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The Importance of Location Specific Pages for SEO

If you’re a business with more than one physical address, it’s considered a crime at BARQAR Marketing to not have pages on your site dedicated to those locations. Not only do location pages make it easier for users to find your address and contact information, but there are very specific SEO reasons why they’re an absolute must.

When a search engine crawls a page, it’s looking for a very strong overall theme. When it sees five, six, or seven different cities and addresses on a single contact page, that’s considered diluted from an SEO standpoint. Here’s why:

When optimizing a page for search engines, several items must be modified to help search engines understand what the page is about. Remember, we’re trying to create a strong theme for one topic. The problem is that several of these vital on-page items have limited space. This makes optimizing a single page for more than one location extremely difficult.

On-Page SEO Items to Consider

  • The SEO Page Title should be 60 characters or less.
  • The URL slug should be less than six words. Ideally, it should be around three words.
  • H1, H2, H3 headings should be short and sweet. Headings that are too long look unnatural.
  • The meta description has a 156 character limit.
  • To properly optimize copy, the keyword should be on the page at least two to three times. If the page doesn’t have a lot of copy, optimizing for too many terms will hurt human readability.

These are just some of the basic on-page elements that are modified. As you can imagine, trying to stuff seven cities into those key areas just isn’t happening. Having a contact page with seven different addresses will not be nearly as effective as having a contact page and seven individual location pages.

What goes into a perfectly optimized location page?

It’s not nearly as complicated as it seems, but it’s important to get it right. Each location page should have the following on the page:

  • City name (and keyword) in the SEO title
  • City name (and keyword) in the URL slug
  • City name (and keyword) in the meta description
  • City name (and keyword) in an H1 or H2 heading at the top of the page
  • Your physical location’s address, phone number, and any other contact information.
  • An embedded google map with your address pinned.
  • A link to your verified Google+ local listing. The Google+ page should be thoroughly filled out. About section, profile picture, cover photo, hours of operation, website linked, etc.
  • Any other internal linking that might be beneficial. For example, linking to your job board for jobs in that city.
  • A brief paragraph describing the types of staffing or recruiting services at that location. This paragraph should be unique for each location Copying/pasting the same paragraph across several pages will hurt the overall quality and performance of those pages. The city name and keyword should be in the paragraph once. On these pages, it’s okay to list a few smaller suburbs outside of the larger city that you place in. This helps to reinforce the overall theme of the page. Search engines can understand the relationship between a major city and its suburbs. Be tasteful in how many you list.

Local SEO doesn’t get much better than that. Just thinking about how much Google will love your new location pages is giving me goosebumps. From there, it’s simply a matter of building your citations across relevant directories such as Yelp, Facebook, etc. and driving positive reviews to those pages.

To get more positive reviews online, take a look at our reputation management service. It’s a cost effective way to get honest, private feedback from your clients, while simultaneously improving your online reputation.

What if we have a couple of locations but do business nationally?

You have to ask yourself what percent of business you do in and around your physical locations. If the answer is “the majority,” you should still be building location pages. If you simply cannot pinpoint where the majority of your business is, and you are truly a national entity, location pages won’t be as beneficial.

The best approach in these cases would be to choose a “top five cities” and place them in the copy throughout the website. This is not ideal, but it will yield better results than excluding geography altogether. Ultimately, it doesn’t make sense to have location pages where you don’t have a physical location. We handle national businesses on a case by case basis to determine the best approach.

To get started with your optimized location pages, get in touch with our sales team for a quote on SEO services.

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