Originally recorded and distributed by Moz

  Hi, everybody. How are you doing? I want to hear some noise. I want some energy. Come on, come on. This is my first MozCon, so I need the energy. It'll make me feel so good. Um, today I'm going to be talking about the future of location landing pages, and we heard something about location landing pages yesterday, and that just tells you how big of an issue it is for local businesses.

It is one of the biggest issues that they face. Whether you're like Walmart or you're like a pest control company with two locations, you still have these same issue with figuring out how to get these pages to rank and how to get them to convert. So, that's what we're going to talking about today. So, like I said, small companies, enterprise, everyone needs better location pages, and I think that's something that SEOs essentially agree with, agree on, like there's, there's no one in here that does local SEO that says, oh no, location landing pages are great, please don't touch them, like everyone knows that they suck, like it's, we, it's a, everyone believes it, uh, but if we all know that, why aren't they any better?

Why isn't it consistently great? If we're all experts, we all agree, and we're all the ones working on these sites, right? So, reason to care. We have a client. It's a home cleaning franchise nationwide, and 75 percent of their organic traffic goes to their location landing pages. This is how important these pages are to a website.

Almost all of their organic traffic is coming through these pages. And guess what happens if you don't have, uh, reviews? Conversion opportunities, uh, awards, recognitions, things like that on these pages. They don't convert. What's the point in having these location landing pages and leading people to your website?

If they get there, they don't have a good experience and they leave. There isn't any, right? So, like, we need to do better. Like, as local SEOS, we need to do better. We need to make better recommendations and we need to push our clients to take those recommendations a little bit more seriously. So, why invest?

They provide search engines and users with a better experience overall. It's not just about the search engine, it's also about the users. The users want to get to a page where they have a good experience, where they know what to expect, and they can make a decision without having to search around anymore.

No one looks forward to visiting a bunch of websites to make an appointment for a dentist or an eye doctor. They want to be one and done. That's what we all want. We don't want to have to keep searching, but when these pages don't perform well, that is what we end up having to do. Uh, they improve visibility and rankings for geo specific keywords.

So, if I write a blog post about plumbing services, but I don't specify a city or anything, it's going to be very hard for me to rank locally, or show it locally. If I don't have a Google business profile, I don't mention a city, a state, any geo information. I'm essentially trying to rank for plumbing services nationwide.

And that's very vague and very hard to do. That's why these location landing pages need to be specific. A personalized experience. Users like getting to a page and feel like they know something about the actual business and that the business actually cares about them as a customer when they visit it.

So if you have a page that's just a repeat of the same information over and over again, like on all of your other location pages, you're more likely not to have your customers want to come back to that experience because... There's nothing special about it. There's nothing about it that encourages them to interact with you.

So, who should invest in location pages? If you want to be found online in a specific area, you need to invest in location pages. That's it. Doesn't matter if you are a huge company, doesn't matter if you're a small company. If you want to be found in cities, You need to have location pages if a county, if zip codes, if something is important to you that is a geographic element, you need to have location pages and they need to be strong.

And it's even more important when you have multiple locations because they, uh, uh, if you, especially if you depend on foot traffic because you want people to find your location, right? You need that information easily available, right? You want people to understand. What your business is about, you want them to be able to differentiate between locations, between services and products at locations as well, and what the experience is at each location.

So you don't want to have a cookie cutter experience whether you have one or two locations or a hundred. And these are the common issues with local landing pages. These are gonna be very familiar. One duplicate content that is. um, Everyone's issue. Whether you're like Enterprise 2. Like I, she was just talking about Enterprise having duplicate content issues.

I worked on a lot of Enterprise local SEO clients and it's rampant. It's insane how much duplicate content that I've seen. And not even just against like internally but outside of their own website. Other sites having very similar content across the same industry, in the same area, geographical area, competing with each other.

It's insane. And who wins if your content is the same as all of your competitors? No one does. Especially not the customer. Like, they don't get anything out of that. They don't learn anything about your business. They don't learn anything about anything that you can do for them from having that type of experience.

