Welcome back to the local lab. I'm Amanda Jordan. Today, we're going to be talking about location pages. This isn't the only day we're going to be talking about it. It was the only video about this topic because there's so much to cover. That's more than just content and common mistakes. So we're going to have an entire series just about location pages, because it's key to our local SEO strategy and impacts our rankings and maps and organic.

So it's super key for us just to be visible in our preferred cities as well. So let's get started. Actually, first thing I wanted to say is that I'm going to be using examples on this video. These are not sites that I have a relationship with. These are sites that I found at random that were good examples of the things that I wanted to discuss in this video.

So we have no relationship with them. We hope if any one of those companies find these videos, they find something useful in the information that I'm providing. So let's get started. Alright, let's get started. So first off, what are location pages? Essentially, it's... Any page on the website that is focused on a specific geographical area to help you perform well in that specific geographic area.

Here's some examples that I found recently that I thought were, were pretty great. This is a company that does housekeeping services in the North Carolina area. This is one of their location pages. So you can see their location pages are linked in the main navigation and it's part of a drop down.

They have a video for each location. They have their key service and keyword right here in the right here in their H1 tag. They have breadcrumbs here that mention it. They talk about the city and location itself. It has the local phone number. Talks about their cleaning services, includes videos of what their cleaning services are, and it gives you more information about the area and where they're located in the city, and even more information about their services and why they choose them.

So this hits on end testimonials as well, and blog posts. So this is a good example of kind of what you need to consider when creating your location pages. It's not a page that's just informational and it's not a page that's just commercial. It's both. It needs to feed into both of those needs for your site visitors and answer all those questions on one page.

So you can see here they make their themselves locally relevant here with mentioning the city. Putting information about the specific area here. They give ample opportunities to interact with them here as well. They thoroughly explain their services here. They explain why you should choose them over their, over their competitors.

And they give you examples of the work that they've done. And then they give you reviews from actual customers in that area. So it checks all the boxes. It says, is it relevant? Yes. Is it local relevant? Yes. Is it topical? Yes. Are they providing information to tell me that I should trust them? Yes, and it's doing it in all an all in one page.

That is what we're looking for in our location pages why do we care about this? Right? Why is this so important for these types of pages? Well, one reason why it's so important is because these pages can rank, help you rank in Google Maps and in Organic for conversion terms, or terms that are more likely to lead to a conversion.

So, someone is looking up house cleaning services near me, they are saying that they have a clear intent to find someone who's going to provide that service near them. Now, someone looks up how to clean a bathroom, that doesn't tell you that person is looking for a local business to provide a service.

That's an informational search. So as far as what type of keywords provide most value for local businesses, it's going to be the keywords that your location pages are more likely to rank for when they are well implemented and well thought out and well strategized. And that also means, of course, reaching your target customer, which is key to getting more leads to your website.

And it helps you It turns, instead of it being a cold lead, it turns, it's someone who's a warm lead. They've already decided that they wanted to hire someone for the service, they just don't know who yet. And ranking for these keywords helps you answer the who. Now if you want to know, well, what are the keywords for my business, that'll be in another video.

So we'll have a video about keyword research and content and all that. But for now, think about it this way. Your location page should be the page that ranks in that city. for your key services and it also should be the page that tells people what they need to know to want to choose to work with you.

So now let's get into the common pitfalls of these types of pages. There are three that I see happen a lot and they happen with businesses of all sizes and it happens to both multiple location businesses and businesses that just have a wide service area so they have lots of pages focused on different cities in their service area.

I'm gonna have to choose an example for this nothing against BassetServices. com. I hope if they see this video they find something useful and that it can help them fix some of these issues that I found. So BassetServices. com. I'm gonna go back to that. First shot in a little bit and explain what that is.

First first one of the most common pitfalls I see is lack of unique content. And that is lack of unique content internally and externally. So internally, it's very quick and easy to create location and service area pages that use the same content over and over again. The problem with that is that Google sees that you're using the same content over and over again, and if that content is not valuable in their eyes, if the city is competitive, you're less likely to rank because Google says, I've already seen this, why should I rank this in this other city just because a couple words have been changed and it's about another city.

That doesn't work. Very well in most cases for businesses when they try that and I give those caveats because in some cases it does work But those are extremely rare. I would say in 90 percent of the cases that I see Businesses do need to have unique content to be able to perform well locally Because not only are you competing against your other competitors who are multiple location businesses, you're competing against competitors whose entire website is dedicated to one city.

And you're competing against those aggregate sites that have, that lists all the plumbers near you, all the plumbers in that area. So all of those things are competition for you. And if you're not bothering to take the first, like go over the first hurdle and have unique content, you're way less likely to perform well.

This is an example of that. So this is a really It's a cool tool called SiteLiner, where if you put your URL in, it will show you similar content between your pages and the website. So, one of the ones it found here is Plainfield. Now as you can see, here's an issue already. This URL says Plainfield, but the page is for Dayton.

