Location Pages vs. Service Area Pages

[Matt Chauhan]

After watching the recently released course on How to Optimize Location Pages from Bright Local Academy, I have some questions.

- Are location pages different from service area pages? In the course, they explained that in order to have a location page, you need to have the physical address of the business and a Google Business Profile at that location.

- Is creating a service area page an effective strategy? If we create a service area page where the business doesn't have a physical address, how do we promote it?

- Is it better to focus on PPC ads rather than building service area pages on the website?

 

[seosemsocial]

After watching the recently released course on How to Optimize Location Pages from Bright Local Academy, I have some questions.

- Are location pages different from service area pages? In the course, they explained that in order to have a location page, you need to have the physical address of the business and a Google Business Profile at that location.

- Is creating a service area page an effective strategy? If we create a service area page where the business doesn't have a physical address, how do we promote it?

- Is it better to focus on PPC ads rather than building service area pages on the website?

While I hate Google, I'm a huge fan of ads. Let's face it:
1) People no longer have an attention span. 2) SERPS are shrinking. 3) Mobile.

Ads should be placed in the category of SEO, for local.

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Hey Matt, there can be a lot of confusion sometimes with the terms "local page", "location page", "service area page", "localized landing page", etc. But in the context of @Claire Carlile great lesson on Bright Local, as you mentioned, Location Pages are pages that can be married with a physical location and GBP. Similar to Location Pages, we often author separate city/neighborhood pages for those populations that are distinct enough to warrant unique and helpful information with the intent of ranking well on SERP without having a physical presence there. So let's say the business is located in "City A", but nearby there are other cities, "City B" and "City C", or perhaps "Neighborhood D". We've had great success with writing separate pages for those locations with relevant/helpful information. Often times those pages will rank #1 or #2 in the SERP for "keyword(s) City B", above the competition that actually has a physical location in "City A". While PPC may also be helpful, as far as CTR goes, the top 3 SERP positions still account for a huge percentage of traffic. PPC has its place, but in my opinion it can't replace the value of a top-3 SERP obtained from a city/neighborhood page.

However, we'll be closely monitoring feedback from the community over the next two weeks, along with our own client's ranking due to potential impact from Google's Helpful Content Update.

Google Helpful Content Update Is Now Rolling Out

The Google helpful content update is now rolling out. It can take up to two weeks to fully roll out. I'm currently typing this on my mobile phone but I wanted to get this up while I am out on vacation

www.seroundtable.com

How is the Useful Content Algorithm Update Impacting Local Businesses?

Google has officially released the Helpful Content Update. We are going to track and share observations about how it's impacting the local algorithm and local businesses here. Please share your observation below.

localsearchforum.com

 

[Claire Carlile]

Great response @JeffClevelandTN and thanks for the mention!