Location/city landing pages are among the most complex and important of all topics within the whole subject of local business content marketing. Whether you have just two locations or thousands of them, like the Lowe’s enterprise, you’ll need to put a great deal of time and thought into how to present this information to the public. Your study of this particular area of work can make a tremendous difference for your business. This section will attempt to answer the most common questions about these assets.
What are the two main types of city landing pages?
Location landing pages are pages on your site that market specific physical locations of your business. For example, if you have an office in Anaheim, one in Lakewood, and another in Garden Grove, your website can have a unique page for each branch.
City landing pages are pages on your website that represent locations you serve, despite not having a physical branch there. They are also sometimes called “service area pages.” For example, if staff from your office in Anaheim also serve Lakewood and Garden Grove, you can decide to develop unique pages for each of these service communities.
How should I display these pages on my website?
You have multiple options. If you have five or fewer locations, you can easily link to their respective pages from a section of your home page and from a tab in your main menu labeled “store locations.” You may also include them in the footer area of your website.
If you have more locations, however, you are likely to need either a store locator widget, like the one shown above, or a more basic store locations page that lists the links to all of your locations in alphabetical order or via some other sensible taxonomy. It is not a best practice to put all of these links in your menu, on your home page, or in your footer. If you are choosing a store locator widget, you should make every effort to ensure that the pages it contains can be indexed by Google. If your product excludes this due to the way in which the pages are generated, create a sitemap page on your website that links directly to the pages so that they can be crawled by search engines.
How many location/city landing pages can I have?
You will have as many location pages as necessary to represent each of your physical branches. Do not attempt to build location landing pages for fictitious offices, P.O. boxes, or other non-locations, or you may risk inconveniencing real-world customers.
The answer to the number of city/service area landing pages you should create is more complex. Often, service area businesses wonder if they should create a landing page for every city in a state in hopes of gaining more business that way. The danger of going with this approach is that Google has warned that websites that publish immense quantities of low-quality city landing pages may be viewed as using a tactic dubbed “doorway pages,” which violates their guidelines. A safer approach will be to create a set of landing pages for the key towns and cities you serve near your physical address, rather than attempting to write a page for every possible locale. If you do happen to serve a very large area, you may be better off indicating that with a custom map showing your statewide or multi-state service area rather than with city landing pages.
The more pages you create, the more important the question becomes about how to differentiate each page from its peers. Remember, you are creating these pages for people, not just search engines, and you must ask yourself whether you really have something unique to say on these pages before deciding whether they truly contribute to site quality and user experience.