How to create unique SEO content for location pages
You need to show the search engines unique content on all of your website’s location pages. Searchers who land on them must also be able to quickly decipher where you are, what you do and who you are.
They should also be able to find all of the information they may want to know about that particular place of business. Coupled with a prominent phone number and clear calls to action, this is what’s needed to prompt prospective customers to contact the company ASAP.
This is fairly simple with just a handful of offices, stores or shops. It becomes more challenging with more locations, but is still doable for most writers up to a point. However, the more unique pages you need to devise the harder and harder it gets – until it becomes overwhelming.
As I’m sure you know, it’s difficult to write dozens – or even hundreds – of unique descriptions about what is essentially the same thing. It’s also awkward trying to make location landing pages authentic and useful to readers if you’ve never visited those places, seen what they look like and what’s around them, met the staff, toured the business or know what makes their products or services different.
Involving Your Local Operators
That’s why you need to involve the people who manage each branch of the business to help you by providing content that is specifically about their place and written in their own voice. These are some of the types of unique content they can help you with:
- description of their business in their own words, including anything unique or different about their products, services or processes that would appeal to readers
- local business groups they belong to (such as the BBB or Chamber of Commerce)
- trade associations they are affiliated with
- awards, certifications, education or training, special licenses they or their staff may have
- photos (cell phone photos are fine and easy to email) of their storefront, their staff, the inside of their business, some of their most popular products, happy customers in the store, employees performing services and so on
- driving, biking, walking and public transit directions from different areas of town
- operating hours, email address and the methods of payment they accept
- case studies they can share or lists of present and past customers you can publish
- testimonials they may have received via email or snail mail from happy customers
- bios of their key staff, especially the people who will be providing skilled services
- specials or coupons offered
Here’s an example of a location page that incorporates most of the above items without being spammy or overdone. It contains all the information a prospective customer may want to know before they pick up the phone to call.
Involving Your Web Developers
At some point, you’ll need to get the website developer involved in helping to make all of these pages easier to manage. This can be done entirely via a database or your pages can be a hybrid of static and database-driven content.
Ideally, each local operator should be able to log in to their own record and enter or upload the items listed above. Then, if staff, hours or specials change, they can be quickly updated online. If an office moves, the new address is available to web users immediately. If the store is remodeled, new photos can appear on the page within hours. You get the idea!
Having all of this information in a well-organized, accurate database also allows you to “feed” it to data providers for distribution or directly to other websites, like Yelp or Trip Advisor via APIs.
Getting all of this set up is indeed a huge undertaking. However, in the long run, it will save time, reduce frustration and, most importantly, give your enterprise the best chance of keeping the information about all of its locations accurate and update across the web.
About the Author ~ Mary Bowling
Mary Bowling has been involved in SEO and other aspects of internet marketing, with a particular emphasis on Local Search, since 2003. You can connect with Mary via Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.
photo thanks to Carlos Guerrera
Struggling to create unique SEO content? I can help – contact me today!
I faced this problem a year or so ago with a client who wanted to cover the whole of the UK.He didn’t have branches in each town/city, so local information was hard to come by. But he did have customers nationwide, so the case study approach worked really well. He was in the top 4 results for some towns within 24 hours.
As you say, trying to make dozens or hundreds of nearly identical write-ups unique is a challenge. One technique we’ve had good luck with is getting a local to give us directions to the location, then picking a landmark and adding just a bit of copy to give it a more local flavor and make it easier to find. Something like:
“Across Charing Cross Road from Leicester Station Stop J.”
or
“On Long Acre between Cos and Massimo Dutti.” It reduces the similarity factor a bit, and the local touch seems to help users identify with the shop.
Yes, I can see that would work well, especially for people like me…I can’t remember road names or numbers, so always prefer to have landmarks to look out for.
It is a bit trickier when the client doesn’t have a physical location in the town/city though, isn’t it? I faced that problem with my own site, and the only thing I could think of doing was to provide details on how I would get to the client, so that they could appreciate how far I’d have to go, what time I’d be likely to arrive etc.
Thanks for posting. I’m currently working on a project that sells location based SEO webpages for (local) entrepreneurs.
Does anyone know how I can setup all those different pages in an easy way? Currently, I create the pages myself (coding and designing with Artisteer) without DB and just in HTML. A DB, some templates and perhaps some API’s would be better but will cost some money to develop? Ideas?
Thanks!
My friend has a ecommerce website and has asked is there a way to create unique pages for his products for each city in the uk so that everytime a user finds that page the content is unique ?
Bart, creating a database that you can pull from to populate location pages is certainly a time saver and gives you a lot of flexibility.
Matthew, good ecommerce platforms allow you to create a unique description of each product, but I don’t know of any reasonable way to create a useful, unique page for each product for each city in the UK.