The Right and Wrong Way of Writing a Local Landing Page

If you’re a small business, you are well aware of the importance of ranking high for keywords for your products or services.

For example, if you are a dentist, you know your practice’s geographical area is limited. You are well aware of who your audience is and who your competition is in getting that audience. So how can you reach that one person living two miles from your office who is looking for a root canal?

Enter the local landing page. As opposed to your main service or product category page, the local landing page is used to target a specific audience in a geographic area to rank higher in the search results. These pages are also great for PPC purposes if you are looking to target a specific geographic area.

Although there are many benefits to a local landing page, there can also be several disadvantages to these pages if they’re done incorrectly. So, how do you know if your local landing page is hurting rather than helping your SEO efforts?

Can a Local Landing Page Hurt My Main Page’s SEO?

You spend all this time crafting content for your local landing pages, only to see them go nowhere in the rankings. What happened? Why aren’t ranking as they should?

Unfortunately, many SEO specialists and content marketers can easily craft a landing page that goes nowhere. And the reason is usually the content itself.

Not only does the content have to be completely different from any other content on your current website, but it needs to be unique enough to make people want to buy your product or service. And that can be tricky.

Remember, your landing page needs to rank on SEO. That means the following factors can’t happen:

• Same content, different town: Maybe you think if you throw a couple of city names in your copy, it will pass Google’s duplicate content detectors to start ranking high. But Google is a lot smarter than that and even if it doesn’t recognize the duplicate content at first, it will catch on eventually.
• Hiding your page: You only want this page to rank on Google. So why link it to any other pages on the site? Because you want to keep people on your site for as long as possible to get them to convert. By adding internal links throughout your website, you can add link juice to that page improving its legitimacy.
• Stop adding the location name: You may be inclined to add the city you’re targeting in every other sentence. Don’t do it. You’re doing more harm than good. Instead, the name should be used sparingly throughout the page.
• Create pages in moderation: If your business handles the entire state, you may be wanting to cover every single town and city in the state. And unless you want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars doing just that, it may be more reasonable to only write pages targeting specific towns and cities most important to your business.

So now you know what not to do, what should you do to make your landing page a success?

The Roadmap to Writing a Successful Local Landing Page

Let’s go back to the dentist example above. If your typical client lives within 30 miles from your office’s location, you could be looking at over 300 towns! But when you look at each of the locations more closely, you may be able to rule out some of the smaller towns or maybe you tighten that circle a little more to only 25 miles away. Now that list drastically decreases until you have about 10 contenders.

Now you’ll need to do a little research. What makes these towns different from one another? Take a look at the demographics a tailor your copy to that group.

For example, perhaps one town has a population that is more affluent than another town. Knowing this, you may want the copy to be a little more formal and discuss more cosmetic dentistry services than the less affluent town, whose residents may just be looking for routine dental care. Know your audience!

If you have multiple office locations, make sure you’re using the right address and phone number that coincides with that page. Not only it should be on the page itself but the page’s Schema markup.

Also, it doesn’t hurt to take a look at your competitor’s website to see what they’re doing. They may be missing valuable information about that location that would make your page stand out above the rest.

Finally, make sure you have additional elements on the page that reflect the area you’re discussing, such as images, videos, testimonials, and even an FAQ section.

How Zen Agency Can Help

Seems like a lot of work? Don’t go at it alone! The SEO specialists at Zen Agency are here to assist. With decades of experience in digital marketing, search engine optimization, PPC, and content marketing, we can construct local landing pages that are meant to rank and convert.

Contact our marketing experts today to learn more about our services and see how we can help you.