Location pages are crucial when it comes to making your business visible to potential customers. Think of a local search like a city street, and your business location page as a sign. Without a sign out front, your business will be indistinguishable from the rest of the storefronts.
The same applies to a location page. It doesn't matter how relevant your business is to the needs of the person searching. It's highly unlikely that a person will find your business by accident if you don't announce your presence in an area.
What Are Location Pages?
A location page is must-have, especially if you run a business with multiple locations. Location pages act as vehicles, carrying relevant information about a business to the people who are searching for that information. Imagine that your business sells shoes, and you have a few locations before opening a new one in Cleveland, OH. Until you build a location page, people searching for "Cleveland shoe store" are unlikely to find you among the results.
Once you make a location page, a search for "Cleveland shoe store" will bring up your business location page among the relevant search results, spring boarding your brand into relevance in the area. *You will need to use a business listing management service.
It's clear that location pages can make a huge difference, but do we know why?
The Importance of SEO
The page that returns results from a simple search on an engine like Google or Bing is called a search engine results page, or a SERP. For any single search, there are thousands of SERPs listing results, but the order of these results aren't random. They're ranked by relevance, or at least, how relevant a search engine's algorithm has deemed them.
So that "Cleveland shoe store" search will return location pages for businesses that fall into the category of the search parameters, ranked in order of most to least relevant.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the name used to describe all the strategies that businesses use to get their pages to rank as high as possible. In searches, simple things like matching words on a web page to words in the search phrasing can cause a page to rank higher or lower.
Local searches are a bit different.
Using Accurate NAP Data
"NAP" Data stands for Name, Address, Phone, and it's an important factor for local SEO. Search engines, as a way to prevent people from creating fake businesses, keep track of the number of times your business's NAP data (called a citation) appears across the web. That's why it's common to see NAP data on every branded page, ranging from archived emails to press releases, blog posts and other mediums.
Generally, the more NAP citations a business has, the higher it ranks in local search results. While local SEO doesn't disregard common concept keywords and link-building, these factors are watered down by the weight given to NAP citations.
What Can You Do with this Information?
If you have a business, especially one with multiple locations, you need to focus on making sure your NAP data is reproduced across the web on branded pages, directories and business profiles. That's where devhub comes in. DevHub allows you tocreate optimized location pages and give them legitimacy by pushing your NAP data into your choice of business listing management platforms.