Originally recorded and distributed by Wix

Crystal: [00:00:00] I am Crystal. This is, and I am the head of SEO communications at Wix, and I am joined today by one of my favorite SEOs in the world Amanda Jordan who is the director of digital strategy at Rickety Rouge. She is a fantastic local SEO. I remember seeing her speak at SMX a few years ago, and she gave some fantastic advice.

Crystal: Which I took to heart immediately and saw some fantastic results immediately. So do pay attention when Amanda Jordan is speaking cause she knows her stuff. And she also knows how to scale the stuff that 

Amanda: she knows, which is something 

Crystal: that, that is incredibly valuable when you're doing your SEO work.

Crystal: So just a couple of housekeeping notes. We are going to be we're going to be recording this session. So this session will be recorded for you and it will be shared on YouTube after the event. And it will also be shared, sent to you via email the next day. And if you are, if you don't see the email, if you get lost, the same place where you [00:01:00] registered for the event, which is on our Wix SEO learn webinars, web.

Crystal: page will be, you'll be able to see the recording there as well. If you have any questions for Amanda, if we mentioned an acronym that you don't know, or if you want to, you're like what, dig into that a little bit deeper. Please feel free to to ask questions in the Q& A panel, which is at the bottom.

Crystal: of the screen. And we will have, we've got people answering questions there. And we'll also be answering some of the questions at the end of the webinar. And if you want to keep up with our next webinars go to Wix SEO, or sorry, Wix. com forward slash SEO forward slash learn forward slash.

Crystal: webinars and you'll be able to see our next webinar. We have them every month and we are so pleased to have Amanda joining us for this one. So I'm going to pass it over to her and let her share. Are you ready to share? 

Amanda: Yes, I am. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to stop sharing 

Crystal: and I will pass it over to you, Amanda, and you can get into this [00:02:00] fantastic webinar all about location pages.

Amanda: All right. So today we're talking about how to build location pages that work. So why you should listen to me. That's I like to start with that because there's going to be a lot of advice you can get on what to do, how to do it, why to do it. I am someone who's very passionate about local SEO and I like sharing knowledge a lot.

Amanda: And I would like to say that I'm pretty great at getting results. So I work with small businesses, anything from a one location plumber, all the way to franchises, multi location businesses, credit unions, so businesses of all size, lots of different industries that need to rank in a lot of different geographical areas, so where people may use different terms.

Amanda: To search for things or they may have different services that are only available in some locations and not others. So dealing with a lot of complex issues. [00:03:00] This is something that I'm really passionate about. I love doing location pages. It's one of my favorite topics because I see it as a opportunity for so many businesses where they're missing out on doing some things that are very actionable, very simple, but will actually get you a lot of great results as far as conversions and rankings and traffic.

Amanda: So it hits everything and it helps the business make more money. So why not? Okay. So what are location landing pages? These are pages that focus on bringing in traffic and conversions to your website, and it's about a specific location. So if you have a location in Houston, you have a location in Dallas.

Amanda: You have a location in Grand Prairie. Each of those cities should have a location page so that you can focus on your primary products slash services and that city. So if you are a housekeeping service, you don't want to have one housekeeping service page trying to rank for all of Texas. Because you [00:04:00] have a lot of competitors in each of those markets that you're trying to compete in.

Amanda: And their website, if they have one location, their entire website is focused on San Diego, right? So if their entire website is focused on San Diego, all of their content is about San Diego, all of their efforts are being focused on San Diego. So it'll be a lot easier for them to outperform you if you're not focusing or putting at least some intention behind those specific cities you'd like to rank in.

Amanda: These are the pages that rank for searches that include like the city or the county or near me. So these are the pages that are most likely to show up. Sometimes some businesses have their homepage show up for these type, those types of searches, but ideally if you have multiple locations you should have a city That is personalized for people from that specific area that they would land on that gives them information about your hours of operation, phone number and everything's things that are specific to that location.

Amanda: tHe impact. Local [00:05:00] location pages can impact virtually every part of your SEO campaign, especially if you are a multi location business. They improve topical authority. So they help Google understand the geographical. impact of where you want to rank, why you want to rank, where you provide services and things like that.

Amanda: Your location pages can help you rank organically and in Google Maps. So having that local factor into that page and well integrated in your content. can help that page rank extremely well for non branded keywords. So if you're plumbing, this is, you want Tampa plumber, that's probably your big, one of your biggest keywords.

Amanda: So you want a page dedicated to people who are looking for a plumber in Tampa specifically, and that will help you rank that page in Tampa for plumber related keywords. If you just had a Florida plumber page, it would be very difficult, or your home page, it would be very difficult to.[00:06:00] Pinpoint where you're trying to rank or what city you want to rank in for Google because Florida is a big state.

Amanda: There's a lot of competition there and there's a lot of people there so it's hard for Google to understand really what geographical area you're trying to service if you don't have any pages that show a clear local intent. Location pages impact your ability to convert. If you're doing your location page as well, There are opportunities for people to decide that they want to do business with you without going to any other page on your website.

