October 25, 2022
Find out how to make your location landing pages unique, competitive, and optimized for top local SEO SERP features. Join Amanda Jordan, Director of Digital Strategy at Rickety Roo as she shares valuable insights for your site, including how to leverage multiple data sources and user generated content to create local landing pages that stand out to local customers.
In this webinar we'll cover:
How valuable local landing pages are to your business
Common issues with local SEO landing pages
Leveraging local landing pages to capture local customers
Meet your hosts:
Crystal Carter, Head of SEO Communications, Wix
Crystal is an SEO & Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, Brighton SEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush and more.
Amanda Jordan, Director of Digital Strategy, Rickety Roo
Amanda is the Director of Digital Strategy at RicketyRoo. She has worked in local SEO since 2011. Her background in local legal and enterprise SEO means she’s a pro at tackling complex problems for clients. When she's not creating local SEO strategies, she's playing with her son and dogs.
Transcript: How to create local landing pages for SEO
00:00
Crystal: I am Crystal and I am the head of SEO communications at Wix. And I am joined today by one of my favorite SEOs in the world, Amanda Jordan. Who is the Director of Digital Strategy at Ricketyroo. She is a fantastic local SEO. I remember seeing her speak at SMX a few years ago and she gave some fantastic advice, which I took to heart immediately and saw some fantastic results immediately. So do pay attention when Amanda Jordan is speaking, because she knows her stuff. And she also knows how to scale the stuff that she knows, which is something that is incredibly, incredibly valuable when you're doing your SEO work.
So just a couple of housekeeping notes. We are going to be recording this session. So this session will be recorded for you and it will be shared on YouTube after the event and it will also be shared/sent to you via email the next day. And if you don't see the email, if you get lost, the same place where you registered for the event, which is on our Wix SEO learn webinars web page, you'll be able to see the recording there as well. If you have any questions for Amanda, if we mention an acronym that you don't know, or if you want to dig into that a little bit deeper–please feel free to ask questions in the Q&A panel which is at the bottom of the screen. And we will have people answering questions there and we'll also be answering some of the questions at the end of the webinar. And if you want to keep up with our next webinars go to Wix SEO or wix.com/SEO/learn/webinars and you'll be able to see our next webinar–we have them every month. We are so pleased to have Amanda joining us for this one. So I'm going to pass it over to her and let her share. Are you ready to share?"
2:04
Amanda: Yes, I am.
2:05
Crystal: Okay. Okay, so I'm going to stop sharing and I will pass it over to you, Amanda, and you can get into this fantastic webinar all about location pages.
2:18
Amanda: All right. So today we're talking about how to build location pages that work. So why should you listen to me... that's how I like to start with that because there's going to be a lot of advice you can get on what to do, how to do it, why to do it. I am someone who's very passionate about local SEO and I like sharing knowledge a lot. And I would like to say that I'm pretty great at getting results. So I work with small businesses; anything from a one location plumber, all the way to franchises, multi-location businesses, credit unions, so businesses of all sizes in lots of different industries that need to rank in a lot of different geographical areas. So where people may use different terms to search for things or they may have different services that are only available in some locations and not others. So dealing with a lot of complex issues. So this is something that I'm really passionate about. I love doing location pages, it's one of my favorite topics because I see it as an opportunity for so many businesses where they're missing out on doing some things that are very actionable, very simple, but will actually get you a lot of great results; as far as conversions and rankings and traffic so it hits everything and it helps the business make more money–so why not?
Okay, so what are location landing pages? These are pages that focus on bringing in traffic and conversions to your website, and it's about a specific location. So if you have a location in Houston, you have a location in Dallas, you have a location in Grand Prairie, each of those cities should have a location page so that you can focus on your primary product slash services in that city. So if you are a housekeeping service, you don't want to have one housekeeping service page trying to rank for all of Texas because you have a lot of competitors in each of those markets that you're trying to compete in. And their website, if they have one location, their entire website is focused on San Diego, right so if their entire websites focus on San Diego all their content is about San Diego, all of their efforts are being focused on San Diego. So it'd be a lot easier for them to outperform you if you're not focusing or putting at least some intention behind those specific cities you'd like to rank in. These are the pages that rank for searches that include like the city or the county or near me. So these are the pages that are most likely to show up. Sometimes some businesses have their homepage show up for those types of searches. But ideally, if you have multiple locations, you should have a city that is personalized for people from that specific area that they would land on that gives some information about your hours of operation, phone number and everything that is specific to that location.
