When a local SEO expert builds local landing pages, the same approach is usually taken – keyword research around the large cities, and not much else. While targeting the highest concentration of a city is crucial, never overlook the smaller surrounding cities that may have potential customers searching for your business. These cities are small, often containing only 5,000 to 10,000 people, but they could be packed with potential local customers who are searching for your products and services. These potential customers may not be searching with enough volume for a single keyword to register in keyword research tools. But these four secret steps of a local SEO consultant will make sure you’re reaching every potential customer possible with your local search marketing efforts.
Local Search Marketing Targeting
First, you need to build a list of the areas you want to target. Most cities provide important population data via a government census. You can often find this data on the city’s Wikipedia entry. Most SEOs start with the most heavily populated nearby cities and work down the list. But if you’re looking for quick results, start approximately halfway down the list and work your way up to cities with higher populations as your budget allows.
Map out a perimeter of the land that you or your customers are most likely to travel for an average business transaction. Some businesses do not want to travel far for service and maintenance calls but are willing to travel further if the business opportunity is lucrative enough.
Make sure that the most highly populated cities are within that perimeter using the census data.
Targeting The Keywords
Now that you have built a list of cities, perform some keyword research. You can determine the popularity of a keyword based on the volume of the searches. For example, if you see “law service” receiving roughly 3000 searches per month and “good lawyer” receiving only 1500 searches per month, you would want to focus on the more popular keywords instead. Google makes it easy to research and target keywords by providing this information for many keyword planning tools. Take note of the use and occurrence of the keywords in those cities as well. For example, for local keywords, you typically see “service” then “location” such as “lawyer Dallas.” These keywords tend to receive more traffic than the reverse, “location” then “service.” However, it may make sense to target both sequences depending on your budget.
Creating Optimized Content
You’re now ready to create some content pages that briefly describe your products or services to your targeted local areas. You can use multiple lengths of content depending on how you choose to describe each service. Short content pieces can be just a few hundred words long while longer content pieces can reach 1,000 words or more. Instead of creating pages that all have the same length content pieces mix it up. Always make sure that your selected keywords are in the page titles and are inserted in one H2 tag. Remember: Keyword stuffing your content with keywords is bad!
Linking To Local Pages
Link your local pages to “more info” pages that describe your services or products in more detail. The easiest way to link to them is to incorporate links into your footer navigation or even your widget section. You can link to multiple pages with a simple text section. You could also provide local links on the core service pages. For an example using Dallas, you could link to services in surrounding cities such as Fort Worth, Arlington, and Plano. You can choose your cities based on the list you built in the first step. Whichever way you choose, providing local links enhances the user experience and helps users get more information about your services. Building successful local landing pages can be dependent on many factors, but it is an important skill to master to reach as many ideal customers as possible.
P.S: Check out 8 Steps For Effective Local Franchise Marketing for more ways to get the word out to locals about your business. Click here or call (817) 642-9686 find out more about how local search marketing works!