Amanda: They can just go to that page, they see what they need, they make a choice, and then they decide to call or fill out the form without visiting any other page on your site. That is the goal to me for a good location page. If it doesn't do that, Then I would not consider that a great location page. It also should increase personalization to local customers.

Amanda: So you want people to feel like you understand them as your customer base. It's not just that this is the same content that's on all of my other location pages, but it has another city added to it. [00:07:00] It's I understand. your specific needs. I understand what's important to you as a customer. I'm involved in your local community.

Amanda: You want to give people as many reasons as to why they want to reach out to you over any other business that's in your, that same service area. So how do you know if, how would you know if you need a location page or location pages? If you have more than one location and those locations are not like very close, like within 20 miles of each other, you need Location pages more than likely because you want to make sure that you're specifying what city, what service area you have on your location pages.

Amanda: And the more you try to encapsulate on 1 page. The less you're showing a specific intention for a specific area. And like I mentioned before, if you have, if you're in a highly competitive city, and you have no content that is dedicated to that specific city, and your competitors, their entire website is about that city, [00:08:00] who do you think Google's going to choose?

Amanda: The website that has no specific content about that city, or the website that has all of its content related to that city? They're going to choose. The website that has all of its content targeted towards that city. So having good location pages is important and extremely imperative if you're in very competitive markets.

Amanda: If you have a lot of competitors in that area where you want to rank the better your location page is, the better chance you have of outperforming them despite them having a ton of content or their entire website dedicated to a city. So we know what a location page is. We know if we need one or not.

Amanda: So what are the elements of a good location landing page? Mostly unique content. So this is the problem that I see Being the most prevalent for look businesses with lots of locations, especially the larger ones like franchises or plumbers and things like that with multiple locations or storage companies of storage companies that [00:09:00] have multiple locations home senior care plumbers, like a lot of industries, a lot of service based industries specifically have issues with duplicate content.

Amanda: And it's because it's hard to write about the same thing in a bunch of different ways, right? There's not a million ways that you can write about repairing your roof. There's really a couple of different ways you can write about it that is going to be completely unique. Part of what we do is focus on giving people the basic information, but otherwise focusing on what our customers in that area need to know about our offering, why they should trust us, and how they should contact us.

Amanda: So we want to not only provide this is I think a lot of times the businesses focus on what the service is itself. They're making a location page for SEO. They're not making it for their customers. And that's not going to perform as well as if you made a page that is. focus on your customer and what their needs are.

Amanda: Sure, you can [00:10:00] explain a little bit about your process, your services or products on that page, but make it more informational and useful information that's going to help educate the customer as to why they want to choose you over your competitors, and then giving them that space to go ahead and convert and either call you or fill out a form on that page.

Amanda: Relevant photos. So photos are going to become, be becoming even more important, especially for local SEO because Google is working on an update called with multi search, and it will be multi search near me that means someone can take a photo of something, and then add the text near me to it, and then Google will give them results that uses the photo and the term near me to find businesses near them.

Amanda: that provides services or products that are what are that was in the photo. So it's going to be important for businesses to think about their imagery a little bit more. It's important, of course, to have pictures of your services, pictures of your [00:11:00] products, branded photos, pictures of your team pictures of your team or truck with your branding and business.

Amanda: Logo and everything on it near landmarks in your city, giving Google more data to pull from about the local relevance of your business. If Google can look at a photo and tell this is a truck from a company that does plumbing. This is the plumbing company this truck belongs to. And it's right next to the Eiffel Tower for some reason.

Amanda: It gives Google a lot more information than having a truck in front of a house. That could be anywhere in any city in any part of the world. You want to include location specific information. One of the things I mentioned was that a unique content is something that a lot of businesses struggle with.

Amanda: So they have a lot of duplicate content on their sites, especially on their location pages. One of the ways that you can help diversify your content is to include location specific information. So if that content is specific to that very [00:12:00] location, it is not. Anywhere else. It doesn't apply to any other location, so it can't be duplicative.

Amanda: So messages from the manager. It could be as simple as sending out a Google form and having a survey for them to fill out and their answers is just what gets put on the page. Services that are available at that specific location. If you have locations that don't provide all of the same services, or their services are slightly different, you can mention those differences to give you a little bit more unique content, and then testimonials and reviews for, from clients and customers that are actually in that area.

Amanda: Not just giving reviews and ratings from any location, but that are specific to that location, if we include those specifically. Not only do we build trust with customers because they can say, okay, this is what people near me who have had experience with these exact, this exact business has said.

Amanda: But it also allows you to have more unique content. And then don't forget the basics of course, your phone number, address, hours of operation. All of those things should also [00:13:00] be on your location landing page. You would be surprised by how many businesses forget those things. And of course, if those numbers change, if that address changes.

Amanda: If those hours change, make sure that they're updated on your Google business profile as well as on your website. FAQs. FAQs are another great thing to add to your location landing pages. Because they provide more unique content or they're just, or if it's not exactly unique, say it applies to every location.

