The Must-Have Elements of a Location Page

Location pages are crucial for driving traffic to your business. Whether you own a restaurant or hair salon, most people who find you will use a local search term such as the name of your city or town. When optimizing pages for local search, be sure to include the following must-have elements.

The following is a transcript of a podcast we did on seoisdeadandotherlies.podbean.com. 

Paul Warren: Thanks for the pep talk there. I think everyone’s going to be excited. This is actually very useful. It’s useful even to me because what we’re going to be talking about is, I must deal with optimizing these things daily, and if you’re a large business or even a small business, this is going to be important to listen to. Let’s get right into what we’re talking about today. We came across this article on Search Engine Journal, a great website. I don’t get any money or anything from them.

Ryan Klein: Everyone knows, Paul, that we don’t get money from anything.

Paul Warren: Yes. We no longer need money.

Ryan Klein: What SEO doesn’t do things in content without getting money? I guess us.

Paul Warren: It really goes against everything we stand for in doing this for free.

Ryan Klein: Actually, that’s a good point. I feel so philanthropic.

Paul Warren: Philanthropic.

Ryan Klein: That’s how you say it. Paul, you don’t say it so slowly like that. You would say it like a normal person. But that’s how it’s said. Today we’re going to be covering the 10 elements that make a killer location page. And we’re going to be walking through some of the ones added on this list. I agree with all of these. And this is just a good checklist if you have a local landing page, you have a local business, whatever. You want to appear in those maps. Make sure that you’re crossing all the T’s and dotting the I’s and following what’s on this list.

Paul Warren: Exactly. We’ll go through these 10. I agree with you. I already browsed through it and I agree with all of them. And I’m sure by the end we may even have a couple of our own. But we talk a lot about local for obvious reasons. The click-through is through the roof for those searches, the service-oriented businesses with their maps. Of course, there’s a huge click-through and there’s a huge reason or desire to be placed there. As we know, the correlation between being featured on maps has lots to do with the authority of the pages being linked to. But also, it’s important that the page that it links to is also killer. That’s what the article is saying a little bit about.

Ryan Klein: That’s great. You want to kill it with awesomeness. So, let’s go ahead and start. This isn’t in any order. They’re all important.

Paul Warren: Do you want to bounce around?

Ryan Klein: No. They organized it for us so let’s just start there at the top.

Paul Warren: Will you do the first one? We’ll alternate like we always do.

Ryan Klein: We have number 10, and that is the presence of your NAP or your name, address, and phone number. If you don’t know what that is, check back to some of our older podcasts, we’ve covered exactly what it is. But I’m also going to explain it right now. It’s just your name, address, and phone number on the page that can be crawled. And you want it to be consistent everywhere. Whatever you have in Google My Business as your name, address, and phone number, you want it to match the landing page on your website for that location.

Paul Warren: Simple. We see NAP a lot. Typically, in the past, we got a little bit more complex with it, talking about how NAP cohesiveness with citations and drive trees. Right now, we’re just simply saying that NAP must be very prominent, especially on the location page.

Ryan Klein: There are some exceptions. Let’s say you have some tracking numbers out there. Google My Business does give you the option to add in tracking numbers just for this exact reason. But if you’re not tracking a bunch of calls coming in from 20 different locations, you’re not sending those calls to a call center or anything like that, just keep it simple. And whatever your business number is, make that the same on Google My Business as you have on your website landing page for your location.

Paul Warren: Cool advice. Very good.

Ryan Klein: That takes us onto the next one, photos, especially for a location page. We’re going to break it down into three topics within photos: Interior photos, exterior photos, and how to optimize your image metadata. Let’s start with the interior. I agree it is a no-brainer. People often do want to see what’s going on in the office, whether it be the building, the business, anything like that. I agree some interior photos are cool. I mean, it’s straight forward. Do you want to elaborate on that, what the interior photo is?

Paul Warren: Well, we’ll say this isn’t even into the optimizing of the photos yet, because we’re going to get into that. But just having photos, it’s giving the expectation to whoever is searching for you and looking you up, that they’re in the right place. They see a photo and it doesn’t look like a dump and it’s nice — they’re probably going to want to go there. It’s just to have good photos of your location and stuff. And people also sometimes tend to get lost. Sometimes maps are not super accurate. Maybe you have a suite in a building and it’s complicated for people to figure that out. But just provide that. Just provide good photos to give explanations of how to get there.