So the impact, so local location pages can impact virtually every part of your SEO campaign, especially if you are a multi-location business. They're pretty topical authority, so they help Google understand the geographical impact of where you want to rank, why you want to rank, or you provide services and things like that. Your location pages can help you rank organically and in Google Maps. So having that local factor into that page and well integrated in your content can help that page rank extremely well for non-branded keywords.
So if you're a plumbing business, you would put "Tampa plumber", that's probably one of your biggest keywords. So you want a page dedicated to people who are looking for a plumber in Tampa, specifically. And that will help you write that page in Tampa for unrelated keywords. If you just had a Florida plumber page, it would be very difficult, or your homepage, it would be very difficult to kind of pinpoint where you're trying to rank or what city you want to rank in for Google. Because Florida is a big state, there's a lot of competition there and there's a lot of people there–so it's hard for Google to understand really what geographical area you're trying to service–if you don't have any pages that show a clear and local intent.
Location pages impact your ability to convert. If you do your location pages well, there are opportunities for people to decide that they want to do business with you without going to any other page on your website. They can just go to that page. They see what they need to make a choice and then they decide to call and fill out the form without visiting any other page on your site. That is the goal for me for a good location page. If it doesn't do that, then I would not consider that a great location page.
It also should increase personalization to local customers. So you want people to feel like you understand them as your customer base. It's not just that this is the same content that's on all of my other location pages, but it has another city added to it; like I understand your specific needs, I understand what's important to you as a customer, I'm involved in your local community. You want to give people as many reasons as to why they want to reach out to you over any other business that's in that same service area.
So how would you know if you need a location page or location pages? If you have more than one location, and those locations are not very, very close, like within 20 miles of each other you need location pages more than likely. Because you want to make sure that you're specifying what city what service area you have on your location pages. And the more you're trying to encapsulate in one page, the less you're showing a specific intention for a specific area. And like I mentioned before, if you're in a highly competitive city, and you have no content that is dedicated to that specific city and your competitors, their entire website is about that city, then you think Google's gonna choose the website that has no specific content about that city or the website that has all of its content related to their city? They're going to choose the website that has all of its content targeted towards that city. So having good location pages is important and extremely imperative if you're in very competitive markets. If you have a lot of competitors in that area where you want to rank the better your location page is the better chance you have of outperforming them despite them having a ton of content or their entire website dedicated to the city.
It can be as simple as sending out a Google form and having a survey for them to fill out and their answers is just what gets sent on the page. Services that are available at that specific location. If you have locations that don't provide all of the same services or their services are slightly different. You can mention those differences to give you a little bit more unique content and then testimonials and reviews from clients and customers that are actually in that area. So not just giving reviews and ratings from any location but that are specific to that location if we include those specifically. Not only do we build trust with customers because they can say okay, this is what people near me who have had experience with this exact business have said but it also allows you to have more unique content. And then don't forget the basics. Of course, your phone number, address, hours of operation, all of those things should also be on your location landing page. You wouldn't be surprised by how many businesses forget those things. And of course, if those numbers change, that address changes, those hours change. Make sure that they're updated on your Google Business Profile as well as on your website.
FAQs: so FAQs are another great thing to add to your location landing pages because they provide more unique content or if it's not exactly unique, say it applies to every location, it actually provides useful content for your users because you're based off of questions that you know that they're asking. There are a lot of tools that will help you find the questions that people are already asking. Also Asked, Semrush, Answer the Public, Ahrefs, a lot of these tools will have a section where they'll give you questions that relate, that come up in search results as well. And you can look at the search volume from those questions to determine what questions you want to add to your pages related to your services or product. Then it gives you more content. It gives you useful content–is likely something that your competitors are not focusing on so it gives you something to diversify yourself with and allow you to actually bring in more traffic because if your competitors aren't doing it and it means that they're not ranking for the keywords related to those FAQs and gives you an upper hand as well. Here's some examples that I put together as far as good FAQs. These are the types of FAQs that my clients use on their location pages just to add some additional helpful content there.