Amanda: It actually provides useful content for your users because they're based off of questions that you know that they're asking. There are a lot of tools that will help you find out, find the questions that people are already asking. Also ask SEMrush, answer the public. A lot of these tools will have a section where they'll give you questions that relate that come up in search results as well.

Amanda: And you can look at the search volume from those questions and determine what questions you want to add to your page issued it to your services or product. [00:14:00] Then it gives you more content. It gives you useful content is likely something that your https: otter. ai bring in more traffic because if your competitors aren't doing it, and it means that they're not ranking for the keywords related to those FAQs and gives you an upper hand as well.

Amanda: Here's some examples that I put together as far as good FAQs. These are the type of FAQs that my clients use on their location pages, just to add some additional helpful content there. Your location pages also should have conversion opportunities. So if someone goes to your page, they read everything on the page, they decide that they want to do business with you, but there is nowhere where they can easily see a phone number and there's no form to fill out, what do you think they're going to do?

Amanda: They're not going to go digging. They're going to leave and go to some, another website or go back to search results. And find and look at the local pack for someone instead, make it as easy as [00:15:00] possible for people to complete that final goal that you have for them on that page. That means having conversions that are easily and readily available, easy to see We actually had a client recently that changed their landing page and added more buttons and phone numbers to it.

Amanda: And they saw a 85 percent drop in revenue from that page just because they made it very busy and hard to navigate. So these things are really important on your location pages is to make sure that you. Don't overdo it, but you make, and you don't crowd the page with conversion opportunities, but you pepper them in.

Amanda: There should probably be one you're at the top of the page. There should probably be one near the bottom of the page your number should be easily found in red on the page so that they can contact you on mobile, they should be able to click to call, so they can easily call you from there. And there, and if it's a long page in the middle of the page to there's probably another spot for a conversion opportunity.[00:16:00] 

Amanda: And these don't have to be, like giant sections of content or anything like that. It could be just a call for a free consultation. It could be get an estimate now. It could be anything like that and a button or a form that they can fill or a Button to call or form that they can fill out where they're sending you information to show that they're interested and that they can be a potential lead for you.

Amanda: Next, you want to build trust. Building trust is one of the things I also see businesses, um, miss the mark a bit. They get very focused on the conversion opportunity part once they're like, oh, yeah, I need to make sure people know that they can give me their money. They're not your customer potential customers are aware.

Amanda: That's what you want. It's your goal to tell them why they want to as your goal to allow the 1 make them want to choose you over your competitors, give them the reason of why. You're the [00:17:00] best choice and some of the ways to do that is to be. Very obvious about what you offer as a company as far as guarantees and things like that.

Amanda: Be very clear and transparent about your reputation include reviews and testimonials and feedback that you receive from other clients. All those things go a long way as to giving people to trust you and want to work with you over your competitors. If you're not sure where to start, For a lot of these tips, you can go look at your competitor pages, but in the keywords that you want to rank for in that city, look at what your competitors are doing on their pages.

Amanda: And I guarantee you will see a lot of these elements on the people who are ranking. Extremely well. You'll see a lot of these elements that we're talking about on their pages and find out what they're doing and find out what you can improve on. So we don't want to copy our competitors. We want to do what they're doing even better than they're doing because we want to be ahead of them.

Amanda: We don't want to be where they are. We want to be hard to catch up with. And one of the ways [00:18:00] to do that is making sure that your reputation is very clear through your location landing pages throughout your website really in general. Amanda, you just told me a lot of stuff that I need to work with on my website and I don't even know where to start.

Amanda: I didn't even know what a location landing page was before this presentation. What am I supposed to do? What I would focus on first... is content. You're not going to show up in search results without content, so focusing on the other things is not going to do any good if no one is finding your page in the first place.

Amanda: So focus on unique content and local content. Unique content being what can I do to differentiate this location page from the other pages on my website. And what can I do to differentiate this location page from my competitors location pages as well. That's what I would focus on first, making sure you have accurate local content on there as well.

Amanda: Making sure you mention the city, mention the service area around that [00:19:00] city. Mention anything that is specific to that location that would be important for users to know about. And then, after you have a content, a page that can actually rank, let's focus on conversion opportunities and building trust.

Amanda: Because now that we can get people to come to this page, we have an action that we want them to do, and that is to call, or to fill out a form. So let's find those places where we want to add those forms onto the website, or those click to call buttons. And then we want to build trust. We want to give them the reasons why they want to they're going to this page now.

Amanda: They can find us now. We need to give them the reasons why they want to fill out that form or click to call. So that's working on your reputation. That's working on trying out different lead formats to get people to convert on the page as well. And then after that, after we're seeing where we are, like, okay, I made this page.

Amanda: We're able to be found in Google now, we're starting to get some leads come in, but we're not growing as much as we want to, then it's time to work on improving the content and [00:20:00] the location page as a whole, and the ways to do that would be adding those relevant photos to break up some of that content, to add some more personalization to the page, and adding those FAQs, which also adds personalization, adds more useful content to Page your site visitors and also can help you increase the number of keywords you're ranking for on that location page.