Ryan Klein: Google’s also been doing that, the 360 tours. That’s been around forever. Do you ever advise anyone to do that? I don’t know if it’s worth dropping the money.

Paul Warren: On G&B if you have the money to do it, I advise doing it. I think anytime you can utilize the stuff that they give you, just go ahead and do it. I believe that Google rewards businesses that utilize the tool to its fullest potential.

Ryan Klein: They do spend a lot of time creating that network of license or qualified or certified 360 video production people.

Paul Warren: The downside of utilizing all the stuff in G&B, though, is often they’ll remove it after you’ve put all the work into it.

Ryan Klein: Oh no.

Paul Warren: They had product categories and all the stuff, and sometimes they’ll remove it for that type of business. Or they’ll just get rid of it altogether. That is one of the things. But having good photos, that’s not ever going to go away.

Ryan Klein: I agree with exterior. Just a nice shot of the outside when people are rolling through, and they’re getting close by, and they see some of your signage, and they know what to expect from the building. That’s always helpful. That’s a user experiencing for sure.

Paul Warren: Another thing to keep in mind is that a lot of times edits and changes to your site are manually reviewed by someone that’s part of Google’s local guides. Having that information, making it easy for them to see that and approve whatever changes. Stuff is changed all the time to G&B listings. Google does it algorithmically. Just making sure you have clear stuff in there can help with that process, too.

Ryan Klein: One thing I want to mention here about these local pages, it’s insinuating the fact that you’re creating the local page for every single place where you have a physical location. I do a lot of geo content strategies where people don’t necessarily have a location, a physical office or virtual office in the area. But they still service the area, or they might still have potential clients that would be interested. For example, if you have a client or you’re a business in Orlando but you serve a 20-mile radius and you like making Geo pages, it’s a good content strategy. And then you have pages for Winter Park, which is right next to Orlando. You have no office, but you have a landing page. Instead of these interior and exterior photos of no office, at least you want to have some images that help someone relate to the area. Imagine you find an iconic free-to-use picture of the downtown area of the city and put it on the page, you want something aesthetic that associates it with the location if you plan on doing geo without a physical office.

Paul Warren: And on top of that, if people land on the page you want them to stay on the page for an appropriate amount of time. You don’t want them to just bounce right out. Giving them more things to look at can increase the time on your page. And those metrics are important even when it comes to local. You must have some organic rankings if you want to be in the map pack there. It’s all adding into it. Let’s talk a little bit about optimizing now.

Ryan Klein: This may be the most interesting part of this entire podcast because I’m a lot more involved with this lately. It used to be all the image text news used to talk about that, and it’s just one of those things you do off your checklist. But this has much broader implications now.

Paul Warren: Well, go ahead and just go right into it, man.

Ryan Klein: Sure. Optimizing your image metadata. Back in the day — or still to this day — if an image didn’t load, we’d have to alt text and describe what the image was. Should it not be loaded? Or, if someone could not see the image for different reasons. All imaged text, if it’s an image of a baby holding an apple, you’d say that and it would say, “Picture of baby holding an apple.” That’s all text. But now there’s other things you can do with images like title, description, and even almost verbatim GPS coordinates. What is the significance of that poll besides alt text?

Paul Warren: Well, the debate is still raging on if adding geotagging to images gives you a boost or not. But I would say do it because it’s not going to hurt.

Ryan Klein: It is widely discussed, but what’s interesting is my team has been testing it for quite some time, and we’ve isolated some of the optimization we’ve done for maps to up an image metadata, and we’ve seen slight boosts. And I’ll say I don’t think it was a coincidence, I think that there is a little bit of a correlation now personally.

Paul Warren: I would do it. And then, making sure you have geo-specific alt text in there, in general, is important. You’d be surprised how many websites just have whatever the stock image title is. And when you download it from whatever site you get the image from, always give yourself one more opportunity to establish a local identity to that page everywhere that you can.