Your location pages also should have conversion opportunities. So if someone goes to your page, they read everything on the page, they decide that they want to do business with you, but there is nowhere where they can easily see a phone number and there's no form to fill out. What do you think you're going to do? They're not gonna go digging. They're gonna leave and go to some other website or go back to search results and look at the local pack for someone else instead. Make it as easy as possible for people to complete that final, final goal that you have for them on that page. That means having conversions that are easily and readily available, easy to see. We actually had a client recently that changed their landing page and added more buttons and phone numbers to it and they saw an 85% drop in revenue from that page just because they made it very busy and hard to navigate. So these things are really important on your location pages. Make sure that you don't overdo it, and you don't crowd the page with conversion opportunities but you pepper them in. There should probably be one near the top of the page. There should probably be one near the bottom of the page. Your number should be easily found and read on the page so that they can contact you on mobile, they should be able to click to call so they can easily call you from there. And if there's a long page in the middle of the page too–there's probably another spot for a conversion opportunity. And these don't have to be like giant sections of content or anything like that. It could be just a, "call for a free consultation", it could be "get an estimate now", it can be anything like that and a button or a form that they can fill or a button to call or form that they can fill out where they're sending you information to show that they're interested and that they can be a potential lead for you.
Next, you want to build trust. So building trust is one of the things I also see businesses miss the mark a bit. They get very focused on the conversion opportunity part, they're like, "oh yeah, I need to make sure people know that they can give me their money". Well, your potential customers are aware that's what you want. It's your goal to tell them why they want to. It’s your goal to make them want to choose you over your competitors–give them the reason why you're the best choice. And some of the ways to do that is to be very obvious about what you offer as a company as far as guarantees and things like that. Be very clear and transparent about your reputation. Include reviews and testimonials and feedback that you receive from other clients. All of those things go a long way as to getting people to trust you and want to work with you or your competitors. If you're not sure where to start. For a lot of these tips. You can go look at your competitor pages but in the keywords that you want to rank for and density–look at what your competitors are doing on their pages and I guarantee you will see a lot of these elements on the people who are ranking extremely well. You will see a lot of these elements that we're talking about on their pages and find out what they're doing and find out what you can improve on. So we don't want to copy our competitors. We want to do what they're doing even better than they're doing because we want to be ahead of them. We don't want to be where they are. We want to be hard to catch up with and one of the ways to do that. is making sure that your reputation is very clear through your location landing pages throughout your website really in general.
So Amanda, you just told me a lot of stuff that I need to work on my website and I don't even know where to start. I didn't even know what a location landing page was before this presentation. What am I supposed to do?
What I would focus on first…is content. You're not going to show up in search results without content. So focusing on the other things is not going to do any good if no one is finding your page in the first place. So focus on unique content and local content. Unique content being what can I do to differentiate this location page from the other pages on my website? And what can a different view to differentiate this location page from my competitors location pages as well? That's what I would focus on first, making sure you have accurate local content on there as well. Like making sure you mentioned the city mentioned the service area around that city. mention anything that is specific to that location that would be important for users to know about. And then after you have a content, a page that can actually rank, let's focus on conversion opportunities and building trust. Because now that we can get people to come to this page, we have an action that we want them to do and that is to call or to fill out a form. So let's find those places where we want to add those forms onto the website or those ‘click to call’ buttons. And then we want to build trust. We want to give them the reasons why they want to, they’re going to this page now, they can find us now, we need to give them the reasons why they want to fill out that form or click to call. So that's working on your reputation. That’s working on trying out different lead formats to get people to convert on the page as well.
And then after that, after we were seeing where we are like okay, I made this page. We're able to be found on Google now. We're starting to get some leads to come in, but we're not growing as much as we want to. Then it's time to work on improving the content and the location page as a whole. And the way to do that would be adding those relevant photos to break up some of that content, to add some more personalization to the page, and adding those FAQs which also adds personalization, and adds more useful content to page your site visitors and also can help you increase the number of keywords you're ranking for on that location page.