Amanda: And then these are some things that you just don't forget because I see businesses often. Forget some of these things that are the foundational things to location pages that are really foundational for any page that you really want to rank. Some of the top ones create page title and descriptions you want to make sure that your page title mentions the service area or the city that you want to rank in.

Amanda: You want to make sure that your H1 Texts in your headers mention the cities or service area you want to make sure that is mentioned in the content [00:21:00] itself, that's not the only place that people can find it. You want to make sure that you actually link to your Google business profile from your location page.

Amanda: And then you want to track your results. I think that's another thing that people often struggle with is Google Analytics, Google Business Profile, and Google Search Console are all free tools that you have to, you're at your ready for you to use for you to track how your location pages are performing.

Amanda: And you'll be able to tell, are these pages doing what I want them to do? Or are they not performing well? And does that mean I need to change something about what I'm doing on a page? And is it, Am I getting traffic and they're not converting, which means am I not building enough trust? Do I not have the right conversion opportunities on the page?

Amanda: Is there something on the page? Itself that's turning people away, or am I not ranking in the first place? So is there an issue with the content on the page? Is it, is there some technical issue with the page? Is there something else that's causing people not to find this page in the first place? And If you [00:22:00] use that data, you'll be able to refine your location pages and make a process for it that actually works.

Amanda: And if you open up a new location, use the same process, you'll be off much off. You'll be starting with a much better footing than you would if you were starting from zero and trying to build lots of location pages all over again, or trying to figure out from scratch what you should do for each new location.

Amanda: So this is a, if you're not, if you don't have location pages now, this is a good way to start building up that, that knowledge of whether your pages can perform in rankings and conversions. And then once you have a page built and you can see how it's performing, you can use that information to determine what needs to be fixed and what needs to be changed to get even better results out of that page.

Amanda: And then as you open new locations, you duplicate that template and apply it to all the new locations as well, so that each location has its best opportunity, at least foundationally and ranking well. Some locations will be different. If you have [00:23:00] a, if you're in a highly competitive city, you may need to do more than the basics.

Amanda: You may need to look really closely at what your competitors are doing and finding out where they're getting this extra where they're, where are they outperforming you and determining what you need to do to catch up with them. And that's the, that's what I would do if you already have location pages now.

Amanda: And you're not getting the results you want out of them. Try to find out what is, what are your competitors doing that you're not doing so that you can improve those pages and to, and see the results that you expect to see from your location pages. And how do you optimize? This is from Wix's article and optimizing your site's content for SEO.

Amanda: So read the article. That's really what the best thing you can do. Add keywords, but focus on being original and helpful. That's something that reiterating something that I already mentioned. Think about the customer's perspective, the customer's experience, that is going to be the most important thing.

Amanda: That's really what Google's chasing anyway. So if you're [00:24:00] focusing on the customer whether you really think it's popping the way it should now or not. It is going to get there. Use proper headings to break up sections on your website, so make sure you use those headers throughout the content, your H ones, your H twos, h threes if you need them, and break out what types of content you have on the page.

Amanda: So you may wanna have an H one that's roof repair in Atlanta, Georgia. You may wanna have an H two is. Why would you choose us for roof repair or our roof repair services are and then next you want to use the data from your site search bar. That is a great tip because that is something that a lot of businesses don't look at.

Amanda: And there's a lot of valuable information there. Because that's what people are searching for within your website. So they've already gotten to your website and they feel like they're not seeing or being navigated to what they're looking for soon enough. So they're using another search within your website to find that information.

Amanda: Add photos to break up content sections and make sure to check your site on mobile. [00:25:00] Like I said, adding photos to break up the content section. I think I just mentioned that in the couple slides ago. And those photos are going to become more important as Google uses image and multi search even more.

Amanda: And then you want to make sure that your site. Looks great on mobile as well, so make sure you check your site on mobile. Make sure that everything is showing up correctly on mobile. All right, so that's the Beginner's Guide to Location Landing Pages. There's so much more to them than that.

Amanda: If you have any questions, of course, I'd love to hear them. This is something that I love doing. So I'm happy to take questions now. We have loads and loads of 

Crystal: questions. Thank you to everyone who's been so patient in the chat. We are trying to answer your questions as quickly as possible, and we're going to, and we've been taking a note of them so that there's a lot of questions that are, that Amanda's really well placed to speak to.

Crystal: To answer. We've been taking a note of them. One of the things that always comes up so a couple of things first. When we say location pages, we mean pages that are about a location. Amanda [00:26:00] mentioned sort of a plumber, for instance, in Houston or in Puerto Rico. And for instance, that's, that, that is a look a.

Crystal: a page on your website, which it might be different from your home page. It might be different from a different place or a different place on your website. And it's just a page of any kind that would have, that is dedicated to that location. So you've optimized it for that particular location. And Amanda shared some amazing insights there.

