SEO is one of the most powerful marketing channels that businesses can invest in, but most SEO discussion focuses on more general (often national) keywords. Many companies, however, are strictly local, and will only benefit from higher visibility in their local city. In other words, they need local SEO.
Before we take a deep dive into developing a local SEO strategy, it’s important to first understand exactly what local SEO is. Simply put:
| Local SEO is the creation of geotargeted pages in order to make prospective customers in every area you serve feel that your services are an ideal fit for their specific, local needs. |
Local SEO is appropriate for any service business that serves local customers. The philosophy behind it is that people tend to feel that their area has unique features and they’d prefer to work with someone that understands them. A great example of such a business is a home builder, as a local builder will understand both the local building codes and any geographic concerns such as weather or soil conditions that would impact construction. Less obvious examples include professional services firms such as a business process consultant—while their services may not be strictly location-based, their clients may prefer to work with a local company. Some example industries that are well suited to local SEO are: HVAC, solar, home building/remodeling, home security, electrical contracting, and civil engineering.
Not every business needs to invest in local SEO. Many SaaS businesses, for example, offer a product for which it simply does not matter where the customer is. Even more importantly, most potential SaaS customers will not be searching for local providers so ranking highly for location-based keywords provides little benefit.
Local SEO Strategy: Keyword Selection and Planning Content
At its heart, local SEO strategy follows the same principles as any other SEO campaign strategy. You should plan your content around topical pillars, identify your most valuable keywords, and create an effective conversion funnel. What sets local SEO apart is that topical pillars can be built around a location, not just a type of product, service, or problem.
For example, imagine an HVAC company in the California Bay Area is beginning a local SEO campaign. While they choose “residential hvac” as one of their pillars, moderate national rankings for “residential hvac” keywords will provide them with much less business than if they ranked #1 for “berkeley hvac” keywords. As a result, treating “berkeley hvac” as their SEO campaign’s first pillar—and first set of published pages—will result in faster return on investment than targeting the far higher competition “residential hvac” keywords.
Each keyword you choose to target should then be analyzed to determine its search intent, and be assigned an appropriate page. There are three basic types of pages in local SEO:
- Location landing pages. These are the most basic form of geotargeted page, and consist simply of a location plus the company’s main keyword. Our pages targeting San Francisco and Oakland are two examples.
- Combined location/service landing pages. A subset of location landing pages, combination location/service landing pages are just that: by combining each service with each location, you can capture a wide range of local searchers.
- Geotargeted blog articles. Just like with landing pages, blog articles can also be tailored to location-based concerns. Comparison blogs focusing on local options and problem/solution articles discussing local concerns are the most common form for geotargeted blog articles to take.
After assigning page types, the next step is to actually create your geotargeted pages.
How to Build Geotargeted Pages for Local SEO
Geotarget pages should follow all of the standard rules of creating effective SEO content (precision, personalization, and portion size), but where many companies fail is in sufficiently differentiating their geotargeted pages. Let’s look at an example of a typical approach to geotargeted landing pages:
Nearly all sites doing local SEO utilize the strategy of writing 1 page about the service they provide, then copying that page for each location they serve, inserting the name of the location to make the page seem personalized. As in the example above, these might have different introductions as well, but the other 95% of the page is exactly the same as every other geotargeted LP.
There are two tools you should use to differentiate your pages:
- Personalization: Content that is specifically tailored to that location, and was clearly written by somebody who knows it well.
- Uniqueness: Content that is different from page to page – could be anything relevant to the service being offered.
We’ll examine each in turn.
Personalization
Personalization is the best to make content more relevant to a local audience. Well personalized content signals to the reader that its writer knows their location well, and is familiar with any local concerns they might have. By doing so, it builds greater trust with prospective customers and helps funnel them toward conversion.
A common pitfall, however, is including personalization that is irrelevant to the reader. Below is an example of irrelevant personalization:
Nothing about the above introduction feels like it’s written by an Oakland native. In fact, all of the Oakland-specific information is simple administrative information about the region. Contrast the above with the relevant personalization on our own Top SEO Company in Oakland, CA page:
Instead of simply stating where Oakland is, we share our work with local clients, discuss local industries, and draw on our experience of being located in the San Francisco Bay Area to connect with a potential reader.
Full personalization isn’t realistic for most businesses, however—many provide similar core services across locations even when tailoring them to local concerns. Even in our own example above, you might note that on the full page the personalization ends after the first paragraph. How we address this issue is that the rest of the content, however, is written uniquely—that is to say, it isn’t found on any other page of the website. This brings us to the other half of creating geotargeted pages: Uniqueness.
Uniqueness
Uniqueness is exactly what it sounds like: each page should have its own content that isn’t shared with any other page on the website. Our rule of thumb is:
To be sufficiently unique, at least 60% of every page must not be the same as any other page.
At first glance, uniqueness seems like it’s a goal at odds with other important marketing considerations: branding and consistency. Pages that are too unique can leave a visitor feeling lost as they move between pages. The best way to ensure consistency despite incorporating unique content is to use shared templates between each type of page you create.
For example, all our geotargeted service pages follow the same template of having 4 cards below the personalized introduction at the top, but the 4 cards are always different from to page. Often, cards cover the same topics from page to page, but always have different titles and content. To avoid duplicating wording or sentence structure, the writer never looks at a previous card’s content when writing a new card. Below are examples from our Oakland and San Francisco pages:
Here are some features that you might incorporate into pages as an opportunity to create unique content:
- About the Company
- Dedications to Quality (Accreditations & Certifications)
- Our Process
- Benefits of Products/Services
- Meet Our Staff
- Featured Blog
- Local Case Study
- Did You Know?
- Local Report
- Awards
- Local Testimonial
- Image Gallery
- FAQ
- Deals / Promotions
- Video
- Popular Services
Note that uniqueness isn’t separate from personalization either: you should take any opportunities to further personalize content in an above page feature.
Getting Help Creating a Local SEO Strategy
Creating and implementing an effective local SEO strategy requires time and expertise. Creating truly personalized and unique content for each geotargeted page is difficult for most companies, so many turn to ineffectively copied pages or insufficiently personalized content.
A better option is to work with an SEO specialist. First Page Sage has a proven track record of delivering industry leading SEO services with a focus on generating MQLs and increasing overall ROI. If you are interested in learning more about how we can build and execute a custom local SEO strategy for you, contact us.