And then these are some things that you just don't forget because I see businesses often forget some of these things that are the foundational things to location pages that are really foundational for any page that you really want to rank. Some of the top ones; create page titles and descriptions. You want to make sure that your page title mentions the service area or the city that you want to rank in. You want to make sure that your h1 tags into your headers mentioned the cities or service area. You want to make sure that it is mentioned in the content itself that it's not the only place that people can find it. You want to make sure that you actually link to your Google Business Profile from your location page and then you want to track your results. I think that's another thing that people often struggle with is Google Analytics, Google Business Profile and Google Search Console are all free tools that are ready for you to use. For you to track how your location pages are performing. And you'll be able to tell are these pages doing what I want them to do? Or are they not performing well? And does that mean I need to change something about what I'm doing on the page? And is it that I am getting traffic and they're not converting? Which means am I not building enough press? Do I not have the right conversion opportunities on the page? Is there something on the page itself that's turning people away? or am I not ranking in the first place? So is there an issue with the content on the page? Is there some technical issue with the page if something else is causing people not to find this page in the first place? and if you use that data, you'll be able to refine your location pages and make a process for it that actually works. And if you open up a new location, use the same process you'll be starting with a much better footing than you would if you were starting from zero and trying to build lots of location pages all over again or are trying to figure out from scratch what you should do for each new location. So this is a if you're not if you don't have location pages now this is a good way to start. to start building up that knowledge of whether your pages can perform in rankings and conversions. And then once you have a page built and you can see how it's performing, you can use that information to determine what needs to be fixed and what needs to be changed to get even better results out of that page. Then SEO for new locations, you kind of duplicate that template and apply it to all the new locations as well so that each location has its best opportunity, at least foundationally and ranking well. Some locations will be different. If you're in a highly competitive city, you may need to do more than the basics. You may need to look really closely at what your competitors are doing and find out where they're outperforming you and determine what you need to do to catch up with them. And that's what I would do if you already have location pages now and you're not getting the results you want out of them. Try to find out what your competitors are doing that you're not doing so that you can improve those pages and see the results that you expect to see from your location pages.
And how do you optimize? This is from Wix's article about optimizing your site's content for SEO. So read the article that's really the best thing you can do. Add keywords but focus on being original and helpful. That's kind of reiterating something that I already mentioned. Think about the customer's perspective, the customer's experience and that is going to be the most important thing. That's really what Google's chasing anyway so if you're focusing on the customer, whether you really think it's popping the way it should now or not, it is going to get there.
Use proper headings to break up sections on your website. So make sure you use those headers throughout the content. Your H1 or H2s, H3’s if you need them. and break out what types of content you have on a page. So you may want to have an H1 that's “roof repair in Atlanta, Georgia”. You may want to have an H2 that’s “why would you choose us for roof repair” or “our roof repair services are…”. And then next you want to use the data from your site search bar. That is a great tip because that is something that a lot of businesses don't look at and there's a lot of valuable information there. Because that's what people are searching for within your website. So they've already gotten to your website and they feel like they're not seeing or being navigated to what they're looking for soon enough so they're using another search within your website to find that information.
Add photos to breakup content sections and make sure to check your site on mobile so like I said, editing photos to bring up the content section. I think I just mentioned that in a couple slides ago. And those photos are going to become more important as Google uses image and multisearch even more. And then you want to make sure that your site looks great on mobile as well. So make sure you check your site on mobile and make sure that everything is showing up correctly on mobile. All right, so that's like the beginner's guide to location landing pages. There's so much more to them than that. So if you have any questions, of course, I'd love to hear them. Yeah, one thing that I love doing so I'm happy to take questions now.
27:19
Crystal: We have loads and loads of questions. And thank you to everyone who's been so patient in the chat. We are trying to answer your questions as quickly as possible and we're going to and we've been taking a note of them so there's a lot of questions that Amanda is really, really well placed just to answer so we've been taking a note of them.
One of the things that always comes up. So a couple of things first, when we say location pages, we mean pages that are about a location. So Amanda mentioned sort of a plumber for instance, in Houston or in Puerto Rico. And for instance, that’s if you look at a page, a page on your website, which might be different from your homepage, it might be different from a different place, or different pages on your website, and it's just a page of any kind, that is dedicated to that location. So you've optimized it for that particular location. And Amanda shared some amazing insights there. A lot of people asked about some technical things that you can do on Wix. So Amanda mentioned things like FAQs and things like buttons and things like CTAs. We had a webinar recently about homepage optimization and that page has lots of links to the technical implementation for some of those elements. And then the location page can act a little bit similar to a homepage but we cover lots of the different elements of different features there that are specific to Wix, so I highly recommend that you visit the Wix SEO Learning Hub and we'll have information there as well. So to get into some of the questions that we've had around this, we had a lot of questions and I've been on a few webinars with Amanda and this always comes up, but what if you don't have an actual shop? How do you optimize your location pages? Your Google Business Profile? If you don't have an actual shop, some people in the chat were saying you know, I'm a service provider for the whole country or someone said I have an Etsy profile or I work remotely. How do you optimize for location if you don't have a location?
