After writing the last post about Rooms to Go’s success with Local PPC (Pay Per Click) Search, I decided to research the topic a bit and write up these tips to improving your Local PPC and SEO efforts.
1. Make sure your PPC links list the city you are advertising for. When your ad is seen, you want to make sure the person surfing notices that your ad is specifically for the area you are advertising for which will increase the quality of your click throughs.
2. Take your store locator and turn each store details page into a landing page just for that location.
- Follow standard SEO best practices and include the store city location in the page title, URL, and text.
- Add specific local information to the landing page like events – tent sales, book signings, or other local information such as store hours and manager contacts.
- Personalize the content on that location’s page to be as specific as possible about that location. Avoid duplicating content that’s provided on your national pages here.
- Consider having a photo taken of the local store that can be shown on the landing page giving the reader an immediate connection to the location.
- Make sure you have a site map linking to all of the locations so the search engines will index those store location pages.
- Consider a sub-domain approach for each location – city.yourdomain.com as that will help with the local SEO for that location and provide a memorable url for your repeat customers.
- If you are going to make any of your pages mobile accessible, these have to be at the top of your list to get done.
- Put GPS Coordinates and POI(points of interest) file with your locations that can be downloaded and used in a customer GPS device to find your stores when on the road.
3. Avoid sending the reader to the home page on the first click. If there’s nothing Local about the landing page, the user may abandon the page and move on.
4. If you have stores in cities with high concentrations of a specific ethnic origin, consider local city targeting in the native language specified through that search engine.
5. Optimize your SEO keywords for your local landing pages. An easy way to generate keywords for local search is to use a tool like http://www.5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php. This site will take your keywords and add the cities to them for targeting that specific area.
6. Don’t overlook the search engines/directories that specialize in local search – i.e. Citysearch.com, superpages, and yellowpages.
That’s all I have for tonight, anyone have any other ideas? I’ll enter the ideas submitted in the comments into a drawing for a shirt from the swag bag.
