Transcript
Joe Troyer: I have a client with over 80 different locations. Do you suggest creating an interior page, on his website. He’s asking for and adding for each location, adding the NAP, the name, address, phone number and embedding a Google map, et cetera, to rank for a local search. If yes, is there a quick way to create these pages? Do you have any other suggestions?
Joe Troyer: Guys, I call these local city pages. When you pick up a local SEO client, when you pick up a local marketing client, when you run a even a pay per call campaign and you’re ranking in Google, and that’s one of the ways that you’re going to drive traffic, you want a 100% should be building out local city pages. All that these are folks, are pages designed to rank for city plus or location. City/location plus keyword phrase.
Joe Troyer: If your client’s business for example, is in West Palm Beach, you also would want to rank for their surrounding cities, not just West Palm Beach. You’d want to rank for Jupiter and Juno. You’d want to rank for North Palm Beach. You’d want to rank for Riviera Beach. You’d want to rank for Lake Park. The thing is is that everybody’s going to be competing for that big city. The main city so to speak, the city with all of the population.
Joe Troyer: One of the things that we do whenever we run any type of local search campaign, is we 100% build these out. It can be a very easy win for us to start ranking these pages. Yes, we 100% do this. In fact, I would say that when it comes to local search campaigns, these are high priority. These are things that don’t take a lot of work and will get a big return on investment. And even when a site is already established, and you’re not starting from scratch, these are a win too because if a site’s already established, it already has authority, to rank for when you’re already ranking for West Palm Beach, personal injury attorney, for example, if you’re already ranking for that, you’re going to be able to rank for a city of 10, 20, 30, 50,000 people very, very easy because you already put in the legwork to rank for West Palm Beach.
Joe Troyer: No matter if it’s a brand new site, or it’s an existing site that’s already got good rankings, it doesn’t matter. Either way, you should 100% be implementing this and it should be a high priority for any type of local search campaigns.
Joe Troyer: When it comes to these, there’s lots of what you call, page builders out there. And what I mean by that is, you can put in some spin syntax and you can put in some cities and you can tell the tools what you want it to do and it’ll go spin up a 100, 200, a 1,000, 5,000, 50,000 even pages on a WordPress install and it will dynamically create all of that content.
Joe Troyer: What I want you to ask yourself though is, does that look natural? Does that look natural? Does it look natural for all those pages to be billed out and to be so similar? And folks, at the end of the day, the answer is no. It’s a 100% a resounding no. If it’s a pay per call site guys and you want to be aggressive with it, that’s fine. But if it’s a client site, in this scenario, I have a client with over 80 different locations and the question is, is there a quick way? Is kind of one of the parts. There’s really no quick way to do it legitimately and to do it well.
Joe Troyer: If I’m doing this for a client, I’m going to doing it legitimately, I’m going to be doing it well and I’m not going to be too aggressive with it. And the reason that I’m not going to be too aggressive is I don’t ever want anything to backfire on a client of mine that is paying me to help them with their marketing.
Joe Troyer: For those of you guys joining live, does that make sense? That make sense to you? Instead, what I would do is, I would educate the customer and why this is an amazing ploy. Why this is an amazing tactic. And how we’re going to help them implement it and I would talk up the value of this and then I would stretch that out over a certain amount of months and make that part of your marketing plan for them. Bring them up to speed. Don’t hide that you’re going to do it and all of a sudden boop, 80 pages are up. I wouldn’t do that. Show them the value of what you’re going to do is. Get them to buy into that plan. And then drip that out.
Joe Troyer: I wouldn’t, to recap here, I would not build these out fast or in a mass page/post type of situation with a paying client. If you know the risks and it’s your site and you’re a pay per call kind of ninja or affiliate marketing ninja and you want to do this as part of your greater portfolio. You got a lot of assets that are very white hat and you want to push some assets into kind of gray hat or more aggressive, it’s not even really gray hat. Just more aggressive techniques, then go for it. It’s like the stock market and it’s like investing. And it’s hedging your bets and having that diverse portfolio. No problem. I just believe that if you’re helping consult with a local business or any type of business, that you shouldn’t be uberly aggressive on their behalf.
Joe Troyer: We 100% want to have a page for each location and we want to have a name, address and phone number on each. We definitely want to embed a Google map as well. What I’ll do is I’ll share with you guys kind of my template in how I do this.
