You’re a business with multiple physical branches, such as a chain of hair salons. How do you decide which location to focus your website on?
Trick question. You don’t.
Instead, you create a series of local landing pages, each one specifically designed to target customers in the local area. This way, your website will show up in local search engine results when a user makes a relevant local query, driving more organic traffic to your website. More organic traffic equals more opportunities for conversion.
Local landing pages for your website are something you need to strongly consider if you have a business with multiple physical locations. They will effectively serve as the homepage for users searching for a business in their local area.
Read also: Local Citation Building
A local landing page will help with your local SEO and help ensure you have a prominent position in Google search results.
What is a Local Landing Page?
Local landing pages can be thought of as the online shop front counterparts for your physical business locations. If you have a business with several locations, the main homepage may not appear to be particularly relevant to a potential customer who is looking for a service in their specific town.
If the page doesn’t look relevant to a user, it doesn’t look relevant to Google either, and relevance is as important to Google as prawn crackers are to me.
I really like prawn crackers.
So if Google doesn’t see you as relevant, you’re not going to get selected to be in the top search results. As far as organic traffic goes, if you aren’t ranking well on Google then you may as well not exist.
Let’s take Browns Hair Salons as an example. This is a hairdressing company with multiple salons in various locations such as Olney, Stamford, and Oundle. The main homepage serves as an introduction to Browns as a whole but doesn’t directly mention each location.
This means if a user searches online for ‘hair salon in Stamford’, the homepage of Browns website isn’t optimised for this and therefore is not likely to feature in the top SERPs.
Are Local Landing Pages Beneficial?
Local landing pages can improve the user experience for potential customers, and also help you to rank better in search engine results pages, so it’s a win-win every way you look at it. On top of this, they don’t take much time or effort to create and maintain, so you don’t stand to lose anything by having them.
How to Optimise Local Landing Pages
Simply having local landing pages isn’t enough to get you noticed on Google. You’ll need to optimise these pages so they are understood by search engines as a good option to present to users making local searches. If you’ve optimised other pages on your website for search engines, then you’ll likely be familiar with many of the following tactics.
Definitive URLs
The URL of your local landing pages should clearly indicate to search engines and users what the page is about. This will help Google to understand the page, giving it a better chance of showing up in ‘near me’ searches. Avoid URLs that can’t be interpreted, or that are too long. For example, the URL could be:
myhairdresser.co.uk/oundle-salonmyhairdresser.co.uk/stamford-salonKeyword Research
Research keywords that are relevant to the service or product you offer, and the location your local landing page is dedicated to.
Focus in keywords with a lower difficulty rating as you’re more likely to hit the top spots in Google with these.
A combination of short and long-tail keywords often work best for local landing pages, such as ‘best hair salon in Stamford’ and ‘salon stamford’. These keywords need to be used naturally within the content, as well as in title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt text.
If your local landing page is more stuffed with keywords than a turkey stuffed with sage and onion on Christmas morning, you’ve gone too far.
Title Tag and Meta Descriptions
The title tag is the ‘headline’ that is displayed when you appear in search results, while the meta description is the summary that follows the title tag.
Any good title tag should be less than 60 characters in length, and the meta description should be less than 160 characters.
Be sure to include the keywords and location of your local landing page in both the title tag and meta description. This will give a clear signal to search engines what the page is about, and it will also encourage more relevant click-throughs from users when it appears in search results.
Contact Details
Your local landing page should include the name of your business and the physical address of your business serving that particular area, as well as the phone number.
Here you could also link to social media profiles you have for your business as a means of indicating your legitimacy to search engines.
Ensuring the contact details are correct is essential as Google will cross-match these with other contact information held about your business online, as a way of checking your authority and prominence.
Image Alt Text
Images contained within a local landing page should be optimised for your local SEO strategy.
Aim to describe the image in the alt text as if you were describing it to someone who couldn’t see it, with bonus points for including your keyword and location.
Final Words
Local landing pages are a crucial part of SEO for any business with multiple physical locations.
They improve your relevance in local search results, and they improve the overall user experience, which of course is always a good thing in the eyes of the search engine.
Simply having them isn’t enough, you also need to optimise them.
Use our handy tips for optimising your local landing pages, or contact us if you need help with your local SEO.
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