Getting Started with Local Content

In this awesome edition of Moz Academy and Local University Mike Ramsey, President of Nifty Marketing, tells us about local content!

Getting Started

First let's talk about the basic idea of what needs to be done for local pages on a website. One of the biggest challenges across the industry is that people who build a landing page that has local content on it, and then they simply take out the city name and the state name from that page and then just replace that with every market that they exist in. So you end up with duplicate content pages looking exactly the same with the exact same content minus the different locations.

Matt Cutts came in and said in an interview with Eric Enge that this practice was not okay and that you needed to have unique content on each page. Today we're going to talk about some ways that you can potentially do that and some different things that you do need to include on these landing pages.

Unique Landing Pages

The first step is having a unique landing page for every single market that you exist in. Some of the things that you need to have are a good page title that includes a bit of keyword information, and the location that the business exists in. If you are a Boston plumber, then your title tag will have Boston plumber somewhere listed. Also, have that information in your h1 tag on the page.

Map

It's very important if you have a location that people are able to go to; that you list a map on the page, preferably one that has a click to directions, that has your name, your address, and your local phone number. This should all be on that same page. We call that a NAP in our industry and that’s how Google stores information about your business to identify you. It also helps building your rankings for local search.

Services

Moving down into the content section, the important thing here is to keep it focused on the location and the services you provide. You don't want to have that same canned content on every single location page over and over. Talk about what makes this area unique. Testimonials are always awesome to showcase either the products or the services that you're offering. Finally, always have a call to action.

Looking Beyond Subpages

Taking that a step further, we're getting to the stage where it's not enough just to have a single page per location. As of now you have your main site, you have your main location page that you would link to from a Google Places for Business Profile, but you can have a lot more local content. So we have all of these subpages that would be linked here and potentially just be fed throughout the content and even having a side navigation bar. So we'll talk about some of the things that you can do to expand this beyond one page.

Keyword Research

The first step is doing your research on the keywords. One of the best places to do that is the Keyword Planner Tool. You can go in and you can actually look for different keywords and their search volume without the local modifier on by just making some edits in that tool.

Analyze That Data

Then next would be digging through Google Analytics. Go in and see the type of keywords that are sending traffic to your website and see if you find any gold nuggets in there of local phrases that have driven traffic that you might not have individual page content about or that you can expand with.

Staff and Stories

Next would be staff information and stories. For example, on lawyers’ websites the most visited pages other than the homepage are the lawyer bios. Make sure that you definitely include information on the people of the company and the products of the company. It’s always good to have a lot of details, such as, pictures, history, and stories.

FAQ

The next thing is to make a FAQ from your customers. The questions that you always get as they come into your business that you're constantly answering, these make for great extra pages that you can add, and you could have a FAQ for almost every single location.

Submarket Pages

As far as another area that we always try to build out content on is the submarkets for each area. So let's take, for instance, you have Minneapolis. If you serve Minneapolis, then you'll also be serving the areas that surround Minneapolis and building out pages for each of those little submarkets can also be a great way of picking up traffic. This is especially true for service-based businesses.

Testimonials

Next would be full-out testimonial pages. We talked about having two or three testimonials on your main local page; it's also great to have a full page of testimonials for each market. They talk about things relative to that market, such as the employees that work at that location. If it's about the facility, maybe they talk about where it's at and the neighborhood that it's in. That's a lot of good, unique local content that you don't have to generate. You just have to get it from your customer base.

Directions and Directories

Next would be the directions and directories that you can list on. You can post links to some of the main directories to definitely encourage people to go and get reviews on those sites, but also just writing out the directions to your place of business will be a really great idea because nobody ever tells directions the same way. You're guaranteed to get unique content trying to explain how to get to your location from the different various points of a city.

Customer Stories

Last, you want to always have customer stories. It's something that we've seen done in quite a few cases, where you'll have a local person in a market and you can tell their story about their experience with your business, somewhat in the form of testimonial, but more focused on this individual. A lot of times the customers are grateful for the opportunity to be heard, but it also creates great content that can help to convert business for yourself. A nice bonus is that you can began to rank in search engines with this content.

There are some ideas for you to take advantage of to just expand your reach. We appreciate you tuning in.