The Location Landing Pages Salad Bar: Making Smart Local Business Content Choices in 2024
The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Edited by Emilie Martin
Pickled beets, butter lettuce, or bacon bits? Ranch or vinaigrette? For all the uncertainty local business owners may feel at the outset of creating a set of location or city landing pages on their websites, the truth is, the options for what to include on those pages to make them valuable are as loaded as a stocked salad bar. The problem isn’t not knowing what to write about but instead seeing just how much you can fit on your plate!
Image credit: Mike Mozart
If what to write about for your local business has you blocked, check out the most delectable and detailed Local Business Content Marketing Guide. But while we’re in the salad bar queue together today, let’s take a deep look at this specific challenge of developing content for these core location and city landing pages that will ensure they are unique, helpful, actionable, and worthy of ranking well in the organic SERPs. I’ve got a checklist and a mockup for you to spark your creativity, plus a lightning round of Q&A to address top FAQs on this topic!
Location/city landing pages: animal, vegetable, or mineral?
This terminology is sometimes tossed around and mixed up. Before we reach for the radishes, here’s a quick look at how these two different types of landing pages are commonly defined:
Location Landing Pages — You can and should create a unique landing page on your website for each of the physical locations of your business. For example, a Mexican restaurant with three local branches can create three location landing pages, while a hardware franchise with 250 stores can create 250 location landing pages.
Here’s an example of a location landing page for the San Francisco branch of REI, a multi-location chain of outdoor outfitters.
- City Landing Pages — Whether you have a physical store or not, you may want to create a unique landing page for each of the major cities and towns you serve. For example, a landscaping company that serves five nearby communities could create five city landing pages. In contrast, a plumbing franchise with 30 franchisees, each of whom serves the five cities nearest them, might create a total of 150 city landing pages on the brand’s website. Sometimes, businesses with physical locations, like pizza restaurants, might create an appropriate number of city landing pages to represent the cities to which their drivers deliver.
Here’s an example of a green carpet cleaning company that’s headquartered in Nevada City, California, but which has a city landing page for its services in Pacifica, California:
While there are some cases in which major enterprise brands opt out of location/city landing pages and just have a store locator map without a unique page for each location, this approach leaves opportunity on the table. If you’re working hard to compete for organic and local pack visibility in the search engine results, investing in creating really good location/city landing pages could be one of the smartest endeavors you can make in the new year.
Your big buffet of location/city landing page content options
A perennial worry for local business owners is that if they have to create multiple pages representing the locations and/or service areas of a single company, those pages may end up being duplicative, dull, uninspiring… wilted. You can set these worries aside forever as soon as you check out this vast menu of checklist options for ensuring your landing pages are immensely helpful and engaging for your website’s visitors:
All 20 of these options qualify as content that you can use to make each of your pages both substantial and different from one another. Now, let’s put this checklist into action by visualizing how all of these elements might look on a location landing page for a fictitious plant nursery. Each element has been numbered, and a useful key follows our landing page mockup:
Key to Our Local Landing Page Mockup:
Proof of E-E-A-T — This acronym, coined by Google, stands for the experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness they want to emphasize in their search engine results. Here in our mockup, we see the first of many proofs of E-E-A-T on the page, proudly showing that our fictitious plant nursery received an award from a local magazine. It has been recognized by a third party as an authority for a particular type of offering. Learn more about E-E-A-T from this practical guide.
Page Navigation — Local landing pages can feature a lot of types of content, and a menu of skip/jump links can help website visitors quickly access the area of content they want.
Contact & Hours — The business’ complete name, address, phone number, text number, email address, social media links, and hours of operation should be the first thing on a location landing page.
Images — An image carousel not only showcases the premises and inventory but can help people find the location on the street. If your business doesn’t have a physical location, showcase images of your completed projects, staff, company vehicles, and other visual elements here.
Unique Sales Proposition (USP) — Summarize the best features of the location in a single sentence. Our fictitious nursery states that it has the best selection of organic native plants in its town.
Links — This text section is just one of many areas of the page in which good internal linking practices are present. Internal links help both human visitors and search engine bots know you’ve got more relevant content to offer on a variety of topics. The more often you link internally to a specific resource on your website, the stronger your signal to the bots that a given page is important.
Directions — Written walking and driving directions help customers get to you. Consider visitors who are driving, walking, biking, and taking local transit. When possible, mention nearby well-known landmarks to help orient customers and associate your branch with a particular neighborhood.
Map — Embed a map to help customers locate your branch. If your business does not have a physical location, and the page you are creating is a city landing page instead of a location landing page, include a map that shows the radius of your service area.
Fulfillment Ecosystem — List out all how customers can transact with you. This could include shopping online or in person, curbside pickup, in-store pickup, home delivery, shipping, and booking appointments.
