How to Set Up Local Landing Pages & More
I LOVE LOVE LOVE local landing pages. I’ve used them for years and have generated more leads than I could possibly count. How do you know you need them? When should you NOT build them? And what should they look like…In this video, I talk about it all!
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Hey folks, Adam Steele here back with another episode of Adam Answers SEO. Today I’m gonna talk about Landing Pages specifically I’m gonna talk about Local Landing Pages. Now this is a topic that I can quite honestly talk about for a very long time. So I’m going to try and keep it brief, no guarantees of course.
There is a lot of material online on Local Landing Pages. Sometimes called Doorway pages which is kind of bad Landing Pages or Local Landing Pages that are done poorly are Doorway pages. I like to think of mine as just Local Landing Pages because they are done with a little bit more finesse.
Starting at the beginning when I’m putting together Local Landing Pages or rather maybe when I’m debating Local Landing Pages, the first thing I’m thinking about is, can I afford to have them? That does not mean can I afford to build them, can I afford to hire a copyright blah, blah.
It means can my website, does my website having an equity in it? And by that I mean link equity or link authority or domain authority or whatever, to spread myself out that much thinner. And maybe I’m talking out of my ass here but, the way I kinda look at it is, I think of it as a picture of water, and if I have five pages on my website, then that picture of water is roughly, well majority of it is gonna be on the homepage but a percentage of that total link authority, domain authority thing gets pushed to each one of those pages. Add five more pages to that and each of those existing five pages gets a little bit less link equity or whatever you wanna call it. So can my site afford to get spread that thin? Am I a far enough along the process that I can thin things out a little bit, without affecting my other pages, or stunting my further growth?
There’s not a perfect way to answer that. Brand new sites I tend to keep it small and tight. Sites that are a little bit older, I can sort of afford it_ There’s no number, it’s not like DA 20 you can afford to do that or anything like that. It also kind of depends on the client’s patience. You are not going to be able to rank these things. If you have 10 Local Landing Pages for all the communities around you, you are not going to to be able to rank those overnight. The more you have the slower it’s going to go. So I’m looking at the client’s patience, I’m looking at the client’s budget.
Every other page that adds to my website is a page that I potentially have to build links to. So do I have the link budget to afford that? So those are sort of the considerations I make those decisions and then we get a little bit more detailed how I’m I gonna structure it. Am I structuring things with a Google my Business page for each one of those? Let’s suppose they actually have locations in those areas, in those communities. Are each one of those Google my Business pages pointing to those Local Landing Pages? I kind of have a cut off; if it’s five or less locations, I point everything to the homepage whether I have Local Landing Pages or not.
If there are more than five locations, then I point those locations at the Local Landing Pages. And I really don’t have a good reason for that other than just being efficient I guess, and maybe efficient isn’t the right word. But just, the home page has the majority of the authority, right? And your best bet at ranking something quickly or in the near future is often to leverage that inherent authority that the domain has, that the whole page has.
So I guess its just easier to use that homepage for those five locations. That I can throw those, five locations in the Footer, or those five locations in the sidebar the NAP, without it looking too stupid, anything more than that and it starts to look dumb. So, I guess that is part of my reasoning as well.
As far as the construction of said of Local Landing Pages, I’m not gonna get too much into that because that could take forever, there are lots of resources for that. I’ve got some other people who can help with that, notably, Matt Hunt of (previously) Small business Online Coach and how I think he has moved the resource to powerbysearch.com. He was one of the first of its kind, I loved it and I don’t remember what it looks like now, but I remember it being like just fantastic. And I’m sure it is still very much applies. niftymarketing.com, I think it was, I want to say it was either Ryan or it was Mike or I can’t remember who put it together.But at least there is one resource on their website and I think they touched on Local Landing Pages before on the website locallanding.net there are a couple of Local Landing Pages resources as well that are pretty nifty on magistrateinc.com I think we got a couple on there too. So there are tonnes.