Crystal: A lot of people ask about some technical things that you can do on Wix. Amanda mentioned things like FAQs and things like buttons and things like CTAs. We had a webinar recently called about homepage optimization, and that page has lots of links to the technical implementation for some of those elements.

Crystal: And a location page can act a little bit similar to a homepage, but we cover lots of the different elements of different features there that are specific to Wix. So I highly recommend that you visit. The Wix SEO learn SEO learn learning hub and we'll we have information there as well.

Crystal: So to get into some of the questions that we've [00:27:00] had around this we had a lot of questions and I've been on a few webinars with Amanda and this always comes up, but what if you don't have an actual shop? How do you optimize your location pages, your Google business profile, if you don't have an actual shop?

Crystal: Some people in the chat were saying, I'm a service provider for the whole country, or someone said I have an Etsy profile, or I work remotely. How do you optimize for a location if you don't have 

Amanda: a location? Yeah if you're nationwide, I wouldn't really focus on locations that much, unless...

Amanda: There is big differentiators and the services. For each of those for each state or something like that, because that can be really difficult to do and a lot of really time consuming as far as trying to create content for every state. Or every county or every region at 1 time. So I would focus on, understanding what terms people are searching for [00:28:00] nationally, related to your services, and building content towards that, and building up your homepage strength extremely well nationally for those keywords, and making sure that, especially if you're trying to write nationally, I think your blog will be even more important and having supportive content throughout your website.

Amanda: So that people so that Google understands that this isn't just like a a one pager right about this topic or this type of business. It's an entire website. That means that you focus on all the elements of that business type or that product or service. So I wouldn't focus on that unless you have a Google My Business listing.

Amanda: If you have a listing, which you can have a service area listing so Google understands that some business types. You don't work in an office or you go to your customers at their location. You don't you don't have people come to your business. So you don't need a physical location. That's perfectly fine.

Amanda: You can have a service area listing and they have [00:29:00] from a ranking perspective. They're not worse off than having a brick and mortar location. You can still rank extremely well. and perform well with a service area listing instead of a brick and mortar with a street address listing. Some things that you might find issues with, it might be a little bit harder to get that locality as a factor without using location as a major factor in the way you optimize your website.

Amanda: I think if you have a service area listing, making sure your website has location pages, especially if you serve a lot of if your service area is... St. Pete, Florida, but you want to include Clearwater. You want to include Largo and some other areas you want to, you probably want to have individual location pages for each of those cities on your website.

Amanda: And have that service area listing as well as your Google Business Profile listing. That's such a weird name, Google Business Profile. I wanted to say Google Maps listing because that makes a lot more sense. Google Business Profile could be so many [00:30:00] different things that has nothing to do with Lookalicia.

Amanda: I don't think it's as strange as 

Crystal: Looker. Looker, I'm not, so they changed the name from Data Studio to Looker and I don't understand. I don't like that. So they, so there we go. But yeah, no that's a great answer. And I think you covered a lot of the the nuance questions that we have there as well.

Crystal: For someone else asks, also asks if you are a, if you're a single location business, so let's say you're, you only have one sandwich shop, for instance, do you also think that it's worth having multiple location pages, or do you think it's worth concentrating on a single location? Yeah, 

Amanda: if you only have one location and you're not some, a business that serves other areas, so if you're like in a city center, but you serve all these little towns outside, if you're, those little towns have a lot of competition.

Amanda: You may want to have some service area pages or location pages, but if you're just one location and you're focused on that one city, you don't need location pages. Just make your entire [00:31:00] website really the most targeted towards Those customers or searchers as you can, and this is a question 

Crystal: for me. So you mentioned about content.

Crystal: And you just talked about like making your website really focused on that. Are there particular types of content that you find work really well to help Google show or help Google understand that you're really serving a particular location? Do you find that? Blogs perform better or do you find that FAQs or or like galleries or reviews or something like that?

Crystal: Do you find that the, that there's one particular type of content that really helps with with location 

Amanda: information? Not overall. It seems to be based on what your competition is doing and the type of business. For photography clients, we actually see that galleries with no content can help perform someone who actually has content on their page.

Amanda: So it doesn't, yeah there's so many different things that are going on that sometimes the things that make sense for a Another type of business does not perform well for another. [00:32:00] Yeah and then a plumber, a roofer, do they really need a blog? Is there that much that they can say?

Amanda: And other than being involved in a community and having something locally happen. I don't think it's always necessary. I think it's, but it depends on how you use those features too. If your blog is about your local community, and you're linking back to your pages using it for, or if you're using it for internal linking say you're all of your blog posts and your roofer are about roof repair roof replacement somehow you were able to write 500 blog posts about it.

Amanda: As long as they're linking back to your core service pages, and things like that, then they're a benefit, but writing that content just because you're like if I have a lot of content I'll rank extremely well that's not the case. You want to be very specific with your intent, and for those businesses, FAQs seem to perform better having, increasing your service pages, so understanding the nuances between one type of service and another, and being able to create more content about what is I have a [00:33:00] client who is a plumber, and they have tankless water heater versus tank water heater as a page, Even though they have a water heater page and they have a tankless water heater page because that's a completely different intent.