Doorway pages. This is the, one of the risks with trying to rank in a lot of different areas is that I would actually say that the majority of location pages right now that businesses have are actually doorway pages. Because it's, your location pages should be adding value. It's not just about ranking for more keywords, it should be adding something and giving something back to your customers.

It should be adding something to the search engine, giving more information to Google. And if it's not doing that, it's essentially a doorway page. You may just not have gotten caught yet, but it's essentially a doorway page. Because it's not giving anyone anything that they need to make better choices.

Low user engagement. This is probably my biggest one and most favorite topic. In fact, this is what inspired this entire presentation. Um, like I said earlier, if you cannot convert people who visit your, uh, landing pages, then what's the point? Like if you can't convince them that they want to engage with your business, if they want to buy from you, do business with you, why are they going through this page?

What are you looking to achieve with this page, if that's not the goal? And then, thin, short content. That is like, kind of, the cousin of duplicate content, right? Because a lot of these issues come from, uh, depending on your team of writers to produce all these content, this content for a bunch of different pages, about the same topic.

There is only so many ways you can talk about help helping someone helping someone unclog a toilet, chocolate. Like, there are not 10, 000 different ways to do that. In this country there are thousands and thousands of plumbing companies, so there's someone having to try to write this content over and over again.

And it's not working the way we're doing it right now. And a lot of this all comes down to scalability. It is hard to scale local landing pages for businesses. It's extremely hard to do. And the reason why it's hard to do is because Uh, when you start talking about location landing pages and the amount of pages that any business needs to succeed in the markets that they want to be seen in, they immediately start thinking about how can we cut down on the time it takes to create this content.

That is immediately the next thought, because content is money, right? Like, they're looking for a shortcut immediately, and the shortcuts we're using right now,

Um, So the, so the reason that featured an actual app like this is because because interviews works, your job of hosting interviews works better. Open sourcing and concealment, correspondence interviews work a lot better. And then I looked at all of the pages that showed up in my findings and kind of analyzed what's going on with these pages, who's showing up, why are they showing up, what features are in their location landing pages.

Some of these industries I looked at were plumbing, HVAC, roofing, um, pest control, home senior care. The findings were a little interesting. Some of these things you're not going to be fine too. Like, it's not gonna be surprising. Like, it's not gonna be surprising that Yilt is still really annoying for local SEOs because it keeps showing up in organic results, right?

That's not gonna change. That is just a fact of the matter. But what I found is, no one is doing all the things. Even the people who are doing it really well are still missing some things. And I think that's really interesting. That even when we're, like, at 95%, we're not getting the last 5 percent to have 100% page that does everything it needs to do.

Um, and I just found that so interesting that that was the case. Um, this is not going to be surprising to, I think, to many people in this room, but content quality is important, more important than content length. We don't need your location landing page to be a blog post, and that is something that happens a lot.

It's a lot of content, but not a lot of features, not a lot of unique selling or value propositions, not a lot of reasons to choose you over your competitors. It's just kind of explaining. Um, but when someone is looking for, uh, mosquito control at their home, they already know what mosquitoes are. They don't need you to explain, write a page about, this is what it feels like to be bitten by a mosquito.

Right? Here, here are five FAQs about mosquito bites. Like, no one, no one needs that on their location landing page. That is not the goal of that page. The page, the goal of that page, which, for me, is kind of like a hybrid. I don't think of it as just another content page on a site. I see it almost like a PVC landing page.

That page has multiple purposes for me. It's not just to rank well. It's to get people to convert on that page. I don't want them to have to go to any other page on the website if they don't have to. I want them to find out everything they need to know about my business and why they want to work with me without having to go anywhere else on the website.

And if they feel like they need to, that's a fail on my part. Right? Because I want them to convert, and if they can't convert when they know everything about my business, there is something seriously wrong. So ever should be based on your local competition. This is kind of goes back to something Lydia said.

