Nowadays, mentioning your town and surrounding areas is insufficient to gain new customers beyond your town. Your website needs Service Area Pages (SAP), which are specific pages for each location you offer your services. Each of these pages must contain unique content: Local SEO Content. If you create SAPs with Local SEO Content, you stand a better chance of ranking in different towns.
Local SEO Content from an On-Page SEO Perspective
SAP Keyword
Every SAP requires its own keyword. Your keyword is likely to be your business type (driving school), occupation (driving instructor) or service (driving lessons), sometimes all three, followed by the area that you operate.
Let’s say the driving school is based in Islington and wants to expand west to Camden. The keywords would be “driving school Camden”, “driving instructor Camden”, and “driving lessons Camden”.
Once you’ve got a list, the best way to check search volume is to use Google’s Keyword Planner. The keyword with the highest search volume will be your main keyword; the others will be your secondary keywords.
Service Area Description
The service description text is the most important element of your SAP; it must be unique to any other page on your website and your competition. Not only that, it must be relevant to the area and at least 500 words.
The easiest way to create unique, relevant and large amounts of content is to use statistics about the local:
- Demographics
- Economy
- Transportation
- Schools
- Climate
- Population
- Business Climate
Emphasis is placed on the word relevant because statistics unrelated to your services are not going to help rank or convert your website’s traffic. For example, a gutter cleaner should include statistics about the local climate and how it affects gutters in the area.
In addition, they could allocate some of the service description text to landlords by including information about the number of rental properties in the area at risk.
Images
Many service-based businesses have the opportunity to display before and after photos on their website. Images are a great way to communicate situations and results; they also build trust amongst potential customers leading to higher conversion rates.
Images taken on a smartphone with the location-enabled contain the coordinate of where the photo was taken. Uploading these images to the relevant SAPs is an excellent signal for Google to rank that page higher for the keywords.
Case Studies
Creating mini case studies relevant to each SAP adds additional Local SEO Content. Using the before and after images, you could explain the problem and why it needed fixing, the solution you provided, the impact and benefits.
You can take it a step further by using more locally relevant information. Using the gutter cleaning example, mentioning the common birds in the area gives you extra points. However, it shouldn’t be repeated from the service description.
News Stories
Similar to case studies, paraphrasing related news stories can support SAPs. Local news writes to residents, so if your business doesn’t serve residents with home-related services, you’ll have little luck with news stories. Even if you do, though, the story may not concern your SAP, so it may be worth ignoring unless you’re struggling with content ideas.
Testimonials
SAPs are pages that you not only want to rank high on Google but convert as many visitors as you can. Like images, local testimonials support SAPs performance in the search engines. Most businesses have a dedicated testimonial or review page, which leads to duplicate content across the website if copied onto other pages. Instead, each SAP should have its own testimonial or review section from customers in that area.
Local SEO Content from an On-Page and Off-Page SEO Perspective
The next three tips for Local SEO Content is only relevant if you are building Local SEO Backlinks. If you haven’t read that blog post, go ahead and read it now, then come back to this one. Otherwise, keep reading to know how to add more Local SEO Content.
Partnerships
On your SAPs, briefly talk about your partnerships with other local businesses in that area. The best partnerships are with complementary businesses. Continuing with the gutter cleaner example, they could partner with a roofer, tiler, builder, electrician, plumber, or painter or decorate, perhaps all of them. Not only would the gutter cleaner be supporting other businesses, but their website would also have additional relevant information about home-related services.
Events
It’s usually relatively difficult to find industry-specific events locally, so the best option is to refer to community events in the town for each SAP. Whether you sponsor the event or not, you can still mention it on this page because it may still be relevant.
Sponsorships
Sponsoring a local sports club is great to mention on your SAPs. Ideally, each SAP mentions a different sports club and a short description. It could be that you say you sponsor a team’s kit, the match ball, whatever you sponsor, and a link to the club’s website.
Summary
Every SAP must have unique content that’s relevant to the area. There are eight tactics you can use to create unique and relevant Local SEO Content for each of your SAPs. These include keywords, service descriptions, images, case studies, news stories, testimonials, partnerships and sponsorships.