Amanda: That's an informational intent, but they don't need a blog for those types of content necessarily. They just need to explain it and have an informational page about it. So it really depends, I think, from my perspective on what your competitors are doing and what type of content you need to show up. And I think that all comes down to intent of the user.

Amanda: So if there's a lot of informational intent, then blogs might be the best way to go. If people are very based very focused on commercial or transactional intent oh, I just want to buy something or, oh, I want, I just want to hire someone, then including more service pages or pages that are focused on the service or product itself would likely be the better way to go just based on what people are looking for in your competition.

Crystal: yEah, I think that's obviously I think, yeah, or not obviously, but I think I agree [00:34:00] that it depends on your it depends on what, on the kinds of searches that people are expecting and the kinds of content that people are needing. And I think someone, someone was saying that blogs can be useful to develop expertise.

Crystal: And I think that's true as well, but I think sometimes with, particularly with with contractors like plumbers or people who are working in the trade, sometimes it can be tricky to keep that up. So a page like you're talking about where you're comparing a particular methodology or comparing a product or comparing, a service or that's something that's that lives on your page can be really helpful.

Crystal: And then we also had someone who was saying that they have a franchise. And they have, so they have a franchise and they have lots of, they're the same let's say, I don't know, Subway Sandwiches is something that I'm not, is something that has a lot of franchises. How would you recommend differentiating content for franchise pages?

Amanda: Yeah this is something that I work in a lot and it makes me very happy to talk about because I worked at the client where they were a home senior care franchise. And of course, they offer the same services at every [00:35:00] location. It doesn't change. So what we focused on it was having unique content.

Amanda: From the people who work at that location. So having the franchise owner point out some things that they wanted to say about why they got into that industry. Why did they why. What they like about being in that industry, things like that and also finding things that are specific to that city.

Amanda: So if you are in a city where they're, ooh, I just thought of a good one just for Subway, it's most popular sandwiches and for that location are most popular look sandwiches in that city. Oh, yeah. Yeah finding ways to differentiate using your own data, especially if you're a franchise and you can collect your own data.

Amanda: That's a much easier thing to do. Is using your own information to find interesting data points. And what if Orkin the pest control company does a very good job at this on their website. For each location, they have the most common pests in that [00:36:00] area. And that's not completely unique because I imagine the southeastern United States, we all like in this area.

Amanda: All of my neighbors here have the same issues, but it's unique enough where not every single location that Oregon has the exact same content. Do you know what? I'll tell 

Crystal: you right now, I lived in Ohio and they have orange ladybugs that show up, which I never saw in California when I lived in California.

Crystal: So that's, I can see where I can see how that would work. aNd I think I just wanted to remind people a couple of housekeeping points. Again, location landing pages are not, it's not a special kind of page. You don't need a special template to make a location landing point.

Crystal: Our landing page, it's more of a content differentiation um, and a content focus, which is why we've been talking about content and about the sort of unique ways that you can pivot your content, focus your content so that people can see what's going on there. Additionally I would also say if people are asking if there's going to be a replay, there's definitely going to be a replay and there's definitely going to [00:37:00] be opportunity to see some of that.

Crystal: When we think about good examples of location pages, you've mentioned Orkin, for instance, it has a good location pages. I think some other ones that, that I've seen are when people include just unique information unique information around around what you're saying specific specific content, and and also, can you think of any other ways that people can add unique content to their location 

Amanda: pages?

Amanda: Yeah, so I mentioned that the FAQs is another one where you can look at what are the questions are, especially if you're in larger cities you can look at what questions people are asking near you about those specific topics. So you can look at the most most common questions related to a topic and make it specific to your business or specific to that location.

Amanda: You can collect reviews and testimonials that are specific to that location and put them in there. And the more the better the review is as in. The more information that person gives, the more [00:38:00] free content you just got from that person. So someone says Bob came to my house on Thursday because we had a broken pipe in the kitchen.

Amanda: He he was great and courteous. If I ever have any emergency plumbing issues, I will call X again. They just put your business name, the service. And the issue all in their review, and those are keywords that you want on your page. Anytime someone gives you a testimonial review with. that extra information on it, that's another opportunity.

Amanda: And also, like I said, it is, it's, you want it to be a relatively unique, you don't need it to be 100 percent unique on each page. You can rank in a competitive city with common content, it's just much harder to do than if you had unique content. So what I would focus on is making the page mostly unique.

Amanda: There shouldn't be any like word for word match for several sentences. That's the biggest issue is that you don't want someone to be able to copy and paste that sentence into Google and find a bunch of [00:39:00] different websites with the same, or a bunch of different pages on your website with the exact same content.