Joe Troyer: I’m typically going to, I guess kind of just rule of thumb, in a best case scenario, I’m going to build out a page like locations. If there’s going to be a lot of location pages, I’m going to build out a locations page. This page is going to simply have a list of all locations. And then is going to link out to each and every one of my location pages. A lot of people, what I see them do is they build out all the location pages. It’s like slash, West Palm Beach, slash Jupiter, slash North Palm Beach, slash next city, slash next city. But then they never build any inbound links to all those pages.
Joe Troyer: What that means is that they end up with pages on their website, city pages, that are all optimized for Google but they don’t have internal links to them. They’re never going to get indexed unless you build links to them and if you build some links and links fall off, and Google goes and keeps crawling your site, like they always do, it’s going to drop out of the index. And if it drops out of the index, it means it’s no longer going to rank anymore.
Joe Troyer: You never want any abandoned or aborted pages where you’re no longer linking to one of those pages. I’ve seen a lot of people make location pages that have no links to them. There is no locations page with a list of all the locations and links to them. You always want to have something like this. If you have 200 locations, you probably want to group these into maybe parts of the country. The northeast branches, the southeast branches, the Midwest, the northwest, the north I don’t know, the southwest. But you could break these into four or five different location pages then if you wanted. You don’t want this to look unnatural, I guess.
Joe Troyer: Lots of big corporate kind of corporate businesses do this. They have location finders that list all of their 5,000 locations across the United States. It’s not a problem doing it. It’s just you want it to look natural. You’re going to do that.
Joe Troyer: You’re going to make then, pages that are slash city. You’re going to have your domain.com and your customer’s domain.com/city. Mypersonalinjuryattorney.com/northpalmbeach. And guys, I wouldn’t put any hyphens in there. I just make it nice and simple in a perfect world. Then on that page guys, I’m going to optimize this page for typically three to four, I would say like tier one keyword phrases. This can include multiple variations and small tweaks to the keyword phrases that we want to go after but really we’re only going to be able to get in three to four major keywords.
Joe Troyer: In terms of personal injury, we could go after city and personal injury. We could go after city and truck accident. We could go after car accident. Tractor trailer accident. We’re at three variations there. We could optimize one title tag to be very optimized and to rank for all of those just by simply fitting them all into the title tag.
Joe Troyer: From there then, what I would do is I would have, I’d have an H, probably an H3 for each of the keyword phrases. And then I’d have a 150 to probably 200 words about each one of these. About each headline. Lastly, I’d build in some images and I would sprinkle these throughout the pages and these images build in or add, let’s say add instead of build in, it makes a little more sense. Add images to page and we’re going to say, “Add optimized images to page.”
Joe Troyer: We’re going to add alt text in there. They’re going to be relevant to car accidents in the area and we’re going to geo tag them. And we’re going to geo tag them folks, to the location that we’re going after, the city that we’re going after. Then we’ll want to include the name, address and phone number for that location and then embed a Google map as well. If we’re going after three to four keyword phrases, we’re going to have three to four H1s and a paragraph under each one of them of text talking about the services they offer and what they do and why they’re better than everybody else.
Joe Troyer: This is exactly how I build out my local city pages. And whenever I bring on a client and we’re going to build out local city pages, I kind of build out a template. Our team spends 10 or 15 minutes in a meeting, coming up with the template. What keyword phrases are we going to go after? What are the template variations? What are all the cities that we’re going to do it for? What kind of images do we want to use? What kind of relevant photos could we add? We’ll take the client’s photos, see what they got on their site and then we’ll go hunting for other photos.
Joe Troyer: Then we go to pull in the name, address and phone number and we’ll want to embed a Google map. But we’ll do all that, research real quick together and kind of come up with a couple of variations of this template and then we’ll roll out, like we talked about. We’ll add in three or four of these location pages every month as a deliverable to our client. So that it isn’t 80 locations going in overnight.
Joe Troyer: I hope that this makes sense to you guys. This is exactly how we build out local city pages. I’ve done a case study in the past guys where we added quite literally $15,000 of business to a local business, a local service based business in quite literally 45 days just by adding a couple of local city pages.
Joe Troyer: This technique is uber, uber powerful and you guys should be doing this as part of your deliverable if you guys are working in the local SEO kind of market, so to speak.