29:19
Amanda: Yeah, so if you're nationwide, I wouldn't really focus on locations that much unless there are big differentiators and the services for each of those like for each state or something like that. Because that can be really difficult to do and really time consuming as far as trying to create content for every state or every county or every region at one time. So I would focus on understanding what terms people are searching for nationally related to your services and building content towards that and building up your homepage to rank extremely well nationally for those keywords and making sure that especially your trend right nationally, I think your blog will be even more important than having supportive content throughout your website. So that Google understands that this isn't just like a one pager written about this topic or this type of business. It's an entire website that means that you focus on all the elements of that because of business hype or that product or service. So I wouldn't focus on that unless you have a Google My Business listing if you have a listing, but you can't have a service area listing. So Google understands that for some business types, you don't work in an office or you go to your customers at their location, you don't have people come to your business. So you don't need a physical location. That's perfectly fine. You can have a service area listing and they have, from a ranking perspective, they're not worse off than having a brick and mortar location. You can still rank extremely well and perform well with a service area listing instead of a brick and mortar with a street address listing. Some things that you might find issues with might be a little bit harder to get that locality as a factor without using location as a major factor in the way you optimize your website. I think if you have a service area listing, making sure your website has location pages, especially if your service area is St. Pete, Florida, but you want to include Clearwater, you want to include Largo and some other areas,you probably want to have individual location pages for each of those cities on your website, and have that service area listing as well as your Google Business Profile listing. That's such a weird name, Google Business Profile. I wanted to say Google Maps listing because that makes a lot more sense. “Google Profile” could be so many different things that have nothing to do with local SEO.
32:10
Crystal: I don't think it's as strange as Looker. Looker, I'm not so… they changed from Big Data Studio to Looker, and I don't understand why I don't like that. But yeah, no, that's a great answer. And I think you covered a lot of this sort of nuanced questions that we have there as well.
Someone else also asked if you are a single location business. So let's say you only have one sandwich shop, for instance, do you also think that it's worth having multiple location pages, or do you think it's worth concentrating on a single single location?
32:46
Amanda: Yeah, if you only have one location, and you're not a business that serves other areas–so like if you're in a city center, but you serve all these little towns outside and those little towns you have a lot of competition, you may want to have some service area pages or location pages. But if you're just one location and you're focused on that one city, you don't need location pages. Just make your entire website really the most targeted towards those customers or searchers as you can.
33:20
Crystal: This is the question from me. So you mentioned content. So you just talked about making your website really focused on that. Are there particular types of content that you find work really well to help Google show or to help Google understand that you're really serving a particular location? Like do you find that blogs perform better or do you find FAQs or like galleries or reviews or something like that? Do you find that there's one particular type of content that really, really helps with location information?
33:53
Amanda: Not overall, it seems to be kind of based on what your competition is doing and the type of business. So for photography clients, we actually see that galleries with no content can outperform someone who actually has content on their page. So yeah, like there's so many different things that are going on that sometimes the things that make sense for another type of business do not perform well for another. So yeah, so like and then like a plumber or roofer do they really need a blog? Is there that much to say, like, and other than being involved in community and having something locally happen? I don't think it's always necessary. I think it's, but it depends on how you use those features too. Like if your blog is about your local community, and you're linking back to your pages, using it for internal linking, say all of your blog posts are about roof repair, roof replacement, somehow. Somehow you were able to write 500 blog posts about it, as long as they're linking back to your core service pages and things like that then they're a benefit. But writing that content just because you're like, “if I have a lot of content, I'll rank extremely well.” That's not the case. You want to be very specific with your intent. And for those businesses FAQ seems to perform better. Having increasing your service pages, so understanding the nuances between one type of service and another and being able to create more content about like… well I have a client who is a plumber and they have a tankless water heater versus tank water heater as a page, even though they have a water heater page, and they have a tankless water heater page, because that's a completely different intent. That's an informational intent. But they don't need a blog for those types of content, necessarily, they just need to explain it and have an informational page about it. So it really depends, I think, from my perspective on what your competitors are doing, and what type of content you need to show up. And I think that all comes down to the intent of the user. So if there's a lot of informational intent, then blogs might be the best way to go. If people are very based, very focused on commercial or transactional intent, like oh, I just want to buy something or oh, I just want to hire someone, then including more service pages or pages that are focused on the service or product itself would likely be the better way to go. Just based on what people are looking for in your competition.