Amanda: You wouldn't be different enough. that that if your teacher was looking at it, they wouldn't think you copied off another kid's paper. That's really what it is. That it looks like someone, someone else came up with these thoughts, not that it's just someone else's thoughts written slightly differently.

Amanda: Yeah. 

Crystal: And what are the, what are some of the you, some, someone, a few people have asked about URLs and things. Would you recommend having like completely, would you recommend keeping your location pages in in a, an individual folder let's say it was like like Amanda's guitar lessons.

Crystal: I'm looking at your wall. So Amanda's guitar lessons, and let's say you were doing in like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh Cleveland, et cetera. Would you recommend putting, giving them like a folder that was like location. So Amanda's guitar lessons. com Locations and then an individual page then, or would you recommend another 

Amanda: URL configuration?

Amanda: That's exactly what I would recommend. So it would [00:40:00] be my website. com slash location slash whatever that city is. And. You can add more details. You can say my website. com slash location slash Tampa plumbing service, or, and then Tampa heating service and Tampa AC service. How far you want to go will depend on really how many location pages you feel like you need for a specific location, not to make things more complicated, but if you have a lot of high interest.

Amanda: Highly competitive services for each location. You may want to have more than one location page and dedicate a location page for each one of those services. So you may want to have, okay, this is my page that is dedicated to boxing classes. This is my page dedicated to. The yoga studio. This is my page dedicated to the regular part of the gym.

Amanda: You may want to separate them based on how heavy your competition is. And I would say how heavy your [00:41:00] competition is how many spots are, is, are your competitors ahead of you. So if your competitors are like, if you're on the fourth page you may want to consider having more than one location page and focus on a specific service for each location page.

Amanda: If you're like, not even the first 20 on Google Maps, you may want to consider that but if you're already close to being on the first page, it sounds like you just need to add a location page or maybe optimize the one that you already have. Okay, 

Crystal: fantastic. And someone was saying, do you ever see, because there are some places where where a city might have might have a combination of languages, for instance, in a given city.

Crystal: I know certainly growing up in California, there's a lot of people who speak Spanish. We've been talking about Spanish speaking. So have you seen location pages where they vary by language as well as by geographical by geography? 

Amanda: Yeah. If you're going to, to the, to. To the point where you have different languages as well, I would recommend [00:42:00] having a second language version of your site completely, including location landing pages, just because that gives you the best opportunity to rank.

Amanda: And make sure that you have, of course, your ruffling text set up so that you can specify what that secondary language is on each of the pages so Google understands. You can have a subfolder for that you can do it as a country level domain if it's really in another country, but in most cases a subfolder on your website.

Amanda: So you might want to do location slash EN for English slash the name of this whatever the URL is for that page, or you might want to do ES for Spanish. So using the the language code for that to make it a subfolder would be a good idea. 

Crystal: Fantastic. And I think someone else is, someone has said Peter has asked a few times.

Crystal: So we got your question, Peter. So he was asking, he says that they have two main services that they do. But they have 300 landing pages for [00:43:00] the, on the, on their website for the different. three location landing pages for the individual locations that they provide services for, and he's asking if he's gone overboard with regard, with regards to those landing pages 

Amanda: What would you say?

Amanda: This is one of my favorite topics, actually. Okay. And it's how do you determine what city's new location page for. If that city is competitive, You need a location page. If there is no one, if there's only 2 or 3 people who are actually in that city that's ranking, then you don't need a location page.

Amanda: 1 of the things that I like to look at is the population of a city and usually if there's under 10, 000 people, I will not. Create a location page because that's not a ton of people. What is Amanda's website? That's a very good question. You can find me at ricketyroo. com. And honestly, I'm perfectly fine if anyone has any questions that they want to email me.

Amanda: It was, my email address was on the on the slide. So it is amanda at ricketyroo. com. [00:44:00] And we'll share the 

Crystal: slides after the event as well. 

Amanda: Yeah, you'll have those slides if you can, if you didn't catch that. But yeah, that's something that I think about a lot and I often go by population is how many people in that area are actually searching for your services.

Amanda: So you want to look at search volume and the population for that area. And you will be able to tell if you should have one there or not. And if you have 300, I, you likely went overboard. 300 is a lot. Unless you're like Verizon or McDonald's or someone huge. I would say there should be very few.

Amanda: I would say. Probably less than 10 for most businesses. And I'm 

Crystal: thinking that if he said it, it might be a question, it also might be a question, you mentioned two services there. It might be a question of filtering down some of the services because chances are, like, I think if you were, like, let's say you're a guitar teacher or whatever, it might be that you have Spanish guitar or jazz 

Amanda: guitar or rock guitar 

Crystal: or something.

Crystal: So that's actually a few services. 

Amanda: [00:45:00] Yeah, that is true. Yeah, I think if it's that's the case, you can likely combine them all into one location page. Just because if you look at the search volume for any of those types of services, if you break down your services more granularly, you'll see that there's likely not a ton of search volume in your area for those individual services.

