by Dr. William Sen | Founder of blue media

Local SEO Tools for GEO Targeting

Create the Best GEO Landing Page Ever!

_{by Dr. William Sen}

Since Google has been putting more weight on Location Based Results in the past few years, certain elements in GEO Targeted Landing Pages get higher rankings, even more than backlinks or content.

Today we’ll introduce and discuss a feature that has rarely been mentioned in the SEO community, but it’s being used by major brands such as Kayak, Expedia, Hertz, Hilton and many others. The very powerful local SEO concept we will call “Nearby Feature” in this article. 

But first things first. GEO targeting in SEO with landing pages is subject to more trust and higher rankings since Google’s Possum update. However, Google needs to know that GEO Targeted Landing Pages have certain GEO elements. Let’s have a look, what you have to do to create a great GEO Landing Page / Local Landing Page:

Creating a GEO Targeted Landing Page: Level 1

Most of the local SEO marketing endeavors are limited to elements below, when it comes to creating GEO Targeted Landing Pages:

• Title Tag Containing the Location and the Product Name
  Let’s take a fantasy product name “Online Marketing Services” for example. In this case most SEOs would create a GEO Landing Page with a Title Tag like this: “Marketing Services in San Diego, California”. It’s good practice and works out well.
• H1 (Header 1)
  It’s very common for SEOs to provide an identical H1 similar to the Title Tag. This could be something like “Best San Diego Marketing Services”.
• H2 (Header 2)
  Many SEOs miss this attribute on their GEO landing page. However, an H2 is a perfect opportunity to provide even more keywords. An example would be: “Looking for a great marketing company in San Diego?”
• Content That Resemblances the Location
  Most SEOs would just provide a couple information about the location, in this example San Diego. Meaning, the content would mention information about San Diego sightseeings, economy, and population. Of course, more sophisticated SEOs would try provide more relevant content such as writing in fact about the marketing industry in San Diego — that certainly will provide a higher ranking, but also needs high quality content.

Creating a GEO Targeted Landing Page: Level 2

You can do much more with your GEO Landing Page if you want to create a high-quality local SEO campaign. Let’s take it up a notch:

• Location Based Relevant Image
  If there is one thing I see more than ever, it’s the lack of Image Optimization. If you want to call yourself a Local Search Marketing Expert, your GEO Landing Page definitely needs to have a unique image, i.e. an image that hasn’t been used anywhere, also not on stock websites, which resemblances the topic. In this case you need an image that resemblances “marketing” and “San Diego”. We mentioned how to create SEO-optimized images this in our article “How to Use SEO Optimized Images“.
• Providing an Address
  What’s the most important thing when it comes to Google’s Local SEO? It’s the location itself, of course: If your Local Landing Page doesn’t provide an address, what’s the point of Local Search Optimization? You need an address on your page as Google is smart enough to understand and render the provided address in your content.
• Google Map
  You’ve probably seen it on many pages already. It’s the typical Google map that is being embedded into the website. And the good thing about it: Google will connect the dots and therefore understand that the displayed map resemblances the location of your Landing Page. However, use this feature wisely as Google has started to penalize websites that abuse that feature. I talked about this in my article: Does the Usage of Google Maps Affect Your SEO Rankings? 

Creating a GEO Targeted Landing Page: Level 3

Great, you have now created the greatest Local Landing Page. Here is, how you can make your landing page superb:

