All Things SEO: Optimising Your Local Landing Pages
What Is SEO and How Does It Work?
You may have heard the term SEO, but what exactly is search engine optimisation?
Essentially, it’s your ticket to the top of search engines like Google. Getting on the first page can be absolutely crucial for a business – and it’s never a bad thing to be ahead of your competition!
In terms of how it works – no one really knows the exact algorithm (Google keeps this hush hush), but we do know there are certain things that Google looks for.
What Is Local SEO?
If you have a brand new website, or you’re just starting to look into SEO, it’s smart to concentrate on your local SEO, rather than SEO on a national (and even worldwide) scale.
This is purely for the reason that there is naturally less competition, which means you’ve got a better chance of ranking, and ranking well, on search engines. For example, if you’re a business specialising in the installation of solar panels in the North East, it makes sense to target the specific areas you work in, and even go as far as creating pages for these areas, such as Durham, Northumberland and Sunderland, rather than just ‘UK’.
This won’t necessarily work for all businesses, however if you’re a business that either has a physical location or work in certain areas – it’s definitely one to think about.
Top Three Tips For Optimising Your Local Landing Pages
Now you know whether or not local landing pages would be beneficial for you, let’s take a look at exactly how you should create these pages in order to optimise your SEO.
1. Don’t Just Duplicate Your Content
If you’ve got multiple locations within your business, it makes sense why you’d want to copy and paste the page exactly as is and just change the location.
It’s a quick way to create multiple locations – which sounds like a good thing, right? Wrong.
You may be tempted to clone the information in order to create the pages, however if the content is exactly the same aside from the location itself, you’ll be penalised by search engines.
When creating multiple location pages, the content should be different and well thought through for each page in order to add SEO value to the website.
2. Don’t Spam Your Content
Likewise, back in the day you would have been able to get away with spamming your content with keywords in order to improve your SEO score, however that doesn’t work anymore. ‘Keyword stuffing’ as it’s called, is an absolute no-go for SEO.
Search engines have learned to analyse every part of your website, and it’s absolutely vital that your content reads well. You’ll only improve your SEO if Google deems your page as relevant and beneficial to the user.
3. Optimise Your Images
Once you’ve optimised your headings and content, the next in line to think about is optimising your images. When it comes to optimising images, there are three main areas you can look at: size, name and alt tags.
The size of the image helps on the speed side of things. If your website is trying to load a large image when it only needs to fill a small space, you’ll feel this on loading. Especially on mobile devices.
In terms of the name of the image, if your image is called image001837.jpg, this isn’t adding much to the website in terms of what Google is able to search and index. Title your image and incorporate a keyword within this – every little helps!
Alt tags are key when it comes to accessibility, and therefore SEO. If you have a user using a screen reader, this will read out the alt tag, helping the user to have a much better understanding. When creating your alt tags, don’t shy away from adding a keyword here or there, but as mentioned earlier, don’t keyword stuff! It’s important that you’re still able to get across a clear description of the image fire and foremost.
In Conclusion
Creating these local sub-landing pages gives you the ability to be able to target users searching terms such as ‘solar panels in Middlesbrough‘ without having a detrimental impact on the rest of the areas.
In short, if you’re a business that either has specific physical locations, or work within specific areas, it doesn’t hurt to create location-based landing pages.
