Local Sitelinks

[healthgrades]

Does anyone know how organic local site links work? The examples I'm looking at are from Yelp and Angie'sList. When you run a brand search, some sitelinks reference my current location and takes me to a regional landing page.

My company has landing pages for major cities across the U.S. but they never get picked up as a sitelink like this. I don't see local links anywhere on the AngiesList or Yelp homepages so I don't know how Google knows to prioritize these pages. We are also a national review site, so we have no interest in showing up in the local pack, etc.  Any thoughts would be super helpful! Thanks

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi David,

I've only seen this type of local sitelink for sites that are sending users to brick-and-mortar locations, so I think in part it would depend on what kind of reviews you're hosting. How different are the local/regional landing pages from each other? Do they feature local products or businesses?

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

Google local is for local businesses and yelp, Angies, GMB and all of the local citation businesses will link to a physical local address.  It's extremely difficult to outrank local businesses if you are a national business and don't have a local address.  Don't be tempted to create a local listing and cheat because you'll get busted by Joy the Spamhunter or #stopcraponthemap etc.

The landing pages will need to contain the area in the URL, local specific words in the copy and also have a strong local presence from hyperlocal and local citations to be picked up in local search.

I don't now what you're trying to achieve by having loacl citations point to your site if it's not a local site.  They just won't do that without a local physical address.  The Hawk, Kestrel (I think) and some other bird-named updates have made it very hard for national brands to rank locally now and I see more and more daily deal sites and comparison sites using ad words to reach their local audiences that they previously could have done without a local address.

Tell me what you are trying to achieve and what your strategy is and perhaps I'll be able to offer more insight. I am a local business and am coming at this problem from the other direction (ie trying to outrank the big national players) and it's becoming easier and easier because I have a local presence and google will always favour that.  But I can tell you some of the ones who are still beating us and you could perhaps model their strategies?

Zocdoc seem to be picking up most of the search for 'find a doctor new york' and they have almost the same domain authority as you, so perhaps it's something on site that you can model from their site to yours by analysing the two.