Local Pages and Why Every Business Location Needs One
Local pages help your company show up prominently in search results and help customers find the right branch, service, or store, depending on their location. If you’re running a multi-location business, you want customers to be able to come to your website and find information about their nearest branch — not just your business in general.
To provide the best experience for your customers and boost your search rankings on Google, companies should consider creating a local page for every business location.
What Are Local Pages?
Local pages, often called location pages or local landing pages, are web pages designed to show people and search engines where a company operates. They are location-specific web pages that contain information about a single store, restaurant, office, other type of business location, or service area the company covers.
Local pages help your company show up in local search results — like when someone searches for “dentist near me.” These pages often use geolocation data to understand where the site visitor is and show them the most relevant page, giving them a localized experience.
What Type of Business Needs Local Pages?
Local pages are a necessity for any multi-location business. Whether you have two locations or two thousand, local pages help you connect your customers with information about the location closest to them.
Some examples of business types that will benefit from adding local pages to their sites include:
- Chain or franchise restaurants with premises in multiple locations
- Retail brands with multiple stores
- Healthcare companies, such as pharmacies or dentists, with multiple offices
- Trades such as electricians, plumbers, or building maintenance that operate in a specific local area.
Why Your Business Needs Local Pages: The Benefits
Local Pages Are Great for SEO
Well-optimized location pages ensure your business shows up in local search results. They offer great local SEO value — all that on-page content helps keep your business at the top of organic search results. They do this by helping you target localized search terms like “pizza near me” or “best pizza restaurant San Diego”.
However, local landing pages can harm your SEO efforts if they’re not properly optimized. If you’ve got mass-produced local pages that effectively regurgitate the same content but just swap a few place names, they won’t offer the SEO boost you’re after. So, to reap the benefits, make sure the content on your local pages is tailored for each location.
Local pages can be a great source of internal links to your website. You can often get links to these pages from numerous local business directories, and local media and news sites will often add links to your pages over time.
Local landing pages also offer ways to improve link equity on your site by linking to other important pages on your website. This helps search engines like Google find and index all the pages on your site, as it can follow links between them all. If you work with Chatmeter to build your local pages, you can be confident they are optimized with the correct schema markup, XML sitemaps, and meta tags.
Local Pages Improve the Customer Journey
Local pages help create a branded customer journey from search to purchase. If a customer finds your site on a local directory listing (like your Google Business Profile, Yelp, or Facebook page), when they click through to your site, they expect to land on a page that’s relevant to their location.
So, rather than linking to your home page on these directory listings, you should add a link to your local landing page instead. Little details like this go a long way in the mind of the consumer.
Local Pages Are Optimized for Voice Search
Local pages are a simple and effective way for brands to deliver local answers to consumers no matter how they choose to search.
Voice search is growing in popularity: A study by UpCity found that 50% of American consumers use voice search every day, with 16% of them specifically using voice search for local “near me” search queries. And when performing a voice search, 60% of voice search answers come from the featured snippet result, according to research by Semrush.
Optimizing your local landing pages can help you land that featured snippet placement, especially for local search queries. The more featured snippets your brand earns, the more likely you are to appear as a voice search result.
Local Pages Offer a Source of Truth
Local pages act as a source of truth both for customers and citations on sites like Google, Yelp, Bing, or similar directory sites.
However, keeping your online information accurate for all of your locations is a lot easier said than done. User contributions (like suggested edits or photos) can lead to the spread of inaccurate information. But as local pages are controlled by your business, they act as a single source of truth across every location.
How to Create a Local Page for Your Business
To create a local landing page for your business, start by creating a new page on your website. Then, there are several elements you should add to optimize it for search performance and ensure you’re providing a great user experience.
Localize the URL for Each Page
If you’re creating multiple local pages for each business location, consider the URL structure for those pages. Adding local keywords to your URLs can help improve the pages’ search rankings. If you include both your service and location in the URL, that provides a clear signal to help Google (and other search engines) understand what the page is about.
A good way to structure your URLs is to follow a parent and child page structure:
Alternatively, if you’re a small business that only operates in a few different locations, you may not need to add that extra layer to your site navigation and could use the following URL structure:
However, this makes it harder to get your service into the site URL. It will also be more difficult to scale over time — for example, if you add more services or locations. You could end up with a very flat website structure, which is harder for users (and Google’s crawlers) to navigate.
Include Relevant Localized Content
Local landing pages should include localized content that answers common questions consumers may have before visiting the business location. This includes all the information that varies between your different business locations, such as:
- Address
- Phone number
- Business hours
- Accepted payment types
- Directions
- Departments
- Accessibility information
- Exterior photos
- Interior photos
- Information about products or services
- Location-specific promotions
- Social media links
- Local reviews specific to that location
- FAQs
- Online ordering information
- Appointment booking
Some local pages like to take their localized content one step further by adding things like store manager bios, event information, or links to other nearby locations.
Add Geolocation and Interactive Maps
Adding geolocation tools to local landing pages creates a seamless journey for customers looking for local information.
Interactive maps help customers plan their trips, get directions, and even work out the best place to park when they visit. They can sit on their couch at home, find your website by searching for services near them, and easily work out how to get to your location.
Geolocation means your site automatically works out a user’s location (if they choose to allow location sharing). So, if you have an interactive map (like Google Maps) on your local page, it can show the nearest locations to your site visitor.
Add Page Links to Directory Listings
Once your local pages are live, add the links to local directory listings (like Yelp, Google Business Profile, and Foursquare).
If people search for your service or business on these sites, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to learn more about your business and make a visit or purchase. Adding these links gives them a clear next step from finding your directory listing to visiting your site.
How to Keep Your Local Pages Up to Date
To keep your local pages up to date, you have two main options:
- Manage them manually
- Automate a lot of the process with a tool like Chatmeter
If you’re a small multi-location business (e.g., with less than 10 locations), you might be able to keep your local landing pages updated manually. This would involve making changes to your local page, then manually visiting listing directories like your Google Business Profile and making those same changes there.
However, this can become very time-consuming pretty quickly — especially if you have to make changes frequently or as your business scales into new locations.
For businesses with more locations, or if you just want to save that manual work, a tool like Chatmeter can help. You can generate multiple local pages at once, helping you establish your local search presence quickly and efficiently.
Chatmeter also has API partnerships with leading search engines, online directories, and maps, so when you update your local page, those changes are automatically pushed to your local listings without you needing to update them manually.
Easily Add, Update, and Manage Your Local Pages
Local pages help you make a great first impression on potential customers — but only if they’re accurate and up to date.
Chatmeter helps multi-location businesses create and manage their local pages — like A&W. A&W has hundreds of stores across the U.S. but was missing out on valuable foot traffic by not showing up prominently in local search results. Since using ChatMeter’s Local Pages, they’ve seen a 15% increase in page-1 appearances on Google, which has driven a 13% uplift in click-to-call actions from search results.
Find out more about how we’ve helped A&W implement and manage their local page strategy. Or, if you want to learn more about Chatmeter’s Local Pages, click here to book a demo and see how we make building local pages easy.