Local SEO: How To Create Location-Specific Web Pages That Rank

You’re a company with a single location that offers services to multiple locations. Think HVAC, roofing, cleaning services, repair services, accountants, catering, plumbing, electrical, dentists, etc. 

You want to rank for keywords that relate to your services in each of those locations. Well, how do you do it? The answer lies in creating location-specific landing pages on your site. This is a part of local SEO that’s often overlooked or done very poorly.

In this geo-location page guide, we’ll go over exactly how to create a location-specific landing page for SEO that ranks!

Picking Locations To Make Web Pages For

So what markets do you pick to create location pages for? One obvious method is to identify the state/cities you offer services in and go from there. 

While it would be ideal to build a page for every location in the broader area you service, this may not be realistic depending on your budget/bandwidth and the total # of areas you service. 

If you’re needing to prioritize locations to create pages for, one of the main considerations should be whether or not those markets/cities have enough demand to justify the cost. 

This is where keyword research can really help when it comes to knowing where to focus your digital marketing efforts.

How to Do Location-Specific Keyword Research

Keyword research can have tons of benefits in any digital marketing campaign, but in this specific location page build, there are two main purposes:

1. Geographical Market Research

By seeing how many monthly searches happen for your main product/service in that city/state, you can see the demand for your services in different markets and prioritize the building of those location pages. 

This will help you finalize your initial list of location pages to build, and give you a roadmap to future pages that could be built as you track the efficacy of your geo-specific landing page campaign. 

2. Winnable Local Search Terms

Once you’ve identified the major cities or markets you’re going to build geo-location pages for based on volume, good keyword research allows you to find winnable keyword variations to use on those pages. 

For instance, using synonyms of your main keyword phrase may allow you to find a location-specific keyword that has an easier keyword difficulty that you can win right away.

Main Sections To Include in SEO Location Pages

When building your location-specific landing page, you’ll want to make sure you include the right information to make it effective. While optimizing for SEO is important, delivering a strong case for why someone in that area should use your product or services is just as important.

Think of these pages like mini-home pages for each location. If someone enters your site through this landing page, it’s likely their first experience with your company. Including the same kind of information you’d use to introduce someone to your company on your homepage will work well on these pages. 

While the actual meat of the page will differ based on your specific service/location, some of the overall sections will be quite similar. Typically, you’d want to include the following on your SEO location page:

Location Page Title

This is the easiest thing you’ll do all day. Simply name your page the main service, followed by the location you’re targeting. This is likely the primary keyword you have for the page as well.

For instance, if you’re a digital marketing service in Salt Lake City, your page name would likely be “Digital Marketing Service in Salt Lake City, UT”.

An Introduction/Hook

This is a section that points out the problem the consumer in that area has and how your company solves it. It’s also where you clearly define what your company is and the main services you offer.

It’s important to reference both the location and the services you’re offering as close to the top of the page as possible.

If there are any reasons why your service would apply differently in one location over another, it would be worth mentioning that difference here. This shows you have local knowledge and provides additional context for Google that you actually provide services in that specific location.

What Makes Your Local Company Different

What makes you better at providing this service in this area than your competitors? Put any value propositions your company has in this section and give your potential customers a reason to check you out instead of moving on to the next company.

A List of the Local Services You Offer

This is a CRUCIAL piece of your landing page. This is where you build context for Google that you offer these different services in the specific location you’re writing the page for. 

For instance, if your main term is HVAC in “City”, then you’d want a section that includes your individual HVAC services. So you’d want to talk about how you offer HVAC maintenance services, heating services, cooling services, filter changes, HVAC inspections, etc. 

From this section on your page, you’d likely want to link back to the main pages on your site that talk about each of these individual services. This will help build out a nice internal linking structure to your main services.

How You Work With Local Customers

This is where you give the customer some insight into what it looks like to work with you. How does the process work? How do they get started?

It’s also a great spot to include an additional CTA to contact you to get started.

Location-Specific Case Studies

This is optional, but social proof can never hurt. If you have a case study or testimonial of helping someone in that specific area, you should include that here. 

Anyone further down the sales funnel who finds social proof of how you have helped someone else in their exact area only helps to cement your credibility. 

Location-Specific CTA / Contact Us Form

Here at BKA Content, we like to include forms on each specific landing page so we can track where conversions are coming from. 

You can use the same form on every page (a lead is a lead after all!), but you lose your ability to see which pages are actually driving your conversions. Either way, make sure you make it extremely easy to contact your business!

Local Services FAQ 

This is a MUST-HAVE section to include on main pages on your site to go after “people also ask” type questions and build more location-specific context on the page. It’s especially important in the age of AI overviews and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) to help large language models easily scan your content to get questions/answers.

