How to Create a Local Landing Page Strategy?

Content only goes so far. In order to make your webpages stand out in local search, you need to consider how you will structure your website to feature local landing pages. For businesses with physical locations, local landing pages can boost search rankings and improve website conversion rates. Local landing pages should be optimized to highlight certain local search ranking factors, such the local store’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) and including a map, hours of operation, photos, and engaging content such as featured products, in-store events, promotions, and social feeds. Advanced marketers will go beyond that. In addition to creating local landing pages for individual store or business locations, brands should consider how they will structure their websites to feature those local landing pages. By structuring their websites to feature local landing pages in a logical way, brand marketers can positively impact search rankings and website conversions.

What are the SEO Benefits of Local Landing Pages?

Questions to ask when structuring your website include:

Where will local pages go on our website?
How will website visitors find our local landing pages?
Will search engines be able to understand and follow our local landing page structure?

As a best practice, brands should create a sitemap structure that organizes all of their store locations. Additionally, local landing pages should link to each other, so that each local page suggests other nearby locations. Such internal linking helps to prevent pages from being “orphaned,” meaning that the search bot reaches a dead end and cannot navigate your site hierarchy any further. From an SEO perspective, it is a good idea to add a link to your local landing page entry point on a website’s main navigation panel. The main navigation panel is typically where visitors will look to learn more about the services that a business offers or the location where its products are sold. Often, this entry point is a store locator that consumers can use to search for and click through to individual store pages. If your brand has recently added local landing pages, don’t forget to update your sitemaps. With newly launched pages, the sitemap should be resubmitted in Google Search Console. This will make it easier for Google to crawl your local pages for indexing purposes. To learn more about the role that sitemaps and onsite ranking factors play in local search, click here.