Cross-sales — Partner with other local businesses to cross-promote one another’s offerings. In our example, our fictitious nursery has partnered with a local restaurant. Alternatively, this area of your location landing page could offer an in-house tie-in, like a bundled package of goods or services.
Premise Amenities — This is where you can highlight everything about your premises that makes it welcoming and inclusive. Our fictitious nursery mentions that it is wheelchair accessible and pet-friendly and also features gender-neutral restrooms. If your business does not have a physical location, this section could feature information like accurate appointment time windows or multi-lingual support.
Reviews — This section not only showcases customer reviews for the location but also links out to the branch’s review profiles and directly asks for customers to leave reviews. More than half of customers will leave you a review if asked to do so, and if you’d like to learn more about how this particular type of content influences your reputation, rankings, and revenue, read The Impact of Local Business Reviews on Consumer Behavior survey report. Reviews are one of your best opportunities for highlighting the “E” (experience) E-E-A-T factor because they prove that real people have first-hand experiences with your business. Another option in this area is to showcase the handwritten testimonials of customers if your business collects them.
Video — Any type of video media can make a location or city landing page more engaging. Here, our fictitious nursery has an interview with one of the on-site master gardeners, showcasing the “E” (expertise) in E-E-A-T.
Audio — It won’t be an option for every local business, but here, we have a company podcast episode that relates to this specific branch of the organization. Other businesses might include a file of their company's jingle or radio ad.
Community Involvement — Feature how much you care about the community you serve to give customers extra reasons to shop with you. In our example, the plant nursery donates a percentage of monthly sales to a local children’s community garden.
Guarantees — Emphasize the “T” (trustworthiness of E-E-A-T) signals of your business by detailing your guarantees and policies and by urging customers to contact you directly with any concerns rather than feeling ignored and leaving you negative reviews.
Specials — Consider offering unique specials that rotate across the locations of your multi-location enterprise. Here, a special gift is being offered to purchasers who meet a specific requirement.
Locale-specific Information — It’s another chance to showcase the “E” (expertise) of your E-E-A-T when you offer information specific to a locality. Here, the fictitious nursery provides statistics about how local weather affects gardening and what plants work best in that area. You might also include data, reports, surveys, information about local laws and regulations, etc.
Guidance — Related to #18, the nursery is offering one-on-one local guidance via an event. If your location has classes, workshops, celebrations, or other events, be sure to publicize them. If you regularly hold events, a calendar widget could be a good idea.
Call to Action (CTA) — Our local landing page features many calls to action, such as prompts to shop, links to click and to contact the business in various ways. The page closes with a final CTA to shop inventory on the site. Never miss the opportunity to let customers know what you’d like them to do next so that they can take the actions that are most important to your business goals.
Lightning Round Location/City Landing Pages Q&A
Back in the 1970s, my parents once dined at a novelty restaurant that featured a large contraption that was wheeled from table to table, shooting out salad onto guests’ plates. While this memory continues to provide family amusement, let’s borrow it to rapidly slice and dice some of the most typical questions surrounding this form of local business content. Hold out your plate!
Q: What are the main goals of location/city landing pages?
A: Location and city landing pages can best be thought of as a form of customer service. These pages have dual goals; one is to achieve high visibility in the search engines for specific branches of your business, and the other is to engage page visitors so that they are inspired to patronize the location being featured.
Too often, business owners take shortcuts and only focus on the first half of this equation, resulting in the publication of large numbers of uninteresting, duplicative pages that are over-optimized with blocks of keywords (like city names and zip codes) and have little to offer human visitors. Sitewide signals like Google’s Helpful Content Update don’t reward websites that have a habit of publishing low-value content. If you keep it firmly in mind that you want these pages to inspire real people to choose your business, your logical next step is simply to choose amongst the many options we’ve covered based on what you believe will be of most help to your community.
Q: How much content do I need on my location/city landing pages?
A: You may not need all 20 types of the above content on a given landing page, and you may also have other forms of content I haven’t listed that are the right fit for your business and community.
Some elements are essential, like your name, contact info, and hours of operation. Beyond this, think about what is popular in your industry — is video content a fabulous fit, will photos help sell your business, do you need to build up reviews to become competitive in Google’s local packs, do deals play a significant role in how your customers shop? Your answers will be unique to your business and customer base. Don’t be afraid of experimenting. For example, lots of videos may not seem like an obvious match for the plumbing industry, but watch Joy Hawkins’ interview of a local plumber who saw outstanding success via a YouTube marketing strategy. Read about “shelfies” and how these photos can bring in customers whose confidence has been boosted by seeing your inventory. Consider how showcasing your sustainability efforts offers local guidance that can set your business apart. There is so much you can tell customers about why they should choose you!
Q: How do I optimize my location/city landing pages?
