Location pages are one of the most critical web page components for a local business with an online presence or multiple business locations. The location pages provide important business contact, physical store locations, and product information to potential customers. When customers want to buy a particular product or a service, they often search for nearby stores. An SEO-optimized location page helps search engines effectively rank the local businesses based on customer locations and expose them to effective customer bases.
With millennials becoming a dominant user segment on the internet, A study has found that local searches are becoming more popular, and close to 50% of users who search with local buy intent will make a purchase in-store with in the next 24 hours. Still, most small businesses do not take advantage of those opportunities by optimizing their location pages. To obtain long-term success as a local business, it is imperative to optimize the location pages of websites.
How to Optimize Location Page Contents for SEO
The starting point of optimizing location pages is the content you include on the page. Having more informative and relevant content specific to each location helps enhance your visibility in local consumer searches.
Keep one page for one location
First and foremost, avoid keeping one master location page for all the business locations. Instead, create separate pages for each business location and include location-specific information.
The following are the most important business information you need to include for better SEO rankings of the content within a location page.
Maintain up-to-date NAP data
NAP data or Name, Address, and Phone Number are initial information any consumer will seek for contacting a local business.
Location pages need to contain the most up-to-date and location-specific NAP data.
Mention your opening hours
Let your consumers know when your business opens and closes each day of the week. This critical piece of information will save them from showing up at your store at the wrong time. Again, make sure to keep them up-to-date with any changes in different seasons.
Include a map and directions
Top-ranking pages make use of Google Maps to improve search engine rankings. Hence, embedding a map of your business location is particularly helpful for first-time visitors to figure out your exact location.
In addition to that, including directions is super helpful for consumers to find you. Describe how to get into your location from at least two directions mentioning the major highways, major landmarks, and nearby businesses.
Add images and videos
Consumers often like to see photos of the business because it helps them get a realistic view. Therefore,
- Add internal photos to help consumers see the real vision of your store experience.
- Add external photos like car parking spaces and nearby stores to recognize the location of your business quickly.
Add product and service descriptions
Different locations of a multi-location business may have their own products and services. In such cases, you can include products and services offered on a specific location in the relevant location page with their images and videos.
Include Call-To-Actions (CTAs)
Call-To-Action (CTA) phrases encourage consumers to take immediate action relevant to your business. If your CTAs are compelling enough, it doubles the chance consumers will do what it says.
Here are some good options for CTA:
- Calling or emailing your business
- Subscribe to a newsletter
- Buying a limited-time offer
- Request an appointment or quote
- Provide directions to the business
SEO Best Practices to Optimize Location Pages
Now that you know how to improve the content of the location page for SEO let’s see the major best practices and SEO factors to help search engines and consumers identify your business in their searches.
Optimize your title tags
Optimized title tags immensely help businesses to appear on the search engine results pages. (SERP). You can optimize your title tag by including accurate and concise descriptions of the following three elements:
- Business name
- Geo-location
- Product or services
When you optimize the title tag, make sure to avoid the following.
- Long titles. Research indicates that keeping the title length under 60 characters improves your title appearance in SERPs.
- Stuffing keywords
- Alternate titles
Optimize location page URL
The best approach to optimize your location page URL is using the location name with the main domain name. For instance, if your business domain name is www.mybusiness.com, then each location page should use www.mybusiness.com/business-location. This location-specific keyword in the URL gives the search engines and consumers a clear indication of the location, thus improving search engine rankings.
Maintain positive reviews
Having many positive reviews is a major deciding factor for consumers to visit your store or buy your products and services online. Businesses with more positive reviews are more likely to appear in the local map pack results and organic search results. Therefore, ensure that you promptly reply to the consumer reviews. Also, try to create more reviews and motivate your customers to leave positive feedback.
Use backlinks
Backlinks are links on other websites that redirect to your website. For example, a blogger can include a link and ask the audience to refer to your page as your website includes the best products. If search engines know your page is valuable because many other trustworthy sites refer to it, it will very likely rank your page highly. Therefore, try to use backlinks in more influential and high-quality pages.
Take advantage of Shema Markups
Shema Markup is a semantic vocabulary of tags you can incorporate into your location pages to improve your visibility in consumer searches. Using schema markups, you can add data like address, business hours, review ratings, product information, upcoming events, etc. It will show consumers concise but very informative data, which will be extremely helpful to the consumers.
Take advantage of Google My Business (GMB)
Another powerful way you can optimize the location page for SEO is using Google My Business. It is a tool that lets you create business listings for each business location. You can create a business profile and add URLs for each location page. Follow the guidelines given by Google when you are creating a GMB profile to enhance search visibility. In addition, focus on adding detailed and relevant information, exact location, and positive review and rankings.
Proper location page optimization strategies can help your business to become a strong candidate in local searches. As the article described, use a separate page for each location with in-depth and effective content. In addition to that, following the SEO best practices described here will help search engines to rank your business among other competitors effectively. Brickwork offers a plethora of online services to optimize your business for local intent— contact us today to get started.