Best Landing Page Practices For Local Search Optimization

Local search optimization is growing faster than we can keep up with, it seems everyone want's to get in on the action. Even Facebook and twitter are going local. If your business is missing out on local search optimization then you may be letting a nice heap of traffic pass you by as your competitors who are ranking locally receive all of the bonus traffic.When building your website for local search results you may want to consider building a separate local landing page for your location geared directly at getting local traffic or if you have multiple location you will need to do one for each location with separate addresses and phone numbers. If you just have one location you can just modify your home page and insert these practices on your most important landing pages throughout your website. Landing Page Best Practices Here’s my top 10 factors to include in a local landing page.    1.    Optimized Title Tags -’Business Name + Service Type, City, Province/State’ | Keyword 1 & Keyword 22. If you can without sounding two spumy add more than one keyword in your title tags.    2.    H1 & H2 Tags – Use header tags that reflect your full business name, service and location.    3.    Full Business Address – If you have more than one location, make sure to create individual landing pages for each location and use an hCard for each one. Try this to create an hCard for your business: hCard generator.  An hCard can help in separating information such ass name, organization, address, etc.    4.    Regional/Local Phone Number – Local phone numbers build trust. ALWAYS use a local phone number on each landing page in the format (123) 345-6789. If you have more than one location have local numbers for each one and have those forwarded to your central location.    5.    Services Offered & Business Hours – make it as easy as you can for your customers and add to your body content by adding this valuable information.    6.    Embed Google Maps on your Landing Page – This is imperative to include on your landing page. Not only will it provide an interactive way for a customer to map their way to your location, it will also count towards a better ranking in the Google local ten-pack listings.    7.    Include Driving Directions Anyways – Yet another way to make life easy on your customer, some may not know how to use Google Maps. Not to mentions it's one more way to get your address on your landing page.    8.    Single Line Business Address in Footer – Having your address in the format ‘Business Name + Service, Street Address, City, Province/State, Country’ can provide an easy format for search engines to pick up on your address.     9.    Meta Tag Descriptions with Local Address + Phone Number – This one’s self-explanatory. If you’ve got an additional phone tracking number handy, you can include the spare phone number in your meta tags to see if customers would rather call you via seeing the search results, or prefer to click on the results and view your landing page. This tactic is also specially useful for folks that use Skype (which makes phone numbers clickable) and on the iPhone.    10.    URL Naming Structure – Sometimes your main URL will not have your keywords in it put when you create your separate landing page your can use hyphens to put in your keywords in your URL to include your most important keywords. Don't worry about getting your business name in here.What to avoid when creating landing pages for your local business's website.1. Listing a PO Box without a physical address.2. Listing information for multiple locations on landing page. Create a new landing page for each location.3. Listing an (800) number on your landing page or website without a local area code.4. Failing to do any of the above 10 best practices.