Ryan Klein: Once you do this little bit of additional optimization of free images, you’re going to put them on your landing page, of course, and then also upload it to your Google My Business listing as well. Do it in both places.

Paul Warren: One last thing about image optimization, and this is something that’s overlooked a lot by the layman here, is you want to make sure it’s optimized for load speed. Because that’s one of the things later in our checklist we’re going to talk about. But if you’re uploading a giant image and it’s not set to load speed, you don’t want it to take forever to load. You want to just scale that thing down and optimize it for that.

Ryan Klein: That’s just a great rule of thumb for any landing page, for sure. People are just dead guilty of having horrible homepages with sliders and huge images. I mean, there’s almost no scenario where you should have any image — no matter how crystal clear or how freaking crazy it is. It should be over a megabyte. I mean, really, you’re trying to keep these to 250 kilobytes or less.

Paul Warren: Good rule of thumb across your website, in general, but since we’re talking about local landing pages, make sure you are now on this, too. We’re moving on down the list. We’re going to go to No. 8, and that’s having a good business description on your page. When I talk about that, I’m going to disagree with this author a little bit here.

Ryan Klein: I completely disagree, and I’ll tell you why in a second.

Paul Warren: Because he says, “You need super unique content from each page.” Well, in an ideal world that’s great, but what if you have 500 locations? And they’re pretty forgiving when it comes to local content. Obviously, they don’t want you to have, word for word, every single location page having the exact same content, just spicing it up a little bit with different location-based info, the H1s, the H2s throughout the text. I wouldn’t make it 10% unique to 90%, it’s the same across the board, but it doesn’t need to be 100% unique on every single page.

Ryan Klein: And so, the example being given here is it’s probably 500-600 words and it’s a Geo page. And all they did was swap out the cities. And they’re saying that this shouldn’t work, this is a mistake. Each location should be completely unique. And just like you were saying, how do you do it for 500 pages, or 500 different cities? We’ve talked about this in other podcasts. I’ve launched websites that literally created a page automatically for thousands of cities, and the majority will rank. Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t going to work for competitive keywords. It’s not going to work for, insert City Criminal Lawyers. Insert City Real Estate Agent. But if it’s inserts City Gutter Repair or Gutter Installation, insert City Hall Photo Booth, it is going to work. And it’s not only going to work, it’s going to be the top three. This still is an issue technically from Google that I hope they don’t fix anytime soon. But complete uniqueness is not necessary. And it’s been proven still to this day that swapping cities is okay.

Paul Warren: And it’s not so much that we’re disagreeing. Just go to the surfs and look.

Ryan Klein: That’s just how it is. It’s not a mistake, it’s an approach that people do when they have national campaigns, and it works. I mean, think about it this way. Even tons of directories are guilty of doing the same thing. They literally have the same canned content; they switch out cities. And directories rank for their craft all day, every day, forever. And it’s just because it piggybacks off their massive authority. That’s why it ranks.

Paul Warren: And what’s interesting, too, is even in this article he says, “Oh, this is a mistake. All they did was swap out the location for each page.” But he doesn’t say, “Is it?” He’s not saying, “See how they don’t rank for any of these pages?”

Ryan Klein: It probably does. It depends on the industry, but this would work in many, many, many industries. That’s just how it is, sorry. People, if they service every single city in the United States and they want to do a geo strategy like this, every page is not going to be unique. It’s as simple as that.

Paul Warren: I would say that maybe this person hasn’t worked on something that’s at the enterprise-level.

Ryan Klein: They haven’t launched pages that create auto-created 50,000 city pages in less than 10 minutes.

Paul Warren: Look at the oil change businesses. There are large chains of those that have hundreds and hundreds of locations. And it’s unique services for each one. Well, they change oil, that’s all they do. This isn’t a unique service that you can talk about on each of those pages. If you can write unique pages and unique services do it. It’s only going to help you. But just take that with a grain of salt.

Ryan Klein: I think that if you’re in a specific area and your radius is 15 or 20 cities, you’ll be able to write unique stuff. If you start getting into the hundreds, no. What are you going to do, spend thousands of dollars writing unique content? Plus, Geo pages are susceptible to fluff more than any other page you can possibly have. It’s just like, “Oh, I need a page for, I don’t know – Houston.” Then it’s like, “Cool. Houston. Man, are you in Houston, are you a Texans fans or an Astros fan?” It’s like, what are you going to write about? It’s another city. It’s just the service. They don’t change per city, typically.