In the FAQ section, you can cover related questions like how much your service costs in that area, how long it takes to see results in that area, and anything else a customer might ask in regards to the service you are offering.

PRO TIP!: If you aren’t sure how to do the keyword research to find FAQs for your service in the specific area you are writing the SEO Location page for, you can always use ChatGPT. Just enter a prompt that explains to Chat that offer X services in X locations and are creating a page specific to X location. Ask it to compile a list of top FAQs people would ask when searching for X services in X location, which you can then include on your location page.

Location Page SEO Optimization

Once you’ve built your page, it’s time to go back and optimize it. Here are some of the main things to consider when optimizing your new location page for local SEO.

Keyword Optimization

You’ll want to make sure you evenly spread your primary and secondary keywords throughout the page, as well as optimize H2s/H3s, meta tags, title tags, and image alt-text with your keyword variations.

For complete SEO optimization techniques for your location page, you can check out this keyword optimization guide that goes over how to use keywords in your content for SEO.

Internal Linking Strategy

If you have other content on your site relevant to this specific location, adding some internal links back to your new geo-location page will help to show Google that this page is a priority on your site.

Typically, this is where a blog becomes an extremely powerful tool in local SEO. If you write blog posts about specific services in a location, then you could link them back here to boost these pages.

Site Structure / Navigation

As far as where this geo-specific location page will live on your site, it really depends on how your services are set up. For instance, if you’re a national company targeting specific locations with landing pages, you probably have too many locations to include in your main nav. It would be better to have those pages live on your site outside of the navigation to make sure it doesn’t clutter up the site experience for a user.

On the other hand, if you’re an RV park that has a location near specific cities and attractions, you might include an “Areas” section in your main nav with your top 5 location-specific landing pages there.

Any time you can get a page into your main navigation, it’s a clear signal to Google that it’s an important part of your site hierarchy, and it will put more weight on that page. You want to be careful, though, that including a page like this in your main nav makes sense to users coming to your site.

Request Page Indexing

To speed up the process of getting crawled and indexed by Google to see which keywords you rank for, it’s always a good idea to manually request indexing on Google Search Console. 

This can easily be done by logging into your Google Search Console account and doing the following:

• Click on URL inspection on the left-hand side.
• Enter URL of new page in the “Inspect any URL…” textbox at the top of the screen
• When Console shows “URL is not on Google”, click on the “Request Indexing” button.

That’s it! Now you’ve forced an index on the new page and you can start to see Google ranking, AIO citations, and traffic to come in quicker than it would otherwise.

Track Your Geo-Location Pages and Adjust

Once your SEO location-specific page is built, is live, and is indexed, you should always track how it’s performing! Here at BKA, we like to track content at the URL level, per campaign. 

For instance, we’d track all of the URLs that are a part of our local SEO campaign and monitor the overall number of keywords, # of keywords in the top 20, 10, etc. We’d then drill down into which keywords it’s ranking for (i.e., are we ranking for the keywords we intended or for others we didn’t consider?). 

Lastly, we’d also look at Google Analytics traffic coming in for that page to see if it’s getting traction. Typically, we track monthly, but when a page is first built, it’s fun to check more frequently than that, especially if it really takes off early.

Consider Adding More Focused Pages – (Location + Each Individual Service)

This is a pro SEO tip, but if your company offers services that have enough demand for each individual service in each location, you might consider making an individual location page for every service you offer. You’d do this instead of creating a single location page per location (that mentions all your services).

For instance, a lawyer who offers many different practice areas might find that there’s a huge demand for both criminal law as well as divorce law in a specific city. In this instance, you’d want to make an individual page for “Divorce law in X city” as well as “Criminal Law in X city” to create the most location-specific context for Google.

Deciding on whether or not to be this granular in your local SEO landing page creation will really just depend on market research for services and your budget. But, chances are, your competition hasn’t been this granular, so this could be a huge opportunity in your space!

Geo Location Pages – The Local SEO Secret Weapon

While there are a lot of pieces to local SEO and making sure you’re ranked highly on the local map pack as well as the search results, having location-specific landing pages on your site that pair your services with individual locations may be at the top of the list.

Most of the other local SEO campaigns you’ll run will be to boost those core pages on your site and build additional context, but the quality and strategy behind your main location pages will likely determine your future local SEO success.

If you’re looking to learn more about how to do Local SEO, check out our free Digital Marketing Academy community on SKOOL and get access to our latest training courses as well as ongoing support from SEO Strategists!

Or, if you’re ready to kick your local SEO into the next gear, contact us for a free SEO Content audit & consultation to see exactly what your site needs to rank!