Category: SEO Management
If your business serves Salisbury and the towns around it, you’ve probably wondered whether it’s worth having a page on your website for each one. A page for Amesbury, a page for Wilton, a page for Downton, and so on.
It can be. Done well, a location page tells Google, and your customers, that you genuinely work in that area, and gives you a chance to appear when someone there searches for what you do. Done badly, it’s a waste of time at best and a risk at worst.
The difference comes down to one question. Would this page be useful to someone who lives in that town, if search engines didn’t exist?
What doesn’t work
The most common approach is to take your main Salisbury page, copy it, and change the town name. “We’re the leading electricians in Amesbury.” “We’re the leading electricians in Wilton.” Same text, same photos, same everything, apart from one word.
Google has been ignoring pages like this for years. Its spam policies specifically mention doorway pages, which are pages created mainly to rank for slightly different searches, all leading to the same place. A handful of near-identical town pages is unlikely to get your website penalised, but it’s very unlikely to help either. And a large number of them, or pages for towns you don’t really serve, can do real harm.
It also doesn’t do much for customers. Someone in Downton reading a page that’s obviously the same as every other town page isn’t going to feel you know their area.
What a good location page includes
A good location page is built around the work you actually do in that place. That means it can only be written by someone who knows the business and the area.
Start with the specifics. What jobs have you done in that town? A kitchen fitter might describe a recent project in one of the Victorian terraces in Wilton, or a barn conversion outside Downton. An accountant might talk about the farms and small businesses they look after around Amesbury. These details are what make the page worth reading, and they’re the one thing a competitor can’t copy.
Then think about what’s genuinely different about working there. Are the properties in that area a particular age or style that affects the work? Is there a common problem, such as older wiring in a certain type of house or parking issues on narrow village streets? How quickly can you get there, and do you have regular customers nearby?
Real photos help enormously. Pictures of work you’ve done in that area, ideally with the customer’s permission, are far more convincing than stock images. So are reviews or comments from customers in that town.
Finally, make it easy for someone to get in touch. A clear phone number, a simple way to ask for a quote, and a reminder of what you do and where you’re based.
Only write pages for places you really serve
It’s tempting to create a page for every town within thirty miles. Don’t. Write pages for the places where you genuinely work and want more work, and where you have something real to say.
For most Salisbury businesses that might mean a handful of pages, perhaps Amesbury, Wilton, Downton and one or two others, rather than dozens. Five good pages will do far more than fifty thin ones.
If there are towns you serve occasionally but don’t have much to say about, mention them on your main service or contact page instead. A simple sentence saying which areas you cover is useful to customers and perfectly fine with Google.
Make the pages part of your website
Location pages work best when they’re properly connected to the rest of your website. Link to them from your main service pages and from any page listing the areas you cover. Link from each location page back to the relevant service pages. If you’ve written a case study or blog post about a job in a particular town, link that to the location page too.
Give each page a clear title and description that mention the town and the service, written for a person rather than stuffed with keywords. “Electrician in Amesbury | Local, Reliable, Fully Qualified” is fine. “Electrician Amesbury Electricians Amesbury Electrical Services Amesbury” is not.
Don’t forget your Google Business Profile
Location pages help your website appear in the normal search results for those towns, but the map results work differently. They depend heavily on where your business is actually based, and a location page won’t change that.
So keep your Google Business Profile up to date as well, with the towns you serve added as service areas if you visit customers. The two work together: your profile helps you in the map results, and your location pages help you in the results underneath. We covered some of the basics of local listings in our local SEO tips.
Be patient, and keep them up to date
Like most SEO work, location pages take time to have an effect. Google needs to find them, and it needs to decide they’re worth showing. That usually takes weeks rather than days.
Once they’re live, add to them. A new photo, a new review or a short note about a recent job keeps the page useful and shows Google it’s being looked after.
If you’d like help working out which location pages are worth writing, and what to put on them, the friendly, experienced team at Spire Digital help businesses in Salisbury and the surrounding area with search engine optimisation (SEO). Give us a call on 01722 320 500.