Paul Warren: A hot tip here. Let’s say you have this situation and you want some unique stuff on there. One of the things I did — and a lot of places are starting to do this — is you add areas served, areas within a geographical radius around that location that you serve. And you have good keywords with city names. Or, if you’re in Orlando I’d say, “Well, we also serve Winter Park and we Altamonte.” That’s an easy thing to put on there. And there’s a little more unique content that you have.

Ryan Klein: One thing that I’d want to do if I wanted to be more involved in certain geographies — if I was doing a huge blanket thing but there’s some territories where I really wanted to stand out — is I would go in and I’d write a small degree of uniqueness to maybe make it a little more of a difference. And I don’t think it would help, really, for an SEO standpoint. I’d want it to help a little bit more in converting from a user experience standpoint.

Paul Warren: Yes. So now let’s jump on down to CTAs.

Ryan Klein: We love CTAs. Call to Action. CTAs are very important.

Paul Warren: And he says in here that Call to Action is Marketing 101. I’ve got to agree. What else are you doing? Why do you have the site otherwise? If you just want people to read it and feel good about where they’re at, that’s fine, I guess. But generally, you want someone to take some action when they come to your website. That leads to money for you.

Ryan Klein: Oh, yeah.

Paul Warren: Having a clear and defined CTA of what you want them to do is going to help them do it.

Ryan Klein: One thing to keep in mind about Geo page, they’re far more lenient toward conversion than informational. The point of the page is essentially to convert people in the area that you’re trying to target. You’re not really offering a ton of information. It’s going to be very straightforward. Your informational pages are more about FAQ service pages. Geo pages are summing up some of those things for a respected area but trying to convert them. If you don’t have a CTA in these pages, it’s a total waste of time.

Paul Warren: If you’re trying to copy a blueprint, if you load a Google My Business page, the information they provide is for someone to convert. Because think about how many conversions happen without anyone even going to your website. They just happen through Google My Business, through the maps listing or whatever. They can click and directly call you, or they can get directions. That’s a pretty good blueprint of what to follow.

Ryan Klein: Actually, that’s a good point. Since it’s local-oriented and Google My Business is the local product for businesses when you go on that, what do you see? You’re seeing some reviews. And you’re seeing when they’re open their schedule. You’re seeing a few other things — pictures, imagine just doing that and you’re just elaborating on it a little bit. That’s it. Maybe some more images, a little bit more descriptive about what you offer, and then absolutely if that’s the case, we’re huge on reviews, of course. You should always feature some badges with all your reviews, and then testimonials, and maybe a few of these things. I don’t want to get too ahead.

Paul Warren: I completely agree.

Ryan Klein: Then think of the categories that are available on Google My Business as opportunities for you, keyword-wise, on those pages.

Paul Warren: Imagine it’s almost like your Google My Business, but it’s featured and stylized in the fashion of your website with more information. I don’t see how that formula wouldn’t be perfect.

Ryan Klein:  Google’s pretty good at getting people to convert, and they’ve figured out the formula, so you might as well copy it.

Paul Warren: Just copy everything.

Ryan Klein: How do you get to the top of the mountain.

Paul Warren: You got it. Build it.

Ryan Klein: No. 5. This one is easy to know the number.

Paul Warren: It’s No. 5 because we’re in the middle now. It doesn’t matter if you’re working up, down, down, up. Directions to your business. That makes complete sense because of Google My Business. You have a pen and you have a little bit of map that they can move around with. But this an opportunity to do a little bit more. They’re called relative and actual directions. Wait, what were the terms for that? Do you remember when you’re in high school and there’s two ways to give directions? It’s the actual address and then there’s the relative where it’s, “Make a left at the ice cream parlor. You’re going to see …”

Ryan Klein:  I would link out to the directions for Google My Business. You can deal with that. And then I would also write out how to get there from a major road in your area.