I think there is a really good one on Moz. I think it was put together by Miriam Ellis, don’t quote me on that, I can’t remember, but really, really good stuff. So I’ll just give you a brief summary of what I like.
First, I like to make the URL nice and specific, but it kinda depends on the homepage, the domain itself. If the domain itself is something cleaning.com then obviously URLs are not gonna be cleaning-vancouver, cleaning-richmond, right? Because cleaning is already there I don’t need to do that again _it just kind of comes out spammy. So, in that case I probably have something like residential-vancouver, or just vancouver right? I don’t need to get too detailed, I don’t need to get too spammy I’m capable enough to not have to do that crap.
But, if it’s just a brand name like, I don’t know, well…Magistrate is an example right? This name has nothing to do with what we do, right? What my company does. So in that case I would probably have forward slash, I don’t know, seo-ppc-vancouver something like that I’m actually stealing that URL from somebody else.
I know of a pal of mine who’s got his URL set up that way, but that’s how I would set up the URLs. Anyway, and I would be sorta cautious about being too spammy for the reason that I do enough stuff that puts me on edge, that I don’t need something that isn’t going to have tremendous reward making me look over my shoulder even more than I already am.
So and then you get into the page construction itself. I’m not gonna go into what makes a good landing page conversion-wise, again lots of good resources on that unbounce, conversion excel etc. But I like to make sure my NAP is on there of course and again this kinda depends on how I’ve set up my Google My Business pages and how I’ve structured all that.
Some reviews local to that area, content (of course) local to that area, some resources local to that area, I get pretty detailed because sometimes you’re writing the same shit over and over again and you need some bloody variety and writing about plumbing 20 times you almost can’t help but be duplicate, you almost can’t help but add some duplicate stuff, cuz how do you say the same thing 20 times, right? So, we add some variety by adding resources, by adding local reviews, reviews from people who are local to that area and people you service in that area.
What else comes to mind? Some of my favourite things; pictures (local to that area), I mean you’re not really fooling anybody, but I like to pit make it so like when somebody comes into my client’s website, it kinda feels like, okay this person knows my area. They specialize in my area. If I’m a realtor then I am making sure that there are houses for sale in that area on that page for example. I’m localizing that page as much as humanly possible. Putting a map on there, putting some pictures of the area that are known in the area, a monument that is in the area or something like that. A park that everyone from that area would know. I’m talking about, I want people to get the idea, that if I’m a realtor, I’ve been in every house in the area. I’ve sold at least every house. I’ve sold a house once, I’ve sold every house at least once in the area. I go to church in the area. My kids go to school in the area. I mean, it is probably not true, but that’s kinda the sense I wanna give, I wanna give the sense that I specialize in that area, right? So, as far as the copy is concerned, I lean towards trying to make it sound a little bit like that, without deliberately saying that that is true.
Then just basic optimization, again there are lots of resources for that, I don’t need to get into that. So I think that kinda sums it up. 500 words 600 words, If I can go on longer than that without making it looking total crap, I will. I recently saw somebody powered by search actually .com/enterprise-seo, something like that, so they put together a page on their website and they have their normal service copy and then they put the resource to enterprise SEO bellow it.
The thing is like it’s bloody 8000 words long right but it fits, it looks good, it reads good, and it shows their expertise in the area. It’s brilliant. I don’t know why I never really thought about doing that, but you could do that, right? That’s probably a little bit extravagant, especially if you are doing 20 of these, but you get my idea.
Or rather their idea. So hopefully that helps, I do hope. And like I said there is lots of resources for this both on the optimization side, the conversion side, all kinds of stuff. So check out those resources, I may or may not link to them, will see how much time I have. But let me know if you have any questions, I built this for years, they work amazing, we’ve generated so many leads with these things.
And just a final note Google has come out I believe and spoken on this, they’ve called them Doorway Pages. So I would do a little bit of research on that, just to make sure that you are not, well, having to look over your shoulder. Thank you guys, I do appreciate your attention, I hope as always that I have brought us a little bit of value.
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