36:28
Crystal: Um, yeah, I think that's obviously I'd like that. Yeah. Or not, obviously, but I think I agree. I think that it depends on the kinds of searches that people are expecting and the kinds of content that people are needing. And I think someone's saying that blogs can be useful to develop expertise, and I think that that's true as well. But I think sometimes with contractors, like plumbers or people who are working in the trade, sometimes it can be tricky to keep that up. So a page like you're talking about where you're comparing a particular methodology or comparing a product or comparing, you know, a service or that that's something that lives on your page can be really, really helpful.
And then we also had someone who was saying that they have a franchise. They have lots of you know, they're the same–like let's say I own a Subway sandwich–that’s something that has a lot of franchises. How would you recommend differentiating content for franchise pages?
37:30
Amanda: Yeah. So this is something that I’ve worked on a lot and it makes me very happy to talk about because I worked with a client where they were a home senior care franchise. And, of course, they offer the same services at every location, it doesn't change. So what we focused on was having unique content from the people who work at that location. So having the franchise owner point out some things that they wanted to say about why they got into that industry, why they did what, what they liked about being in that industry, things like that, and also finding things that are specific to that city. So if you are in a city where there’s…ooh! I just thought of a good one for Subway–like most most popular sandwiches and for that location are most popular sandwiches in that city.
38:27
Crystal: Oh, yeah!
38:29
Amanda: Yeah, like finding ways to differentiate using your own data, especially for your franchise and you can collect your own data. That's a much easier thing to do, is using your own information to find interesting data points. Orkin, the pest control company does a very good job at this on their website. For each location, they had the most common pests in that area. That's not completely unique, because I imagine in the southeastern United States, we all, like in this area, all of my neighbors here have the same issues–but it's unique enough where not every single location that Oregon has has the exact same content.
39:08
Crystal: Do you know what, I'll tell you right now, I live in Ohio and they have orange ladybirds, like the orange ladybugs that show up–which I never saw in California when I lived in California. So like that, I can see how that would work. And I think and I just wanted to just remind people a couple of housekeeping points. Again, location landing features are not a special kind of page. You don't need a special template to make a location plan to make a location landing page. It's more of a content differentiation and a content focus, which is why we've been talking about content and about the sort of unique ways that you can pivot your content and focus your content so that people can see what's going on there. Additionally, I would also say if people are asking if there's going to be a replay there's definitely going to be a replay and there's definitely going to be an opportunity to see some of that. When we think about good examples of location pages you've mentioned, Orkin, for instance, has good location pages. I think some other ones that I've seen are when people include unique information around, like what you're saying, like specific content. And also, can you think of any other ways that people can add unique content to their location pages?
40:32
Amanda: Yeah, yeah. So I mentioned that an FAQ is another one where you can look at what are the questions or especially if you're in larger cities, um, you can look at what questions people are asking near you about those specific topics. So you can look at the most common questions related to a topic and make it specific to your business, or specific to that location. You can collect reviews and testimonials that are specific to that location and put them in there and the better the review is as in, the more information that person gives, the more free content you just got from that person. So someone says like Bob came to my house on Thursday because we had a broken pipe in the kitchen. He was great and courteous. If I ever have any emergency plumbing issues, I will call x again. Like they just put your business name, the service and the issue all in their review–and those are keywords that you want on your page. So anytime someone gives you a testimonial review with that extra information in it, that's another opportunity.
And also, like I said, if you want it to be relatively unique, you don't need it to be 100% unique on each page. You can rank in a competitive city with common content. It's just much harder to do than if you had unique content. So what I would focus on is making the page mostly unique. There shouldn't be any like word for word match for several sentences. The biggest issue is that you don't want someone to be able to copy and paste that sentence into Google and find a bunch of different websites with the same or a bunch of different pages on your website with the exact same content. You wouldn't be different enough that if your teacher was looking at it, they wouldn't think you've copied off another kid's paper that's really what it is like. But someone else came up with these thoughts and that it's not just someone else's thoughts written slightly differently.
