Hyper-Local Landing Pages: the Yellow Brick Road for Local Search

[Linda Buquet]

Especially in large metro areas, longer tale/less competitive local key phrases could include neighborhoods, landmarks or regions. So landing pages for all those local variations helps you cast a wider net for your clients AND could be an additional service you offer them.

Think of it as the "hyper-local long tail" and follow that yellow brick road!

Follow the Yellow Brick Road by pasukaru76, on Flickr​

Just scanned an article I wanted to share today that makes great points about taking local search beyond city search - to hyper local neighborhood search.

Why Landing Pages Are Key to Hyper-Local Search

The Greater Los Angeles area is a case in point. It’s comprised of dozens of cities, such as Redondo Beach, Carson, Harbor City, San Pedro, Long Beach, Lakewood and Paramount, to name a few. Your potential customer in Long Beach is not looking for a painter that serves the Greater Los Angeles area. She’s interested in somebody who can service Long Beach.

In fact, she may live in the Belmont Heights neighborhood of Long Beach and wants to know if you can service Belmont Heights.

That’s a long-tail keyword. The competition is lower for this long-tail keyword (and the traffic is lower). But the good news is that when somebody in Belmont Heights is looking for a painting contractor, your landing page will show up.

But you should also have a landing page for the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach, and the Traffic Circle area of Long Beach, etc.

For example, supposed you’re a pizza shop owner in Dallas, Texas, and one of your shop locations is right next to the campus of The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), in Richardson, Texas (a suburb of Dallas). Your search efforts would be focused on attracting students that live on or near campus. Those students might search for “pizza UTD” on Google.

Read more at Why Landing Pages Are Key to Hyper-Local Search | Business 2 Community

The author uses an example of a Gutter company he feels has a good hyper local landing page strategy. Can't say I've had time to analyze it, but here's one of their pages if you want to have a go at it.

Seamless Gutters | Gutter Guards | Virginia | Lynchburg | VA | 24501 | 434.237.7711

I personally would not have done title tag like that and some of the other local landing pages and big banks of zips which is a problem with new organic guidelines.

But at any rate, the article makes some great points about landing pages for hyper local search.

Thoughts?

 

[Brian]

I work with attorneys. So for example if someone wanted to be found for searches on Personal Injury Attorneys <Los Angeles Suburb> are you suggesting start writing landing pages entitled :

Personal Injury Attorneys Redondo Beach
Personal Injury Attorneys Carson
Personal Injury Attorneys San Pedro
etc

And then write unique content for each page. Would you have to careful so that each page was really unique so as to avoid duplicate content issues? For Los Angeles that could involve a lot of pages. Are there any issues with this being viewed as spammy?

 

[Gio Greenard]

And then write unique content for each page. Would you have to careful so that each page was really unique so as to avoid duplicate content issues? For Los Angeles that could involve a lot of pages. Are there any issues with this being viewed as spammy?

Yeah I would definitely keep each page unique as far as content, it's not just a case of changing the location details on each page.

I have built additional pages for my clients who have multiple locations but just the one website, and it has worked well. e.g domain.com/sydney /melbourne ect...

Although like yourself I would be slightly worried about having multiple pages for neighbourhoods as opposed to cities.

 

[Travis Van Slooten]

I work with a full service law firm so not only do we have multiple practice areas, but we have multiple cities to target as well because of our vast metropolitan area. We decided to target only 2 areas of practice and "only" 22 of the cities in our metro area. Yes, we created 44 landing pages!

We wrote unique articles on each one and then above the fold (before each of the articles) we turned it into a quasi sales/contact us page.

Long story short, it's been over a year since we did this and almost all of these pages have ranked #1 or #2 for the past several months.

Now here's the thing...we're clearly in a gray area here with Google's TOS as they consider these as doorway pages. We know we've been flying under the radar with these. Given the risk, we are considering pulling them down.

I personally am comfortable pushing this with my clients when we're only doing a handful of city landing pages - say no more than 12. Anything over that I get real nervous and make sure my clients clearly understand the risks. They definitely work but all it takes is for Google to do a manual review and it's game over

@Linda - thanks for the head's up on that gutter landing page. I just happen to have a seamless gutter client so that was very helpful to see. We have similar landing pages but our landing pages aren't nearly as spammy looking as the one you pointed out. That just screams spam to me. Our pages are so much more unique and provide real value to the customer in each of the cities.

Travis Van Slooten

I work with attorneys. So for example if someone wanted to be found for searches on Personal Injury Attorneys <Los Angeles Suburb> are you suggesting start writing landing pages entitled :

Personal Injury Attorneys Redondo Beach
Personal Injury Attorneys Carson
Personal Injury Attorneys San Pedro
etc

And then write unique content for each page. Would you have to careful so that each page was really unique so as to avoid duplicate content issues? For Los Angeles that could involve a lot of pages. Are there any issues with this being viewed as spammy?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Travis

Not to pimp out my own post here, but I wrote this one last week with your exact situation in mind:

16 Ways to Create Unique "Local" Content for Cities Where You Want to Rank

I.e. how to avoid having a clone army of landing pages.

 

[Travis Van Slooten]

As always, great post Phil. Yet another post of your's I had to bookmark

Travis Van Slooten