Amanda: That means that you could combine them into 1 page because there's not a lot of people searching for it. If you don't have a ton of competition for it, you will be able to perform extremely well without, putting that, putting a ton of effort into it. My goal would always be to get you the most impact with the least amount of effort possible.

Amanda: So if it if we can get away with only having five location pages, then that's, that would be the goal. And if we, if it's. We can either have 20 location pages and do very duplicative content or 5 and have them be very unique and special. Then we're going to go with the 5 pages. Yeah, and that's what I would and then we can [00:46:00] mention the other cities in this pages.

Amanda: So there's other cities nearby that big hub, say, New York City if we're focusing on New York City, there's other areas that we want to focus on that are close enough to it. We can bundle them into the New York City page and mention them on that page instead of creating a separate page for each nearby area that we want to focus on or each borough or anything like that.

Amanda: Absolutely. 

Crystal: And one, one last question I think this is a really good one. How often should you update the content on your location page? How, what how how valuable is the content freshness for ranking for location 

Amanda: pages? It is not a huge factor for location pages specifically, but I would say at least every six months, just keep an eye on what your competitors are doing.

Amanda: If you're not in a very competitive market, every six months is fine. Like you, because if your competitors aren't very focused on SEO, if you look at their content and their website and you're like, ah, they're not doing those things, they're not someone that you need to focus on too much. Another another [00:47:00] thing is if your traffic or if your traffic changes or your ranking changes, that's another time, that's a prompt to look at it, especially on those specific location landing pages.

Amanda: It's if something changes, that's a sign that either your competitors are doing something different or Google's looking at your page differently, and that's a sign that you should pay attention to what's going on and review them. And I like, especially for local businesses to do competitive analysis because you.

Amanda: You don't have to be the best in the country. You just have to be better than the guy that is closest to you because proximity is a huge factor. So you don't have to be the best ever. You don't have to be the number 1 law firm on SEO in the entire world. You just have to be better than the guy within 10 miles of you.

Amanda: That's often not very difficult if you take a close look at what they're doing on their website. Hey, 

Crystal: absolutely. And I guess if I can sneak in one, one more for myself, is that cheeky? How much are you guided when you're thinking about keywords and things for your for your someone's saying, how do we cite it for the Amanda [00:48:00] Jordan fan club?

Crystal: Amanda's on Twitter. And she's on LinkedIn and she's genuinely fantastic. I'm president of the Amanda Jordan friend club. But I think one of the things I was going to say is Google business profile, it gives you lots of ideas with regards to the kinds of services and the kinds of things that they're interested in.

Crystal: How do you use that to guide the kinds of content that you include on local location pages? 

Amanda: Yeah. There's a lot of if. The way that I look at Google business profile is that Google is telling us exactly what they want to see from local businesses because they're making it part of their platform, right?

Amanda: So that is a good way, place to start. It's is the stuff on my Google business profile reflected on my location landing page? Do I mention the, like Google allows you to take business categories? Does the content on your website relate to those business categories? Because that's going to be one of the, a big thing.

Amanda: Does the address match what Google sees? Does the business name match what Google sees? All that information is going to be important. And Google really likes serving [00:49:00] your Google business profile over your website because then you stay on Google if they show you the Google business profile and not the website.

Amanda: So making sure that your Google business profile is set up correctly and optimize is extremely important. That could be a completely different webinar because there's so much going on with Google business profiles from so many different angles that, that impact your ability to convert to impact your ability to be found on Google.

Amanda: You can be highly successful and get a ton of lead from Google maps without ranking. Oh, your website ranking well at all. So there's a lot there as well as to what can impact your ability to show up. So I would say yeah, Google this profile is a good place to look as to does my website match the information that I expect to see.

Amanda: That Google is looking for the Google missed profile. Absolutely. 

Crystal: Fantastic. And thank you to everyone who joined us. And thank you to everyone. I highly recommend that you visit the Wix SEO learning hub, which has lots of information about Google business [00:50:00] profile and about local SEO, including reviews, including citations, including a guide to local SEO from one of Amanda's colleagues.

Crystal: As well, we will be sharing this recording. We will also be sharing Amanda's deck and you can find lots of information there. We will be having our next webinar in November and where we will be talking about content distribution. And Amanda, if you can just give us one more shout out to all of your details.

Crystal: Thank you so much for joining us today. And yeah, just let them know where they can find you. 

Amanda: Yeah. If you have any questions, I love answering questions. It's fun to me. That does, I know what I'm setting myself up for by saying that with a number of questions that are still in track. But Amanda at ricketyroo.

Amanda: com, feel free to reach out. You can find out more about local SEO in general and my agency at ricketyroo. com and you can find me on Twitter at Amanda T. Jordan. Go. 

Crystal: Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. And thank you, Amanda. And again, [00:51:00] visit the Wix SEO learning hub, which is at Wix.

Crystal: com forward slash SEO forward slash learn. Where there's lots of webinars, lots of resources and lots of great stuff about Wix SEO and SEO in general. And I hope to see you again soon. Thank you so much to everyone for joining us. Thank you.