Paul Warren: I agree, especially if you’re a business where you have people that sometimes do get lost or they’re saying, “Oh, this isn’t the easiest place to find.” You’re going to write way more relative directions. But it’s a great opportunity to throw more keywords in there. I’m sure semantically it shows that you’re writing about more geo-location-based stuff and who knows how far that could possibly go.

Ryan Klein: And it’s also an opportunity to be more unique in content.

Paul Warren: You could just read about the directions for 500 words.

Ryan Klein: There you go.

Paul Warren: Just be like, “If you’re coming from the north, if you’re coming north-northwest ….”

Ryan Klein: We didn’t cover this from a word count. No less than 400.

Paul Warren:  They’re a little bit shorter page. Historically, as far as my experience, it’s hard to avoid fluff on Geo pages. But with standards. There’s a lot of articles and blogs for writing that are 700, 800 words nowadays. And I know location pages are very, very difficult to get to that. Nor is it even necessary. But there must be a minimum, and I’d say at least 400.

Ryan Klein: That’s a good rule of thumb there. Let’s go to No. 4. And this is, in my opinion, one of the more important ones. And a lot of businesses that have a ton of locations don’t do this at all.

Paul Warren: I’ve been doing this for a long time.

Ryan Klein: It’s hard to scale it. That’s embedded in your Google My Business map.

Paul Warren: Always. Always.

Ryan Klein: That’s right.

Paul Warren: And a lot of companies use an API with something that isn’t from Google. Wiki Maps or something like that, Wiki commons.

Ryan Klein: Wikipedia Maps.

Paul Warren: It looks like a Google Map, and it shows the location and all that stuff. But when you embed this map, you’re building links to the map and to Google My Business, which is great because you need as many links as possible to that listing. But it powers it up and gives it a little more juice.

Ryan Klein: The power-up. Agreed. It’s one of those things where it’s not any one thing that makes a big difference, but once you do all of them, you’re separating yourself from competition. And an embedded map is certainly one of those things.

Paul Warren: I want to say the reason this guy gave for doing it isn’t why I would do it at all.

Ryan Klein: One thing about embedded maps that you do have to be careful of, is that it pulls in more information besides your location. There are times I see it and this person did it correctly. But they have bad reviews. What happens is it pulls it in, but it pulls in your reviews almost always as well, because it’s API and it’s pulling in all the information. While it’s a good practice to do for location-based pages without a doubt, if you have crappy reviews they are going to get pulled in, too.

Paul Warren: They set it to use Google Maps API, but that costs money. It costs a lot of money.

Ryan Klein: Oh, is that what you’re saying, it’s a custom map solution. I mean, you just go to your location and you go to share and then the share is where you find the embed.

Paul Warren: And that’s free.

Ryan Klein: And then it’s free. And then you can do dimensions however you want. If you’re nifty with the dimensions and you have bad reviews, you could probably even cover up your own reviews.

Paul Warren: You can do custom dimensions and just embed the map only. If you do it right, you’re not going to have the problem.

Ryan Klein: But you should have good reviews anyway. And if you ever want to have good reviews, please refer to our podcast we did about four weeks ago.

Paul Warren: Or, check out our-soon-to-be-published article.

Ryan Klein: Yeah.

Paul Warren: Should we talk about that?

Ryan Klein: No. Let’s save that for the end. We have a couple of things we must talk about at the end. Good things. Very good things.

Paul Warren: All right. Going down to No. 3.

Ryan Klein: I was confused. Am I on this one?

Paul Warren: Title and meta description.

Ryan Klein: No, you skipped schema, dude.

Paul Warren: Oh, I did. Sorry. Well, going down to No. 3.

Ryan Klein: Literally, there’s schema, and I don’t even want to talk about it. I’m still exhausted from a week ago. We did a whole podcast, and it was about 40 minutes on schema. But just as a refresher, this article is describing local business markup. It doesn’t have to be that one. A lot of different schema has spaces for location and geography and coordinates and a lot of other stuff. This one might be true. It might be some of this. It might be some of that. But schema, if you want to know the ins and outs, we did the podcast a week ago. Otherwise, I’m personally not going to go into it a whole bunch. You go to Schema.org find out what your options are. Local business is one.