Um, you're trying to beat your competitors. You're not trying to beat every single, like, if you're working on, uh, for a law firm, a personal injury lawyer, and where I live, and which is middle of nowhere, South Carolina, right? Your strategy is going to be a lot different than if your client is a personal injury lawyer in downtown Atlanta.

Like, downtown Atlanta is going to be extremely competitive. You're going to need a lot more of everything. But if someone was trying to rank down the street from me for personal injury lawyer, I mean, I could do that in a day, like, easily, because there's no competition. We don't have any, we don't have any traffic lights, so there is no, we don't even need personal entry lawyers for, for car accidents at least, so like, you need to know who your competition is, and you need to know what they're doing, and what is actually going on.

Don't give yourself more work than you need. Uh, directory sites, Yelp, BBB, Angie's List are still everywhere. They're probably not going anywhere, as we heard yesterday, so. Get used to it. Make sure your clients are on them, because be unescapable, right? Be everywhere in the Google verse your local client can be.

Because Google is not going to stop making the SERPs less Google y. They're going to get more Google y. So don't work against it. Like, put your stuff everywhere. Every opportunity you have to show up in a list, make sure you are there. BBB is free. Yelp is free. Ish. Uh, make sure, like, if there's, like, top, a top, uh, plumbers near me list or whatever for that city, make sure you figure out how to get your client on that list, because that's going to matter.

Because if you, someone looks in the search results, they see you, um, in Google Maps, but then they look at one of these lists and they see you again, you're more likely to get called, because they say this person is everywhere. They must know their business very well. If they're on this list, they're here, they're here, they're here, I can't get away from them.

They must be really good at their job. And people are more likely to call you if they see that. They can't escape you when they look in the SERPs. I actually had a conversation with my Lyft driver last night, and he was talking to me about this. He said that, uh, he's looking for someone to help him with taxes for his small business.

And when he looks in search results, he keeps seeing these aggregated lists, he can't even find a, just a normal person that lives nearby that can help him with his business taxes, which is insane, right? So, these lists aren't like the, just because they keep showing up doesn't mean that you can't beat them, because there are people who prefer to get in contact with a business directly instead of setting up another account.

there's a whole event going on over at the AKC AAR się submits.

and my encor we're going to transcribe that but this is basically how we're going AAR.

I was looking at the search results, and what ended up being the way that I chose was the experience on their website. It wasn't that they were ranked number one, it wasn't that they had, uh, the highest star, the best star rating, or highest number of reviews. It's that I could actually book an appointment on their website without having to call or fill out a contact form.

They were the only ones that did that. It was a feature that was not an SEO feature. It was the only reason I chose that eye doctor. But, I still found them organically in Google. That is originally how I found them, but the features on their page is what made me a customer. And Yelp, BBB, and Andy's List can't do that.

Your website can, though. And if you're not taking advantage of those things right now, those websites might as well stay in organic SERPs as the top pages instead of your website. Because you're not giving a reason for people to choose you instead. This is the, if someone is here from One Hour Heat and Air, please come and shake my hand later because this was the best slide I found.

Uh, they were doing almost all the things. They were at the 95%. Uh, they had several, they were had like top ranking pages for several highly competitive markets. Uh, they had the most features on their landing pages. And they had the most, They're, uh, location landing pages also have the most first page keywords out of any site from any industry that I saw.

Anywhere. So they're getting most of the things right. More than anyone else. And guess what? They don't have a ton of, like, traditional content on these pages. It doesn't, they're not depending on that. They're kind of piggybacking off of what BBB, Yelp, and all these other sites do. What we heard yesterday.

They're giving a better experience in some ways. So when people go there, they stay on the page longer, they actually convert before they leave, instead of just, like, looking at the page, saying, I'm not getting the information I need, and then leaving then. So by having a better experience overall, they're kind of not depending on content as much.

