Writer Marcus Miller shares tips, advice as well as an infographic on creating highly improved, high-converting landing pages for local SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
We use hundreds of local businesses — from hyperlocal, single-location businesses to nationwide, multi-location companies — at the company I run, Bowler Hat.
One pattern we often see is the fact that larger and seemingly more respected businesses don’t be as good in local search as it should. Presently there are many reasons for this, and having multiple locations amplifies the need for solid local Search Engine Optimization foundations. A common concern we come across is the lack of a well-optimized and well-performing website landing page for local businesses.
On this page, we aim to illustrate what we should believe to be the perfect location landing page, based on our experience working with local businesses.
We have to tick our SEO boxes here, but we must also improve the leads made from these pages — to get this done, we have to look at the intersection of lead generation and local SEO.
Exactly where lead generation meets local SEO
There are two key elements to think about here:
- Local SEO ranking factors
- Landing page conventions
You want to create a flawlessly optimized page from a Local SEO perspective but also a finely tuned business lead generation machine. These webpages should allow the customer to achieve their goal — similar to a traditional lead-focused landing page.
Clearly, there is some synergy here. To create pages that are really visible, they should also be highly useful and allow the customer to get in touch and generate us those all important leads.
1. Local SEO ranking factors
Listed here are the ranking factors that are relevant for local SEO landing page optimisation:
- City, state in landing page title.
- Click-through rate from search results
- Topical keyword relevance of domain content
- Quality/authority of inbound links to landing page URL
- Product/service keyword in landing page title
- Page authority of landing page URL
- City, state in landing page H1/H2 tags
- HTML name, address and phone number (NAP) matching location NAP
- Load time of landing page
- NAP in hCard/Schema.org on landing page URL
- Geographic (city/neighborhood) keyword relevance of domain content
This may not be to say every one of these is relevant for each and every job, but we will want to factor in as many of these as possible in our quest to have the SEO signals dialed in for our landing pages.
2. The perfect landing page
Most of the landing page science comes out of the PAY PER CLICK industry. In the end, if you are paying to drive traffic to a given page, then you normally want to squeeze every last bit of performance from the page. Presently there is no absolutely perfect layout, and the right page will very much be based upon what is being promoted; however, we will take some guidance from proven best practices.
- Ad copy & context.
- Page headlines
- Product features
- Product benefits
- Location map
- Call(s) to action
- Social proof
- Your team
The perfectly optimized local website landing page
So it naturally employs that the perfect local SEO landing page is also a finely configured lead generation page. This specific ticks the boxes for Google, and most significantly, it achieves what your customer is looking for.
To higher illustrate this, we have came up with the following Infographic that shows how you can implement all of these key SEO and landing page elements on a killer website landing page (click to enlarge):
The Perfectly Optimized Local Landing Page, by Bowler Hat and Search Engine Land
It is straightforward to get trapped in too filter a perspective — whether that is SEO, PAY PER CLICK, landing page optimization or one of the other myriad digital marketing techniques. My intention here was to illustrate how training from one discipline will most likely complement and improve another.
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