nails
Local Website Optimization | | matt.nails0 -
Ranking nationally but not locally
Hi everyone, I'm working with a client that has a strange situation. He's ranking for his target keyword on a national level but when searching locally, he's in the 100s (see attached). Any idea what could be going on here? He did have an old domain that got hacked that is redirecting to his current domain. Thanks, Tim lmSSXdT
Local Website Optimization | | TimKelsey0 -
Is it worth it having different cities in your footer, each with a separate page?
I have been looking at the website of local web design companies and every single one in my area has a footer with links to a separate page for that local city. This seems like a bad idea to me, but everyone in the local pack has it. Does it work?
Local Website Optimization | | EcommerceSite0 -
Local SEO HELP for Franchise SAB Business
This all began when I was asked to develop experiment parameters for our content protocol & strategy. It should be simple right? I've reviewed A/B testing tips for days now, from Moz and other sources.I'm totally amped and ready to begin testing in Google Analytics. Say we have a restoration service franchise with over 40 franchises we perform SEO for. They are all over the US. Every franchise has their own local website. Example restorationcompanylosangeles.com Every franchise purchases territories in which they want to rank in. Some service over 100 cities. Most franchises also have PPC campaigns. As a part of our strategy we incorporate the location reach data from Adwords to focus on their high reach locations first. We have 'power pages' which include 5 high reach branch preferences (areas in which the owners prefer to target) and 5 non branch preference high reach locations. We are working heavily on our National brand presence & working with PR and local news companies to build relationships for natural backlinks. We are developing a strategy for social media for national brand outlets and local outlets. We are using major aggregators to distribute our local citation for our branch offices. We make sure all NAP is consistent across all citations. We are partners with Google so we work with them on new branches that are developing to create their Google listings (MyBusiness & G+). We use local business schema markup for all pages. Our content protocol encompasses all the needed onsite optimization tactics; meta, titles, schema, placement of keywords, semantic Q&A & internal linking strategies etc. Our leads are calls and form submissions. We use several call tracking services to monitor calls, caller's location etc. We are testing Callrail to start monitoring landing pages and keywords that generating our leads. Parts that I want to change: Some of the local sites have over 100 pages targeted for 'water damage + city ' aka what Moz would call "Doorway pages. " These pages have 600-1000 words all talking about services we provide. Although our writers (4 of them) manipulate them in a way so that they aren't duplicate pages. They add about 100 words about the city location. This is the only unique variable. We pump out about 10 new local pages a month per site - so yes - over 300 local pages a month. Traffic to the local sites is very scarce. Content protocol / strategy is only tested based on ranking! We have a tool that monitors ranking on all domains. This does not count for mobile, local, nor user based preference searching like Google Now. My team is deeply attached to basing our metrics solely on ranking. The logic behind this is that if there is no local city page existing for a targeted location, there is less likelihood of ranking for that location. If you are not seen then you will not get traffic nor leads. Ranking for power locations is poor - while less competitive low reach locations rank ok. We are updating content protocol by tweaking small things (multiple variants at a time). They will check ranking everyday for about a week to determine whether that experiment was a success or not. What I need: Internal duplicate content analyzer - to prove that writing over 400 pages a month about water damage + city IS duplicate content. Unique content for 'Power pages' - I know based on dozens of chats here on the community and in MOZ blogs that we can only truly create quality content for 5-10 pages. Meaning we need to narrow down what locations are most important to us and beef them up. Creating blog content for non 'power' locations. Develop new experiment protocol based on metrics like traffic, impressions, bounce rate landing page analysis, domain authority etc. Dig deeper into call metrics and their sources. Now I am at a roadblock because I cannot develop valid content experimenting parameters based on ranking. I know that a/b testing requires testing two pages that are same except the one variable. We'd either non index these or canonicalize.. both are not in favor of testing ranking for the same term. Questions: Are all these local pages duplicate content? Is there a such thing as content experiments based solely on ranking? Any other suggestions for this scenario?
Local Website Optimization | | MilestoneSEO_LA1