They're depending on providing a better overall experience when someone gets to the page, and that is helping them rank higher as well. So these are the most common features I found in my study of the top ten, uh, of the, So, top ten ranked pages for the top 50 cities in the country. Uh, 61 percent of them had reviews, 32 percent had UVPs, 25 percent had coupons, and 25 percent also had conversion opportunities, and 18 percent mentioned words and recognitions.

Um, some things that I found interesting is that not 100 percent had conversion opportunities. Like, if your location landing page does not have a conversion opportunity, What is your goal with that page, right? Because if someone is going, clicking on your Google business profile to get to your website, they likely have a goal, a commercial or transactional type goal.

They're trying to book a service or a product or something, and you're not feeding that with your page if you're not providing them with opportunities to find that. Like I mentioned earlier, unique value propositions give people a reason why they want to work with you. Mention that on your location landing page.

If you want to have unique, non duplicative content, that is one of the ways to do it. Like, take those opportunities to talk about things that your business does that your competitors don't do. Or you do better than your competitors. One of the questions we ask on our onboarding questionnaire is, why do you deserve to rank?

And I think it's a genius question. Because we're asking our clients, why do you deserve to rank? And that's exactly what Google's asking us. When we're trying to rank their site, why do you deserve to rank? What's so special about your business that you deserve to outrank your competitors? And that's the question essentially all of us are trying to answer every day when we go to work, right?

For our clients, it's like, hey, how do I show Google that they deserve to rank? How do I, I guess, to a lesser extent, show Bing that this client deserves to rank? Um, What you need to win with local pages. So this is what I think the future of location landing pages are going to look like. I think we're depending too much on our writers, right?

Because I, as someone who started off as a copywriter in SEO in like 2011, a really long time ago, I, a little part of my soul dies every time I tell someone that they have to write about the same thing over and over again in 20 different ways. Like, it's, it's, it's just wrong, right? It doesn't feel good to ask someone to do something repetitive that doesn't bring them joy.

Especially if they love writing, right? You're taking away a little bit of that joy of loving what they do from them when you're asking them to repeat the same thing over and over again. But write about, like, I don't know, pet vaccinations in 50 different ways. Let's come, let's come up with a new way to do it.

So, let's diversify our content sources. So, as someone who has worked in enterprise SEO and worked with franchises where, in addition to having corporate involved, also having individual franchise owners and sometimes franchise partners involved, I know it's hard to get people to buy in to the things that you want to do, but it's extremely important for you to sell the value.

If our clients can't see the value of something we're proposing, that's on us, right? It's our job to show it to them. We can't, they're not SEOs. They're not going to immediately get it. It's our job to show them the value of the things that we propose. And if they don't understand it in the words that we're giving to them, we need to find a way that they do understand it.

We need to tie it to their bottom line. We need to show them how it relates to their, uh, their revenue, their profit. We need to show them the opportunity loss, the opportunity cost. Like, what are they losing by not making these changes? One of the ways that we can, the future of location landing pages and how I think things are going to change, is that we're going to start seeing a lot more people pull from CRM and using that data.

Like our clients have a ton of data about their clients already. We don't need to mention them by name on our location landing pages, right? We don't need to call them out and say, Hey, Joe had a clogged toilet, and he called us, and we unclogged it, and we got there same day. He was very happy and excited.

We don't need to do that. But if we find something interesting, like, hey, every year around Thanksgiving, we get a lot more plumbing calls. It'd be really interesting for us to add something on our location page about the holidays that intentionally end up with more plumbing issues. Or, hey, we know that seasonally, These products are more likely to be purchased together.

We should mention them on our location pages that people who often come to our website for this also look for this product as well. We need to pair products and services together. Uh, if you're a plumbing company or HVAC company and you want more maintenance contracts, you have the data, right? I'm not saying ask your client to give you the data, ask them to give you the access so you can find these yourself, right?

Because the more you're asking them to do, the less likely you're going to get it implemented. The more that you can take on yourself, and just show them, like, hey, I did all the, I did all the legwork, all someone needs to do is press these couple of buttons and we're good, the more likely it's going to actually happen.

