Does your company service multiple areas or have individual branches/dealers in various regions? If so, you might consider creating unique content for each location through separate pages on your website.
By doing this, you can help improve your local search engine optimization (SEO) and give customers an opportunity to familiarize themselves with your neighborhood team. Likewise, this can be an excellent strategy for offering a personalized experience based on what each location provides.
Here’s what you need to know about localized content and why this is an excellent digital marketing approach.
Why Do You Need to Localize Your Content?
Before getting into our best tips for creating individual pages for your locations, let’s discuss why it is important to localize your content.
To start, localized pages make it easier to have a consistent local reach across multiple markets. When someone is looking for a particular item in a specific city or region and types into Google what they’re looking for (or the words near me), you want them to be able to locate you as soon as possible. Using this type of segmentation on your website makes it easier to rank in these specific areas.
Likewise, individual business pages allow each location to showcase what they offer, including staff members and other specific elements about that portion of the overall company. In some cases, you might have different stock at each location, which would be important to notate on a portion of your site specific to that location.
Finally, there’s the content marketing aspect to consider. The more content you have on your website, the larger it is and easier to find. Individual business pages make this possible.
5 Tips for Creating Individual Business Location Pages
Of course, you don’t want to just sit down and create a bunch of different pages with the same content across multiple spots on your website. Instead, it is better to have a plan for this strategy and understand the varying aspects that go along with it. Here are five tips for how to localize a website.
1. Know When to Localize a Website
It’s important to understand when to localize a website. General industry standards include creating branch pages when you’ve expanded to three or more different markets.
2. Going Global? Think About Language
Perhaps your business doesn’t just operate in multiple cities but instead across multiple countries. In that case, you would want to consider adding various pages with the local dialect or native language on them.
Not only does this appeal to your regional clientele, but it also makes it easier to rank for local SEO factors and non-English keywords, too. However, it is best to use someone comfortable with this type of translation, as many computer translation programs don’t always effectively communicate the correct meanings of certain industry-specific terms.
3. Consider the Information Necessary for Each Location Page
The next step is to consider what information you need to add to each individual branch page. In general, you’ll want to include the location contact information, any management information, and content that mentions the name of the city they’re in.
You can also take this one step further, too. Maybe your business has offices in multiple major metropolitan markets or states. Consider creating blurbs or blog posts that talk about local happenings, how workers at those locations are giving back to the community, or whatever else makes sense for your given niche.
4. Create Special Offer Landing Pages
Another aspect of localizing your website includes special offers. Perhaps you have an upcoming marketing promotion that you want to be able to track by regional area. You can start by creating landing pages for each individual location.
The great thing about this is that you can diversify various aspects of the page by the unique features of that given area. For example, a branch in Dallas might have a photo of the skyline in the background, while one in Phoenix could show a desert sunset and saguaro cacti. With your text, you could mention specific needs for those in the localized climate you’re discussing. There are lots of different ways to make this work well for your business.
5. Create a Personalized Experience
If your business has brick-and-mortar branch locations, taking the extra step to make each segment a personalized experience for your website visitors is important. Include elements like Google Maps to help get them to your exact address, use keywords that make the most sense in the given area, and think of ways to make it easier on a micro scale for your customers to reach your staff.
The more personalized you can make the user experience (UX) with branch pages, the better response and result you’ll have. Plus, it makes it easier for your customer to know exactly what to expect when directly interacting with your company.
What To Avoid with Website Localization
While localization is an important part of any company’s multi-branch marketing strategy, there are a few aspects that you definitely want to avoid. In fact, using these tactics can cause you to miss out on significant traffic or make it harder to rank as a company. Here are a few tips regarding what not to do for website localization.
Keyword Stuffing Pages
Localizing your website with branch pages does not mean stuffing it with city or suburb name keywords. This is generally frowned upon as a bad practice and can make it harder to rank among your competition in the local SERPs.
Instead, adopt a strategy of sparingly adding new content to various pages with one or two mentions of a specific region or keyword. This is usually more than enough to let your audience know where you’re located and indicate to search engine crawlers where they should categorize your content locally.
Completely Separate Domain Names
When it comes to localizing your website, some businesses create completely separate domain names for each branch. This is not a good idea, as it means you’re essentially competing against yourself for certain keywords on a national or larger regional level.
Instead, opt to build out a main company website with localized sections and content pages that further explain what you do at each of those satellite offices. Not only does this make more sense from an SEO and content marketing aspect, but it is also easier for customers as they can find what they’re looking for without having to jump to a completely different website.
Skip Google My Business or Other Local Directories
In addition to localizing the content on your website with branch pages, you’ll also want to remember to use Google My Business and directories to help drive traffic to those segments of your website. For example, your listing on Google My Business for your branch in Arkansas should link to your branch page yourcompanyname.com/littlerock.
Local directories are an amazing way to create backlinks for your website and provide authority for your overall page. The end result? Stronger off-page SEO and better Google and Bing rankings.
Wrap Up: Location Pages for Your Website
If your business has multiple offices or locations, it is a good idea to create individual pages for each business location. By doing this, you can improve your search optimization, customize content to meet your customer’s needs, and make it easier for each team to stand out on their own.
Are you looking for an agency that offers website localization service options? Please contact our expert team at ER Marketing today for details.