42:42
Crystal: Yeah. People have asked about URLs and things. What would you recommend having, would you recommend keeping your location pages in an individual folder? Like let's say it was Amanda's guitar lessons, I'm looking at your wall, so guitar lessons and let's say you were doing it in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, etc. Would you recommend giving them a folder that was in that location? So AmandasGuitarLessons.com/locations and then an individual peach then? Or would you recommend another URL configuration?
43:25
Amanda: That’s exactly what I would recommend. So it'd be my website website.com/location/“whatever that city is” and you can add more details. So you can say my website.com/location/tampa plumbing service and then Tampa heating service and then Tampa AC service. So how far you want to go it will depend on really how many location pages you feel like you need for a specific location, not to make things more complicated, but if you have a lot of high interest, highly competitive services for each location, you may want to have more than one location page and dedicate a location page for each one of those services. So you may want to have, okay, this is my page that is dedicated to boxing classes. This is my page dedicated to the yoga studio. This is my page dedicated to the regular part of the gym. You may want to separate them based on how heavy your competition is. I will say how heavy your competition is is how many spots that are your competitors ahead of you. So if your competitors are like, if you're on the fourth page, you may want to consider having more than one location page and focus on this specific service for each location page. If you're like, not even the first 20 on Google Maps, you may want to consider that but if you're already kind of close to being on the first page, it sounds like you just need to add a location page or maybe optimize the one that you already have.
45:04
Crystal: Okay, fantastic. And someone was saying, Do you ever see… because there's some places where we're in a city that might have a combination of languages, for instance, I know certainly, growing up in California, there's a lot of people who speak Spanish, we've been talking about Spanish speaking, so have you seen location pages where they vary by language as well as by geography?
45:32
Amanda: Yeah, if you're going to the point where you have different languages as well. I would recommend having a second language version of your site completely, including location landing pages just because it gives you the best opportunity to rank and make sure that you have of course your wrestling text setup so that you can specify what that secondary language is on each of the pages so Google understands. You can have a sub folder for that. You can do it at a country level domain if it's in another country, but in most cases, a sub folder on your website. So you might want to do location/ and for English/, the name of this, whatever the URL is for that page, or you might want to do “es” for Spanish. So using the build language code for that to make it a sub folder would be a good idea.
46:31
Crystal: Fantastic. And I think someone else has said, Peter, who's asked who has asked a few times. So we got your question, Peter. So he was asking, he said that they have two main services that they do, but they have 300 landing pages on their website–three location landing pages for the individual locations that they provide services for. And he's asking you if he's gone overboard with regard to those landing pages. What would you say?
49:59
Amanda: This one of my favorite topics, actually. Okay. And it's how do you determine what cities you need a location page for? If that city is competitive? You need a location page. If there is no one, there's only like two or three people who are actually in that city that's ranking, then you don't need a location page. One of the things I like to look at as a factor is the population of a city. And usually if there's under 10,000 people, I will not create a location page because that's not that's not a ton of people. What is Amanda's website? That's a very good question. You can find me at RicketyRoo.com And honestly, I'm perfectly fine if anyone has any questions, but they want to email me. It was my email address was on the on the slides but it's Amanda@RicketyRoo.com
47:52
Crystal: And we will share the slides after the event as well.
47:57
Amanda: So yeah, you'll have those slides if you didn't catch that. But yeah, that's something that I think about a lot and I often go by population. How many people in that area are actually searching for your services? So you want to look at the search volume in the population for that area. And you will be able to tell if you should have one there or not, and if you have like 300? You likely went overboard. 300 is a lot. Unless you're like Verizon or McDonald's or someone huge. I would say there should be very, very few. I was probably say less than 10 for most businesses.
48:39
Crystal: And I'm thinking that it also may be a question, you mentioned, two services there. It might be a question of filtering down some of the services because chances are like I think if you were like, say you're a guitar teacher, whatever it might be that you have Spanish guitar, or jazz guitar or rock guitar or something. So that's actually a few services.
48:59
Amanda: Yeah, that is true. Yeah. I think if it's that's the case, you can likely combine them all into one location page, just because if you look at the search volume for any of those types of services, if you break down your services more granularly you'll see that there's likely not a ton of search volume in your area for this individual services. So that means that you could combine them into one page, because there's not a lot of people searching for it. If you don't have a ton of competition for it, you will be able to perform extremely well without putting a ton of effort into it. My goal would always be to get you the most impact with the least amount of effort possible. So if it is like if you can get away with only having five location pages, then that's that will be the goal. And if we can either have 20 location pages and do very duplicative content or five and have them be very unique and special, then we're gonna go with the five pages. Yeah, and that's why we can mention the other cities in those pages. So if there's other cities nearby, that big hub, say New York City, like if we're focusing in New York City, or there's other areas that we want to focus on that are close enough to it, we can bundle them into the New York City page and mention them on that page instead of creating a separate page for each nearby area that we want to focus on or each borough or anything like that.