Paul Warren: I’ll just cut it. Local schema.

Ryan Klein: We just did a whole podcast about that a week ago.

Paul Warren: I don’t want to talk about that again. Just know that you need the local business markup and there’s specific business types for your business, so mark that up too, and the hours. There’s a bunch of stuff in there. But we already did a whole podcast on it. It was our last podcast.

Ryan Klein: It was that last podcast that was at least a half hour. If you have any trouble, go to Schema.org or do a Google search and copy and paste in people’s examples. Refer to the podcast. It is intimidating at first glance, but it’s just frankly copying and pasting and switching out a few fields. But schema is very important for local. Very, very important.

Paul Warren: Very. Very.

Ryan Klein: In this list that we’re going over, if you isolate one thing to do that’s most important, I don’t know if it’d be No. 1 but it would probably be the top three.

Paul Warren:  Something like that.

Ryan Klein: Cool. All right, you can read the rest of them now. Let your computer crap out and set this back 20 minutes.

Paul Warren: It’s like anytime we’ve ever recorded at your house, and the laptop hasn’t worked for 20 minutes.

Ryan Klein: The momentum is totally gone. That’s just the 20 minutes of me hanging around and saying, “I don’t know why this happens every single time.” And it’s like a totally unique situation and it happened about 12 times in a row. But now we’re on Zoom and we don’t have any problems.

Paul Warren: Boom. Let’s move on. Now we have No. 7.

Ryan Klein: The numbers are so wacky, dude.

Paul Warren: Way backwards. Whatever. No. 3, title and meta description. Now, this is also SEO 101. You want to have in your title — and I don’t mean your H1, I’m talking about your SEO page title — you want to have what the keyword is that you’re after and then the store name, or the location. We’ll use criminal defense attorney, Orlando, Florida. I always have the state in there as well. I’ve always found that to be useful.

Ryan Klein: I agree, especially since there’s a Wilmington, Delaware and a Wilmington, South Carolina, so you want to just make sure that you differentiate. For Geo pages, title and descriptions are very straightforward. Title is always going to have some city and state. Meta description is going to mention it again.

Paul Warren: Easy peasy.

Ryan Klein: 101. Simple.

Paul Warren: You always want to have your brand name in there because honestly, Google changes the page titles whenever they want, anyways.

Ryan Klein: Typical.

Paul Warren: Hell, it doesn’t mean it’s going to display that. I always end up with the pipe and then I end up with the brand name afterward. But use geo-specific keywords. Your city and then the main keyword, what the page is about. Keep it simple. And then meta descriptions. Hey, you’re not going to rank any better from them but hey, you might influence some click-through rates. I’ve seen people change them regularly to include offers or deals or whatever. Again, this is also that Google will make it what it wants to make it just by you telling it. But don’t leave it blank. That’s crazy.

Ryan Klein:  That’s pure crazy. I mean, what would happen is just pulling the beginning of your text, which may be relevant or not.

Paul Warren: I might do that anyway. Don’t leave it blank.

Ryan Klein: Great. Moving along. I guess I can do it. I’ll give you a break. I know you’ve just been doing a lot of talking. Internal linking is No. 2. Linking you could be referring to all sorts of different things internal. I think a lot of this could be internal linking and is also external linking. In this situation, I think it’s almost all internal. But there’s external if you’re talking about social.

Paul Warren: That’s true. We’ll look at it on both sides. Internal linking to your own site. I think this is one of the things you can do to increase your rankings the most, by creating a nice little silo of pages that all link to each other. One thing I do, too, is if I have other locations in that city area or even in that state, I link to those from that page. And it just creates a much stronger little geolocation silo. But always do that. And then if you have location-specific social profiles, link out to those. It’s just one more thing for Google to crawl and see your NAP on.

Ryan Klein: Exactly. Very straightforward. Again, we like to start with the complicated stuff, front-load it, and then we’re going to wind down with some of the really easy stuff. This last one, it ain’t uncomplicated, I’ll put it that way. And that’s load speeds. I’m not going to get into too much on how you can have better load speeds, because a lot of that you might want to work with your dev on if you have one. If you’re a small enough website, you’re probably not going to really have too much of an issue with this. But if your page loads slow, that is a ranking factor for sure, along with not having a mobile-friendly website. I don’t even know anyone that doesn’t have a mobile-friendly website now.