And, and, but when you crawl down here, or when we scroll down, we see that it says Plainfield again here. So there's something funny going on where the H1 tag... The URL and the content don't match. They're all about different cities. That is, if it's confusing for us, it's definitely confusing for Google.

That means that this website can't perform well. In fact, look, now we see Dayton again here. The URL is for Plainfield. Plainfield is in the first paragraph, but the H1 tag says Dayton, and the content down here says Dayton. Google's not sure what city this page is supposed to rank for. And I can say that with confidence, because when I looked at the rankings for this business, they rarely rank for anything that is not branded as a term.

Branded terms are great, they are likely linked to a conversion, but the point of us doing local SEO and creating these pages is so that we can rank for the keywords that aren't branded, but are, but have a high intent to convert and, or to hire someone. So those are key issues for this page. If we look at, this is called meta SEO in one, I believe.

If you look here, it says Plainfield here, Plainfield here if you look at the H1 tag though, it says Dayton. So, I'm sending mink signals to Google because there is not unique content. There is a Dayton page. In fact, let's go there. Yeah. This is a Dayton page, and it has nearly the same content on it. We know because Sightliner said that Plainfield and Dayton have 97 percent match as far as content.

So those pages aren't unique, and those pages aren't ranking because they aren't unique, and because there's some UX issue that's providing a poor user experience. Now of course... This kind of goes right into the next point for optimization. So this page is clearly poorly optimized because it's not clearly about one city over the other.

It's competing with itself on two topics. When we look at the header, this starts with the business name, not necessarily with the services. And a lot of these are very generic and that's specific to a key service that they offer. That makes it harder for Google to determine which. Which one are you really going after?

What is the focus of the page? Especially with pairing that with the business name in front. I bet this page ranks for branded terms but ranks poorly for anything else because of the focus on branded and their and their title tag here in addition to the other issues with the content itself. Makes it very confusing for search engines to find where You're trying to rank HVAC electrical and plumbing services in Dayton.

This is pretty much a repeat of what we saw here as HVAC plumbing and electrical solutions in Dayton, Ohio. So that doesn't give Google any additional information about what the page is about, what you're trying to rank for. It's kind of repetitive. And when we look at our H2 tags. HVAC repair, maintenance, and installation services in Dayton.

That's trying to be too many things at one time. We should be a little bit more specific. And out of those three, or HVAC repair, maintenance, or installation, one of them has to perform the best. And that's the one we should be focusing on in our H2 tags. So that's just a sign of another issue.

Another issue that a lot of businesses run into when they have Multiple locations or service area pages on their site is an internal linking issue They haven't built a strategy to make sure that all these pages are supported with internal links Those internal links help google understand the importance of those pages to your website and which Keywords those pages should rank for because your anchor text on those internal links gives google insight as to which which keywords that page should rank for if you're interested in that, of course, that's going to be another video.

We'll cover internal linking as well another issue these pages likely have and a lot of businesses have are Are issues with link building because they haven't it's hard to build links but it's even harder for local businesses and it's even harder when you have lots of service area or location pages and you're trying to be competitive and you see that your competitors are getting rankings for the same keywords on their homepage where all of their links are built.

And you have one page with duplicate content on it and you're trying to compete with an entire website on a topic where they have lots of backlinks and lots of authority already. Those are situations that businesses find themselves in when they are are kind of falling for these common issues for location landing pages.

The best way to get out of this is really to have a strong local SEO strategy that thinks about all the pieces and how they fit together. And not as in, not as a focus on individual tactics that may get some results, but with like algorithm update or a competitor that puts a little bit more effort into it to their SEO.

You can easily get overthrown and that kind of leads me to my my third common pitfall and that is poor execution And that's what I mean by a lack of local seo strategy You can't execute location pages well enough in a competitive market or in a competitive industry if you're not thinking strategically The everything you're going you're doing is going to end up falling through or needing to be updated regularly because you're not really focusing on it from a holistic point of view but you're doing small parts of a strategy or small tactics that are not cohesive or working together to better your page over time.

That's really what the goal is. The goal is to better your page over time so that you beat your current competitors and then make it difficult for anyone to overtake you or overthrow you after that. And that is what a good local SEO strategy does for you. All right, I think that's it for this video. To wrap it up, location pages play an essential part to your local SEO strategy and your ability to rank in Google Maps and organically.

These pages rank for keywords that show clear intent to hire someone for your services and they can Easily help bring customers into your funnel who don't already know your brand name. These pages should focus on providing informational content and commercial content so that not only can you bring people in for those keywords, you can convert them on the same page.

Next video, we'll be going diving in even deeper into location pages, and I hope to see you there. Talk to you later. Bye. In the next video, we'll be diving even deeper into location pages. I hope to see you there. See you in the next video.