Please give a warm welcome to our friend Tom Capper as he shares a 4-point process for determining whether local pages are something you should explore in this week's Whiteboard Friday! A 4-step process to deciding whether you need local pages I'm talking about conventional, 10 blue links rankings but for local pages, and by local pages I mean pages from a national or international business that are location-specific. For this purpose, I'm going to talk through an SEO job board as an example. If you search for "SEO jobs" now, like if you open a new tab in your browser, you're probably going to find that a lot of local orientated results appear because that is an implicitly local term and actually an awful lot of terms are using local data to affect rankings now, which does affect how you should consider your rank tracking, but we'll get on to that later. SEO jobs, maybe SEO vacancies, that kind of thing, those are all going to be going into your implicitly local terms bucket. That's going to be things like SEO jobs in Seattle, SEO jobs in London, and so on. Examine the SERPs to see whether local-specific pages are ranking Now we've categorized our keywords. That's an example of a local page, because this is a national business with a location-specific page. If you're going to be pulling a lot of data of this type, maybe from stats or something like that, obviously tracking from the locations that you're mentioning, where you are mentioning locations, then you're probably going to want to categorize these at scale rather than going through one at a time. I've got Local Business, Local Page, and National Page result types.
Does it make sense for you to create local-specific pages on your website? Regardless of whether you own or market a local business, it may make sense to compete for space in the organic SERPs using local pages. Please give a warm welcome to our friend Tom Capper as he shares a 4-point process for determining whether local pages are something you should explore in this week’s Whiteboard Friday!
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Video Transcription
Hello, Moz fans. Welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. I’m Tom Capper. I’m a consultant at Distilled, and today I’m going to be talking to you about whether you need local pages. Just to be clear right off the bat what I’m talking about, I’m not talking about local rankings as we normally think of them, the local map pack results that you see in search results, the Google Maps rankings, that kind of thing.
A 4-step process to deciding whether you need local pages
I’m talking about conventional, 10 blue links rankings but for local pages, and by local pages I mean pages from a national or international business that are location-specific. What are some examples of that? Maybe on Indeed.com they would have a page for jobs in Seattle. Indeed doesn’t have a bricks-and-mortar premises in Seattle, but they do have a page that is about jobs in Seattle.
You might get a similar thing with flower delivery. You might get a similar thing with used cars, all sorts of different verticals. I think it can actually be quite a broadly applicable tactic. There’s a four-step process I’m going to outline for you. The first step is actually not on the board. It’s just doing some keyword research.
1. Know (or discover) your key transactional terms
I haven’t done much on that here because hopefully you’ve already done that. You already know what your key transactional terms are. Because whatever happens you don’t want to end up developing location pages for too many different keyword types because it’s gong to bloat your site, you probably just need to pick one or two key transactional terms that you’re going to make up the local variants of. For this purpose, I’m going to talk through an SEO job board as an example.
2. Categorize your keywords as implicit, explicit, or near me and log their search volumes
We might have “SEO jobs” as our core head term. We then want to figure out what the implicit, explicit, and near me versions…
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