• Boilerplated Content Freshness
  Sounds sophisticated: What you need in your page is constantly changing variables. This is considered content freshness. The importance of fresh content has been thoroughly discussed on the article at “Get More Traffic Using the SEO Fresh Content Technique“. Why does it have to be boilerplated or embedded with Smart Content? Because if you have more than ten, hundred, and even thousands of GEO Landing Pages, you wouldn’t be able to change them every week. Therefore, you need content that has changing variables in it. The best way would be to use a Local SEO tool — I’ll talk about it in a minute.
• Create more Landing Pages
  Let’s say you’re targeting a brick and mortar location in a city: creating just one GEO Landing Page is not enough. Think about the county and neighborhoods, and create additional Landing Pages around it. For example, if your location is Los Angeles, then you need to create Landing Pages for all the other neighborhoods such as Hollywood, Bel-Air, Venice, Mission Hills, Beverly Hills and so forth. Not enough, you need to build Landing Pages for all the surrounding nearby cities as well such as Long Beach, Anaheim, Burbank, Santa Ana and many more. Now, that’s what we call a GEO Funnel.
• Interlinking
  Feeling like an SEO Geolocation superstar, yet? It gets better. It’s time now to interlink all these locations with each other. Let’s say you have created the Landing Page for L.A. “Marketing Company in Los Angeles, CA” and you’re mentioning Hollywood — you should put an anchor link to your Hollywood Landing Page. 

Creating a GEO targeted landing page: Level 4

Now it’s time to become the unbeatable master of Local Search Engine Optimization. If you want to really create a stunning GEO Landing Page, you need Local SEO Tools which will help you to apply the challenges you would be facing. Sure, you can create boilerplated or smart content, hundreds of Landing Pages, and interlinking them manually. But eventually you will get lost, and your Landing Pages will be all over the place. Most of your time you will be wasting time maintaining the existing Landing Pages rather than creating new ones if you do this manually.

• Proximity Local SEO Tool “Nearby Conecpt”
  The “Nearby Concept”, is one of the SEO tools I have been working with.
  It can be considered as a part of the SEO technique known as GEO funnel, GEO intelligence, or GEO-targeted Organic Lead Funnel: Website pages show a custom amount of locations that are nearby the location of the GEO Landing Page. And best part, the tool allows you to interlink locations automatically.
  If you’re an SEO and have been dealing with Local Business SEO or Local SEO Marketing, you probably have seen GEO targeted landing pages on many other websites. It might not caught your attention. The travel industry is one of the best creators of landing pages when it comes to GEO targeted SEO. Let me show you:
  

  

  The example above is a screenshot from the GEO Landing Page of Expedia. As you can see, under “Car Rental Deals in Top Destinations”, this is actually a Feature that has been created only to interlink locations. A much better example is to use locations with close proximities of the location of the Landing Page. Below is another example:
  

  

  The beauty of tools like this is, when you create a new location, a tool like this can automatically calculate all proximities of all cities, neighborhoods and places for each Landing Page, thus each and every Landing Page will be renewed and updated.
  If you’re considering using this tool, there a couple companies that can help you with this, including blue media Marketing in San Diego, California.
  

  SEO Benefits

  A Nearby Concept like his one is an SEO play and can tremendous effects:

• Interlinking
  The widget is linking to other locations. This provides Google links to follow, so all locations can be indexed easily. Besides, interlinking puts weight on locations, and some locations may get more internal incoming links then others.
• Content Uniqueness
  As every widget has a different order of locations and provide different mileage numbers, each GEO Landing Page is a unique page.
• Location Intelligence
  Google understands the mileage information that is provided and therefore categorizes this Landing Page as part of a GEO local pack. That means, if you provide that information on your GEO Landing Page, Google will consider this Landing Page above all others and it may rank much better than on the competitor’s website without a GEO funnel.

Who Needs It?

The utilization for GEO pages overall is beneficial for businesses conducting services, selling products or targeting audiences in specific locations. It’s extremely valuable for local businesses as well as national websites, or even international target audiences. Usually the GEO Landing Pages aim for audiences with a specific topic in specific areas.

A very good example is the German website Massageausbildung-BNS.de. A GEO funnel was set up here to expand the training facility from the regional rankigns to all of Germany. Under the page https://massagebildung-bns.de/deutschland/ you can see the entry page of such a funnel.

For example, a marketing agency operating in San Diego may target those in the San Diego neighborhood Kearny Mesa searching for, “Marketing Company Kearny Mesa.” If such a Landing Page exists, Google would then rather show the Landing Page of this marketing company on top of all other agencies as it is more GEO-relevant.