Paul Warren: You’d have to be a real jerk.

Ryan Klein: But you want to be making sure that you have good page load speeds, especially compared to your competition. Google’s page speed insight, that’s a good place. They’ll walk you through some of the things that you can do to update that. But going back to what we said earlier about the images, one of the biggest things that slows down page load times is too big of an image for what you have loaded in there.

Paul Warren: You don’t remember talking about that in the beginning? You’re just reinforcing it.

Ryan Klein: Reinforcing it. Load speed is not exclusive to Geo pages whatsoever, your local page. This is literally for every single page on your website. It’s almost always going to start with images and probably plugins. And then server.

Paul Warren: Pesky JavaScript things.

Ryan Klein: Hosting. We’ve talked about this in the past, too. But this is something that’s just truly important for every page, not just this page. But I agree. And then as far as some of our own takes, our hot takes, mobile optimization, I completely agree. I think that user experience on the Geo page is a little bit different. Maybe even the flow of the page is a little bit more important. Having people can contact you above the fold, I think, is probably a little bit better on the Geo page. You treat it, in my opinion, much more like a conversion page instead of an informational page, even though you have a lot of the great things G&B has, you’re still going to have your hours and then images and reviews, all that stuff. I look at it more like a conversion page. And there are ways that you approach that differently for both desktop and mobile.

Paul Warren: You’re almost thinking of it as this is the bottom of the funnel. People that come to local pages have a much higher purchase intent then if you’re just reaching a random page on a website that doesn’t have anything local about it. Think of it as how do I get people to convert from this page to you. Maybe that’s providing some social proof on there, some good reviews that you have, that you want to be collecting your own reviews. We did a broadcast about that in the past. But this is a good place to show some of those reviews on there. The reviews are great to have. Things from Yelp or Google My Business, if you can display those on there, I would do it.

Ryan Klein: I’ve always treated local pages a little bit different. I like the idea of maybe being a little bit oriented with something — extra pictures of the business, especially if its somewhere people plan on spending time at. A restaurant, or a bar, or a nice doctor’s office or dentist, all that stuff. Something I might consider a little bit more for Geo pages, especially if they have offices and an actual location. And then if you’re doing the geo approach, just to reiterate, it’s where there are more areas that you serve and not so much that you have an office or a satellite office. It’s good to include a fair use image of something that associates the page with the city. If you’re building pages for certain areas around it and there’s a city hall or there’s a nice downtown area or there’s some monument or anything that associates with the area, I like to include that there, too. It’s one of those quick aesthetic ways people are relating to the page based off that landmark. I think that’s important.

Paul Warren:  I think any time you can increase the local connectivity. Increase that your pages and your business are in that location. Take advantage of it and do it.

Ryan Klein: Cool. Anything else you can think of to make a totally kick-ass local landing page for both SEO and for conversion user experience?

Paul Warren: I think the real key is to just start doing it. Start adding these things. Don’t wait. Don’t wait until you’re dropping out of a map pack or you’re gone altogether.

Ryan Klein: I completely agree. And I don’t think that businesses do this enough. There are some businesses that have four, six, 10 offices and they don’t even have dedicated pages for each of them, even with GMB. That’s a start. That’s the no-brainer. But also, people will create a list of areas we serve and they include 10, 15, 20 cities. Just create pages for them. And don’t feel bad if they’re not 100 unique. Truly don’t. Don’t.

Paul Warren:  Just look at the surfs. Go look at the rankings for things and you’ll see where this guy is completely accurate here with those thoughts.

Ryan Klein: I think I mentioned this on the podcast already, but just really consider this. The biggest directories in the world don’t have unique content on their respective pages and they have thousands and thousands of city pages. And they don’t even offer any value. It literally contradicts the more recent content algorithm updates. It defies the logic that Google is telling people what they must do.

When you need to develop a local strategy to drive more traffic to your business, be sure to discuss your options with your SEO company. At Market My Market, we place a big emphasis on local and can help you write effective pages. Contact us for a free marketing quote.