A: As mentioned above, over-optimized location and city landing pages have been a longstanding problem on the web. Read I Want To Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works to determine what approach to these landing pages is actually suitable for your business model, and in creating this set of pages, avoid the temptation to stuff them with keywords. An approach with more appeal to human visitors will be to naturally incorporate your most important location and product/service keywords into your:
Page URLs
Title tags
Headers
Sub-navigation
Internal links
Main body content
You don’t need to hit a magic number of words or repeated keywords. Focus on customer service, and write as you would speak to a live customer, honing in on their needs, the language they use and understand, and answering all the commonest questions they might ask.
Q: Should I be worried about duplicate content on my location/city landing pages?
A: If you’ve encountered information around the web about a “duplicate content penalty,” please ignore it; Google has repeatedly confirmed that this concept is a myth. On your set of landing pages, it is totally normal if some elements are identical from page to page. For example, your customer guarantees are likely the same across all your branches, as might also be brand-wide specials, news, or product/service information. There is no need to be concerned about this same text appearing on more than one page of your website.
With that fear banished you can instead focus on the positive direction of making each page useful along the lines of Google’s Helpful Content Update, mentioned above. The good news is it’s really easy to localize most of these landing pages because certain elements will automatically be unique to the locality. For example, your contact info, location-specific reviews, images, and videos will all be unique if they are about Branch A instead of Branch B. You can also experiment with creating unique deals and specials for each branch and custom guidance related to a specific town or city. The only thing to avoid is taking a slap-dash approach and tossing up a large volume of these pages with nothing helpful on them, as this could weaken the overall quality of your website.
If you truly don’t have the time/resources right now to invest in creating a unique page for each branch that will contribute to the overall quality of your website, you may be better off using a map-based location finder widget instead for now.
Q: What navigation should I use for my location/city landing pages?
A: If your brand currently has only half a dozen or so locations, you can likely link to them via a dropdown in your main navigation menu labeled “Locations”. If you have more branches than this, you should likely implement a text or maps-based store locator widget so that customers can enter a town or street name or find themselves on a map to be taken to the appropriate landing page. If your model is a Service Area Business, a more detailed map can help customers understand which branch to contact for the area within which they are located. To ensure proper indexing of all your landing pages, it’s a good idea to list them out in an HTML sitemap page on your website.
Q: Are location/city landing pages a set-and-forget task?
A: In most cases, no. At the bare minimum, you should be auditing these pages periodically to ensure that the hours of operation are accurate at times of the year when change is common. For example, you should update your pages to reflect holiday or seasonal hours. And, of course, you will need to update these pages any time core contact information (like addresses or phone numbers) changes so that your local business listings across the local search ecosystem match what is on their respective landing pages. But, if you determine that you’re going to make the most of these landing pages, there are many areas you can keep fresh, including:
New incoming reviews
New images that reflect seasonality in both inventory and premises
New videos
New podcast episodes
New deals/specials
New events
New internal linking opportunities as new content is created on other pages
Google has a long history of emphasizing freshness in their results for certain queries, and by keeping your pages lively, they will also appeal to customers who will understand that your content is current and trustworthy.
Q: Should my local business listings link to my location landing pages?
A: The best answer is that this is up to you. You can either link all your Google Business Profiles and other local business listings to your home page, or you can link each listing to its appropriate landing page. To make a wise decision for your business, weigh these pros and cons:
Q: Should I use AI to generate my location landing pages?
A: This is another “maybe,” depending on your business philosophy, model, and goals. It’s quite true that businesses are currently experimenting with using technology like ChatGPT to generate content that is then published on their sites, and brands with hundreds or thousands of locations may well turn to these resources for the fast creation of large volumes of landing pages.
However, I’d recommend a cautious approach to taking this route, mainly if your brand is small-to-medium rather than enterprise-level. SMBs have a sometimes hidden advantage in serving customers who value human experiences over mere efficiency. Most of us prefer to have the phone answered by a live person when we call a business instead of being processed through an automated system. This same dynamic applies to customers who choose to shop small and locally for distinctive and caring service as opposed to feeling “processed,” which is sometimes the case with larger entities.
Anecdotally, I’ve long noticed that Google’s algorithms tend to favor big local brands in their local results, regardless of the quality of their listings or location/city landing pages, but this isn’t the case for local SMBs who typically have to work hard to build up brand awareness and authority. In such cases, your landing pages are an opportunity to put in the elbow grease to create best-in-town content for unique groups of customers. Leaving this up to robots may be fast, but it may also miss out on the opportunity to make human connections that are fundamental to small local businesses’ success. And if you’re marketing an enterprise with physical locations and decide you will use AI to generate landing page content, definitely fact-check and edit it so that it doesn’t mislead your customers. Think through your approach carefully, weighing all the possible pros and cons.
There’s more to learn about location landing pages, and if you’ve gotten value out of this article, head next to The Local Business Content Marketing Guide for four full chapters of guidance on all of the many forms of content local brands can benefit from publishing. It’s free and could be just what you need to make smart content marketing choices in the new year!