50:24
Crystal: And one last question. I think this is a really good one. How often should you update the content on your location page? And how valuable is the content freshness for ranking for location pages?
50:40
Amanda: It is not a huge factor for location pages specifically, but I would say at least every six months. Just keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. And if you're not in a very competitive market every six months is fine like you because if your competitors aren't very focused on SEO, if you look at their content and their website and you're like, they're not doing those things, they're not something that you need to focus on too much. Another thing is if your traffic or if your traffic changes or your ranking changes, that's another time–that's a prompt to look at it, especially on those specific location landing pages. It's like if something changes, that's a sign that either your competitors are doing something different, or Google's looking at your page differently, and that's a sign that you should pay attention to what's going on and review them. And especially for local businesses to do competitive analysis because you don't have to be the best in the country. You just have to be better than the guy that is closest to you because proximity is a huge factor. So you don't have to be the best ever. You don't have to be the number one law firm on SEO in the entire world. You just have to be better than the guy within 10 miles of you. That's often not very difficult and if you take a close look at what they're doing their website
51:56
Crystal: Absolutely. I guess if I can sneak in one more for myself. Is that cheeky? How much are you guided when you're thinking about keywords and things for your…? Someone said, “how do we sign up for the Amanda Jordan fan club? Amanda’s on Twitter, and she's on LinkedIn, and she's genuinely fantastic. I mean, I'm the president of the Amanda Jordan fanclub.
But I think one of the things I was gonna say is Google Business Profile, it gives you lots of ideas with regards to the kinds of services and the kinds of things that they're interested in. Do you use that to guide the kinds of content that you include on local location pages?
52:34
Amanda: Yeah, there's a lot of like, if the way that I look at Google Business Profile is that Google is telling us exactly what they want to see from local businesses because they're making it part of their platform, right. So that is a good place to start, is this stuff on my Google Business Profile reflected on my location landing page? Do I mention that like Google allows you to take business categories, does the content on your website relate to those business categories? Because that's going to be one of the epic things. Does the address match what Google sees? Does the business name match what Google sees? All that information is going to be important. And Google really likes serving your Google Business Profile over your website because then you stay on Google if they show you the Google Business Profile on their website. So making sure that your Google Business Profile is set up correctly and optimized is extremely important. That could be a completely different webinar, because there's so much going on with Google Business Profiles from so many different angles that that impacts your ability to convert, that affects your ability to be found on Google. You can be highly successful and get a ton of leads from Google Maps without ranking well, or, your website ranking well at all. So there's a lot there as well as to what can impact your ability to to show up. So I would say yeah, Google Business Profile is a good place to look as to, does my website match the information that I expect to see, that Google is looking for for their Google Business Profile?
54:08
Crystal: Absolutely. Fantastic. Thank you to everyone who joined us and and thank you to everyone. I highly recommend that you visit the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which has lots of information about Google Business Profile, and about local SEO including reviews including citations, including a guide to local SEO from one of Amanda’s colleagues, as well. We will be sharing this recording, we will also be sharing Amanda's deck and you can find lots of information there. We will be having our next webinar in November. Where we will be talking about content distribution. And Amanda, if you can just give us one more shout out to all of your details. Thank you so, so, so much for joining us today. And yeah, just let them know where they can find you.
54:57
Amanda: And yeah, if you have any questions like I love answering questions, it's fun to me. I know what I'm setting myself up for by saying that. But Amanda@ricketyroo.com. Feel free to reach out. You can find out more about local SEO in general and my agency at ricketyroo.com. And you can find me on Twitter at Amanda T Jordan.
55:22
Crystal: Good. Thank you so much. for joining us today. And thank you and thank you Amanda. And again, visit the Wix SEO Learning Hub, which is wix.com/SEO/learn where there's lots of webinars, lots of resources and lots of great stuff about Wix SEO and SEO in general. And I hope to see you again soon and thank you so much to everyone for joining us. Thank you!