Local Landing Page Strategies: Content and Design Essentials

Create a local landing page that weaves a helpful, informative, and clear local neighborhood story and inspires your customers to do business with you. That’s the top content goal when building and optimizing location webpages for companies with multiple properties. Your team members should work with a local strategist to pull in the data, a skilled content specialist to write and create media, and a seasoned developer to make the site user-friendly and visually stunning. This is especially important when designing your mobile site, as this is where most searches now begin.

In order to launch successful local landing pages (LLPs), you’ll need to make it easy for the ideal customer to land on your page. Additionally, you should quickly make it clear what these customers need so that they remain on the page. You should also inspire them with clear calls to action (CTAs) that eventually lead to conversions.

That doesn’t always happen when you have light content and basic information.

If you are an enterprise brand, your location page should be informative but also fun and different from the other pages on your site. Don’t hesitate to add custom location photos, images of your team flashing big smiles, or even promotions that you’ve yet to show customers on Google. This can all be a huge initiative that can benefit your overall SEO strategy.

Let’s start by exploring the detailed features that could benefit your local efforts.

Is the Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) Accurate?

Assuring that your location details are accurate can be essential when it comes to strategizing for Google My Business (now known as a Google Business Profile). This information is fundamental to any local strategy.

Working with your developer is the first step in this process. Try to match the Google Business Profile with your website and any lingering pages that might still have outdated information from years ago. Yes, I’m talking about that old event page everyone forgot about!

The structure of the page has to be intact. A multi-location page study will review features that should be included on the landing pages to ensure users land on pages that they find informative or useful.

Not Just Any Reviews—Native Reviews!

You have some options when it comes to reviews. You can build a simple process, but the overall goal is to create native reviews that you can display on the landing page.

Google reviews are key, but you should also make sure that users who land on the landing page can see what past customers have seen. This is essential to the buyer’s journey.

This will take some time, but it’s proven that this strategy is effective and can benefit the user’s overall experience.

Users Engage With Location Images

Every location is unique, so you should treat each landing page as its own entity. Pictures are an essential part of this facet of the experience.

The quality of the image is also extremely important. One of the most irritating things is landing on a restaurant’s page only to find that it has blurry or outdated imagery.

It only takes a few minutes to snap a quality photo and upload it to your GBP and landing pages.

Google loves to see images of employees and signage on the front or interior of buildings. These images, as well as images of specials and coupons, are things we should constantly update.

Add Available Attributes—These Are the Details Users Need

Attributes can be key when it comes to building the best page for potential customers and keeping Google happy.

In my last article on Brightlocal, I mentioned the importance of attributes and why they are needed on location pages.

Some of the attributes we often see are:

• Wi-Fi options
• Links to directions
• Standard operating hours and holiday hours
• Wheelchair accessibility
• Black- or Latino-owned
• Happy hour (Restaurants)
• Delivery and takeout options (Restaurants)
• When the business first opened

Having web developers add this type of content to your site can only benefit your business, improving bounce rate and keeping users on your page. These users will be most likely to convert because of trust.

And don’t get me started on EAT signals.

Give Focus to Technical SEO

Search engine optimization’s core lies in technical SEO. If your landing pages are fast and user-friendly, marketing should come easy.

Ensuring the core web vitals are in place and that the page is lighting fast will lead to great results for your landing page.

You’ll also want to monitor the pages using tools such as:

• SEMrush
• Ahrefs
• Data Studio
• What A Graph
• Google Analytics

If you are an expert in data analytics or just a marketer who landed the role, make sure you are on top of the numbers.

Most executives and managers will be hounding you unless you come to them with a report that is to perfection.

Include a Sitemap To Guide Users

Google often recommends using a sitemap on your website to let users know exactly what pages to land on. This includes the local landing pages and selling pages you are optimizing.

Adding these pages and special pages to the sitemap should increase awareness when Google crawls the site and users become interested in what other pages are available for them.

Embed a Google Map

Embedding a Google map on your page provides usability for users who are looking to get directions to your business or want to gain a general idea of where this particular location is. This is especially beneficial for mobile users.

We typically recommend adding this information toward the top of the page so that users can engage with the site quickly and not bounce back to other competitors.

Calls to Action (CTAs)

We all hate scrolling on our mobile phones, trying to find a phone number, only to discover that it isn’t clickable on a website. Making sure the calls to action on the page are working but attracting customers can be one of the most important initiatives when creating pages.

Making sure the calls to action scroll with the users as they navigate the site is also important; otherwise, users may become uninterested by the time they are ready to call or email you.

Page Title and Description—What Users See First

You can use the Wiideman tool to optimize a page’s title and description. This ensures the accurate characters for local pages are easy to read when Google and potential customers land on your page.

Building Links to Your Pages Through Solid Outreach

Get Creative!

Thinking outside the box is exactly what you need to do when finding the ideal place to list your location page on the web. If you’ve built a solid landing page, have organized the content well, and find that the overall experience is a success, your next step is making sure you’re getting a healthy number of links pointing back to that local page’s URL.

Some of the best local links can be from small businesses in the area, sites that end in .edu, and your local government office’s page.

Connecting with folks in the area is a great start, but providing them with new content from the beginning can improve your chances of being listed.

Conclusion

As you build out these detailed local pages, try to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Making this process easy for them will improve your CTAs and let Google know that you are a trusted source for these local keywords.

Google often changes; as you add these criteria, know that new ones may arise, and things could change with Google. That’s why SEO is forever evolving—your local landing page is a prime example of this.