SEO, Location Pages and You: A How-To Guide

Location pages serve a practical and personal purpose for multi-location brands. Holding a high search engine results page (SERP) position for each unique location improves the brand’s visibility within the service area or market and allows brands to get personal. In this piece, we’ll run you through the technical and customer-focused benefits of building and optimizing local landing pages and provide a road map to get it done efficiently.

What Is a Location Page?

A location page targets local keyword variations to capture organic search traffic within the specific location’s geographic area. Sometimes referred to as local pages, service area pages or city pages, they often serve as a local homepage within a brand’s larger domain.

For One Hour Heating & Air Conditioning, the local homepage includes localized keywords that are also targeted on the national homepage. At the same time, the page itself is organized within its own subfolder.

• National domain: https://www.onehourheatandair.com/
• Local landing page: https://www.onehourheatandair.com/lees-summit/

For SEO to work, marketers target audience-specific keywords that are highly relevant to the audience’s needs. Creating new or optimizing existing location landing pages is a big part of achieving strong results. Local SEO is a subcategory of the search marketing industry specializing in crafting local pages and optimizing them for localized keywords across website content categories.

Why You Need Location Landing Pages

Remember that one of the most important (and yet overlooked) components of SEO is relevancy. Many brands chase high-volume, short-tail keywords that drive vanity metrics (tens of thousands of organic sessions, millions of SERP impressions) but don’t consistently generate quality site traffic or conversions.

Location-based SEO is all about relevancy, and that requires two priorities when crafting location pages:

1. Localize the keywords
2. Localize the content

Creating unique content for each location isn’t easy, but it’s worth the effort. Franchise businesses or individual owners with multiple locations or service areas often need a bit of extra muscle – and our SEO and content team can do the heavy lifting for you.

How to Optimize Location Pages for SEO and Your Customers

First, define your market or service area. This will ultimately inform the local keywords you target and shape the unique content you’ll need for each page.

1. Target local keywords.

Let’s say your business provides expert air guitar lessons in several communities in Michigan. Each location services a primary city and a mix of nearby neighborhoods or suburbs, most of which have at least a few eager aspiring air guitarists.

Localizing these pages will pair existing keyword targets held by the domain and a modifier, which is just a fancy way of saying, “Insert city name.” Make sure you focus on branded local keywords on the homepage and localized non-branded keywords on other services. Here are a few examples of our thriving fake (for now) air guitar lesson company.

You can find the keyword volume, difficulty, and traffic value of national and local keywords using tools like Semrush or Moz, although Google Trends is a very useful (and free) tool to get you started!

Aside from keywords, some on-page information is an immediate differentiator for both Google and users: contact information! Sometimes called “NAP information,” for name, address, phone number, your digits and address prove a specific location is doing its own thing.

2. Make it local – and unique.

Many franchise websites are built using CMS platforms that automatically localize service areas of city pages. The platforms use content elements called macros to play a very organized (and unfun) version of Mad Libs, filling in local information on location pages. For example, a city page might be…

• Hot Air Guitars of {City}

…wherein the {City} is automatically updated to that franchise location.

That’s a start, but it’s often not enough to make each page truly unique. While information from Google is fuzzy, most industry experts believe a page’s content should be 40-60% unique to avoid duplicate content penalties. Google (and other search engines) don’t like websites that use the same copy and the same metadata on multiple pages.

Website location pages for franchises are common duplicate content culprits – but they don’t have to be. Encourage franchise owners (or your favorite local SEO experts) to think bigger than macros and include the following:

• Varied page copy (rewriting content)
• Introducing localized keywords naturally into the copy
• Mentioning and even linking to local organizations, landmarks, events, or resources
• Using local terminology, if possible

A local homepage optimization project can dramatically improve franchise visibility, drive conversions, and highlight region-specific opportunities that inform blog concepts and paid media efforts.

More Ways to Avoid Duplicate Content

If you’re having a hard time coming up with fresh ideas for location pages, consider formatting local homepages to include content blocks that differ from the national page. Some new ideas might consist of:

• Parking information/driving directions
• Location-specific reviews (you can pull these from Google Business Profile)
• Staff profiles/company history
• Local events
• Local vendors or partners the franchise works with

One Last Note About Location Pages…

SEO is never done. Just as search engines tweak (or overhaul) their algorithms, customers change how they search and what they expect from search results. Make localized, geographical SEO part of your brand’s long-term strategy to catch and capitalize on new search trends, including voice, image, and artificial intelligence. What works now may not work tomorrow, and no brand can afford to get left behind.

Get Local, Everywhere You Are

Local SEO is our thing. Oneupweb works with national franchise brands representing thousands of individual locations across the US and Canada in diverse industries. Whether it’s a growing plumbing franchise or an up-and-coming restaurant chain, our integrated teams have the experience to drive real results, real quick. Let’s talk about it; get in touch or call (231) 922-9977 today to get started!