There are now some 3.5 billion people across the planet who are lucky enough to have internet access. That’s a whopping 45% or so of the population. The advent of the world wide web has led to unprecedented globalization, but as businesses expand their reach, they’re also learning about the power of local SEO.
Most people may not care where their mail-order flip-flops come from, but when they need an exterminator or want to try a new Mexican restaurant for dinner, their Google searches become geographically specific.
- Half of mobile users who conduct a local search visit a nearby store within 24 hours
- Searches using keywords such as “near me tonight” or “near me today” have grown by 900% over the last two years
Clearly, people value convenience and urgency. For businesses with broad service areas encompassing many different cities, it’s vital to accommodate consumers and harness the power of local SEO, which includes creating local landing pages and city pages for SEO.
Turns out, that’s easier said than done (but stay tuned — we have a solution).
The Burden of Creating Local Landing Pages in Bulk
There are two types of businesses that typically need a massive amount of local landing pages:
- Physical Location-Based Businesses: Companies like Avis/Budget and 1-800-Got-Junk with a national presence and brick-and-mortar branches in many different locations
- Comparison Shopping Sites: Orbitz, Zillow, Uber and Indeed offer everything from flights to ride shares to job listings, all of which are geographically sensitive
These companies often turn to third-party content creation services, which rely on teams of freelancers to generate content for each relevant city or other location. The process is intricate: meet requirements for quality and quantity while adhering to internal SEO mandates and other key directives.
Things often turn problematic when it’s time to scale. Suddenly, the freelance teams can either maintain quality or churn out quadruple the content, but they can’t do both. You should never have to choose between content you can be proud of and the amount of content you need to grow.
Struggling With Subpar Deliverables
As your contractors work furiously to keep up with demand and quality slips, there’s one person left holding the bag — you. Internal SEO and content teams are forced to pore over each and every page your content partner sends over and make revisions. That’s not so bad when there are only five or 10 orders in the mix; it’s an intolerable and completely unrealistic time-suck of a task when those 10 orders become 1,000.
Even if you have the personnel bandwidth, it’s unlikely you have the lead time. All that post-delivery editing eats away at the workday until you’re questioning what you’re even paying for. If you spend a full week or two editing freelance content before you can publish it, what’s the benefit of outsourcing?
ALSO: Can You Outsource Landing Page Copywriting? 7 Things to Consider First
Overly Generic Content
Lest you entertain the thought of creating one landing page and simply swapping out the city names, think again. Google is smarter than any of us are probably comfortable with, and its algorithms look for relevancy and originality. They’re looking for natural inclusion of semantically related terms like neighborhood names, tourist attractions, local businesses and the like. If you don’t have those terms covered in engaging copy, you’re unlikely to rank well.
And if you don’t have those things covered, your user experience isn’t going to be great. You likely won’t be providing searchers the info they want, and they’re gonna bounce. That’s going to hurt your behavioral metrics which can lead to RankBrain reducing your search rankings, but more than that, it’s not good to have all your traffic bouncing. No leads are earned that way.
Rely on copy and paste, and you’ll sacrifice rankings as well as user experience — two things increasingly linked.
We encourage the use of a template to create consistent layouts from page to page and city to city, but within that template, our writers create completely unique copy relevant to each location and company branch.
Messing With Missed Deadlines
A missed deadline isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s the tiny snowball that turns into an entrepreneurial avalanche. If you get your landing pages late, you can’t build your website on time, which affects your launch, puts a snag in your marketing plans and derails sales indefinitely.
When you’re ready to scale, you need a content team that can keep pace right alongside you. Anything else is a recipe for wasted resources and frustration.
Disjointed Company Details
Google prizes NAP consistency — that means displaying the name, address and phone number of each local store the same way from page to page. It doesn’t much matter if you switch between “St.” and “Street,” but overall, location data should be written identically across the board.
The aforementioned template once again comes in handy here. We can match NAP formats for sites such as Google My Business or go with your in-house preferences. We’ll also line up other content sections, too, keeping subheads consistent and making it easy for consumers to skim and find the information they need quickly.
The Crowd Content Solution
We have one central mission: Deliver publish-ready content our clients can use ASAP.
To meet our goal and give clients the content they deserve, we start every project with a calibration stage. We give our writers your parameters, let them work their magic, double check for consistency and then pass it back to you for approval. If we need to make adjustments, we will and then add those changes to the project brief used for the duration of the project.
ALSO – Get The Complete Guide to Creating City Pages For SEO
Additionally, we push each local landing page through three levels of production — write > edit > QA. No matter how big the batch or how lofty the project, we know that every order from the first to the last always sounds like the initial (approved) batch.
Our unique approach addresses a plethora of pain points, solving common content creation challenges along the way:
- Tired of overly generic content? We work with a list of high-quality data sources from which our writers consistently pull great local info. Whether you need statistics on the population of local retirement communities or want to reference the average monthly cost of pool maintenance, we’ll work together to identify and agree on authoritative, accurate references.
- Can’t afford missed deadlines? We don’t blame you. Crowd Content’s detailed project management system keeps every aspect of our team on track, ensuring deliveries are met regardless of scale.
- Concerned with informational organization? We work with our clients up front to get pertinent data and then organize it in a spreadsheet and use our QA step to check that writers (and editors) are including the right details in the right places.
Ready to ramp up your business and need help with local SEO? Contact our team, and we’ll help you get started.
