We work with hundreds of local businesses — from hyperlocal, single-location businesses to nationwide, multi-location companies — at the company I run, Bowler Hat.
One pattern we often see is that larger and seemingly more authoritative businesses don’t perform as well in local search as they should. There are many reasons for this, and having multiple locations amplifies the need for solid local SEO foundations. A common issue we come across is the lack of a well-optimized and well-performing landing page for local businesses.
In this post, we aim to illustrate what we believe to be the perfect location landing page, based on our experience working with local businesses.
We must tick our SEO boxes here, but we must also maximize the leads generated from these pages — to do this, we have to look at the intersection of lead generation and local SEO.
Where lead generation meets local SEO
There are two key elements to consider here:
We want to create a perfectly optimized page from a Local SEO perspective but also a finely tuned lead generation machine. These pages should allow the user to achieve their goal — much like a traditional lead-focused landing page.
Clearly, there is some synergy here. To create pages that are highly visible, they should also be highly functional and allow the customer to get in touch and generate us those all important leads.
1. Local SEO ranking factors
Last month, I took a look at the local SEO ranking factors from a recent Moz survey. I wanted to break these down and help local marketers understand what exactly needs to be done to optimize for the primary ranking factors. We can further analyze this information in our quest for the perfectly optimized landing page.
The following are the ranking factors that are relevant for local SEO landing page optimization:
This is not to say every one of these is relevant for every job, but we will want to factor in as many of these as possible in our quest to get the SEO signals dialed in for our landing pages.
2. The perfect landing page
Much of the landing page science comes out of the PPC industry. After all, if you are paying to drive traffic to a given page, then you naturally want to squeeze every last bit of performance from the page. There is no absolutely perfect layout, and the right page is going to very much depend on what is being promoted; however, we can take some guidance from time-tested best practices.
The perfectly optimized local landing page
So it naturally follows that the perfect local SEO landing page is also a finely tuned lead generation page. This ticks the boxes for Google, and most importantly, it achieves what your customer is looking for.
To better illustrate this, we have created the following Infographic that shows how you can implement all of these key SEO and landing page elements onto a killer landing page (click to enlarge):
SEO and landing page synergy
It is easy to get trapped in too narrow a perspective — whether that is SEO, PPC, landing page optimization or one of the other myriad digital marketing tactics. My intention here was to illustrate how lessons from one discipline will often complement and improve another.
I would love to see your local landing pages and how you are generating leads from Local SEO traffic, so hit me up on Twitter @MarcusBowlerHat.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
