Why Landing Pages Are Key to Hyper-Local Search

Hyper-local search is all the rage. The competition for the most popular short-tail keywords makes ranking for them almost impossible. The new frontier is the less competitive long-tail of local search.

Small businesses have discovered the importance of search for their marketing mix. Location-based marketing services and the growth of mobile has made it possible for donut shop owners, landscapers and birthday party clowns to make an impact with hyper-local search.

Unfortunately most businesses miss the mark when it comes to bringing people off of the search engine on to their web properties. They’re still relying on their website to close the deal.
This is a mistake.

The key to winning in hyper-local search is the landing page – or rather, multiple landing pages for multiple locations.

Dominate Multiple Neighborhoods

Say, for example, you’re house-painting contractor. If you live in a large city such as Chicago, Houston or Los Angeles, you can service the whole city you live in. Your farthest drive is probably 45 minutes on an average traffic day.

But your customers are not looking for services for your city. They’re looking for services for their neighborhood.

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.

So what will she search for on Google? “house painting belmont heights long beach ca,” or something similar.

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 theTraffic Circle area of Long Beach, etc.

Each landing page allows you to rank for your keywords in that specific neighborhood.

A perfect example of this type of hyper-local strategy is The Brothers that just do Gutters, a gutter maintenance firm from the U.S. northeast. “The Brothers” have mastered the use ofspecific landing pages for dozens and dozens of municipalities, neighborhoods and counties in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Virginia.

Each landing page uses the appropriate hyper-local keywords in their title tags, h1, h2, h3 tags and body copy, allowing them to dominate search for specific municipalities.

For example, when you Google “gutters westchester ny,” the 2nd organic result is for The Brothers. You get similar results when you search for “gutters ocean county nj” or “gutters danbury ct.

Each one of these results sends you to a completely different landing page – a hyper-local page. The Danbury, CT page is a separate page from the Westchester County, NY page.

Each landing page is a self-contained hyper-local SEO powerhouse, with the appropriate keywords in all the right places.

The Brothers dominate the hyper-local SEO market for gutter repair services – not by dominating the keyword “gutter repair,” but by dominating long-tail keywords in dozens of local municipalities. This would not have been possible without the use of dozens of landing pages dedicated to these localities.

Local Scent

If this sounds like a lot of time-consuming effort, it is. You could achieve similar results if you packed the services pages of your main website with the keywords representing all the dozens of local municipalities you serve.

Original Article

Agencia 365