The more, the more of the work that you've put into it up front. The more likely you're going to get the results in the, in the feed, the buy in that you want from the teams involved. Um, like the, my example of the maintenance contract, say you want to increase your maintenance contracts for HVAC, you look into the client's data and you notice that anyone who signs up for a maintenance contract, if they didn't, the services that they would have paid for, it would have been 25 percent more expensive.

You put that on your location landing page. Customer said, sign up for a service, a maintenance contract. НаU, which is I said, Hey, because under some pretty bad environment and we also have work to do and we got to do it nicer and nicer here, We were like we could say it's a better idea, we should Right.

So stayed on here. Thank you. Uh,

Um, Um, what, uh, Parasites and insects and things are more likely to be in your area based on where you live. Easy to do. Anyone could Google that and find that out. It doesn't, it doesn't take having someone write a ton of content all the time. There are other ways to get useful data without having someone plow through writing about the same services in twenty different ways.

Another thing that I've done before is interviews and surveys with CSR team and managers. It doesn't have to be super complicated. Ask the client, can I get a list of the emails of your franchise owners? Here's the questions I want to ask them. I'm going to send them a survey. As they complete the survey, I'm going to do some free spam fighting for them.

You know how many people are going to answer? Like, I will take down your competitors for you. All you have to do is answer five questions in a forum. They are more than happy to do it. Clients love spam fighting more than anything in local SEO if you haven't, if you haven't learned it, worked in local SEO before.

They love seeing a competitor getting taken down for doing something they weren't supposed to do, so. Uh, FAQs. This is something that Emily mentioned yesterday. I also agree with that. I think that's a great idea. Um, FAQs should be on your location landing page and they should be specific to that location.

Um, or they need to be specific to your main products and services so that you can actually help with your rankings on those, on those things a little bit too. Statistics. So there's lots of government and industry sites, um, with interesting data. Add those to your location landing pages. I don't, I can't think of anything that would be more impactful.

Then having some interesting statistic that no one has on your location landing page and getting it able to get its own backlinks just from having good content on it. Like I don't know if there's anything more appealing to a local SEO than having a location landing page that can actually generate backlinks that would be insanely powerful.

And now let's talk about some user generated ideas. So, reviews. Like I said, I think they're, like, I can't remember what percentage, but there was, there was 61%, I think, had reviews on them, but there were 39 percent of these sites that had no reviews on their location landing pages, which is kind of, like, sketchy, like, nowadays, because you'd expect to see it, right?

If you have a good reputation, why aren't you shouting about it? Why aren't you giving us the, the, the information from the mouth of your customers? Because. Essentially, those reviews, a lot of people, at least, I think, the majority of people, I can't remember that percentage, but the majority of people consider reviews just as important as a word of mouth recommendation.

Polls and surveys. So, uh, I don't know any company that doesn't have an email list of their customers, right? Use that information, get that information directly from their customers. Give them a poll or survey to fill out, get information directly from them. And, uh, use that to put on your page. Just put a disclaimer.

Your feedback may be used on our website. I don't think the majority of them would care. Especially if you say, like, hey, 15 percent discount on your next order. 10 percent off your next service of 500 or less. Give them an incentive to help you build better pages. And then social proof. This doesn't work for every company, like no one.

No one cares to see what plumbers are doing like on their social media account. No one wants to see a plumber's Instagram account. So it doesn't work for everyone, but when it does work, you should use it, right? Like if you are a MedSpa franchise, you should definitely have photos on your website of the locations, of the rooms, of happy customers, if you can get them to agree to it, of your employees wearing branded merchandise.

Everything. Like, take advantage of every opportunity. Use the image, uh, search that we, uh, information that we heard earlier this week and use it on your website. Get those branded photos on your website. Use them on your location landing page. Give people an idea of what the experience is going to be like if they come to your business.

So, if you're interested on knowing how to make The future location landing page, there's a checklist available at ricketyroo. com and in this checklist, it will include everything that I think is going to be the future of location landing pages and how you can make location landing pages that don't suck.

Thank you.