by One of the less pronounced SEO factors that is gaining significant attention by Google are Location Based Results, which has in a great way influenced the way pages are ranked.
GEO Targeted Landing Pages come with certain GEO elements that significantly help the pages to rank better in the search results
This article will introduce you to the world of GEO Location Pages using different methods and elements. The methods in this article are not techniques an everyday SEO expert is necessarily aware of despite it is being used by brands worldwide.
Before we delve into it, it is important for you to understand that Google is prone to provide higher rankings for GEO Targeted Pages since 2017.
This is the case with GEO Targeting in SEO with GEO Landing Pages, following the Possum algorithm update by Google.
But what does it take to build a great GEO Landing Page in 2024? Let’s get started.
How to Create a GEO Targeted Landing Page
The efforts put into targeting local markets through the use of SEO are in many cases limited to the elements that will be described below.
Building GEO Targeted Landing Pages involves much more. However, we will begin by considering these elements below as they are often put into practice:
- Title Tag
The Title Tag is made to contain the product’s or service name, and the location of the business offering the product or service. Say for instance we intend to create a GEO Landing Page for “Brand Design and Advertisement Services,” the primary way to build this for most SEO professionals would most likely involve creating a GEO Landing Page with the service and its location made conspicuous. For example: “Advertisement Services in San Diego, California”. There’s no harm done with this practice and it sure will provide appreciable results. - H1 (Header 1)
The first header is usually made similar to the Title Tag in many SEO practices. In the case of the example cited above, the H1 tag could be “Best San Diego Advertisement Services.” - H2 (Header 2)
The second header allows for the use of more keywords. But quite often, most SEOs do not utilize their H2s. A fitting example for the mock service above would be: “Looking for a great Advertisement Company in San Diego?” - Content (particular to the Location)
The grave error most SEOs make in this regard is that they generalize their content. For a GEO-targeted Landing Page, the content on such a page must reflect and provide adequate information about the location.
In our example, the content will become very applicable if it talks about other important features of the location ranging from the weather to the economy, population, important dates, beautiful spots for sightseeing, etc.
Further streamlining of the content will include facts about the advertisement industry in that location (e.g. San Diego).
Providing streamlined/boilerplate content that changes on each location automatically can help scale when creating a massive amount of GEO Landing Pages. Often this method is called the Smart Content Method and involves the use of Smart Content SEO Tools.
There Is More to Creating a GEO Targeted Landing Page
The basics of building a GEO targeted Landing Page have been carefully highlighted above. But those who want more than just the basics, you can do much more with GEO Landing Pages. We are about to delve deep as promised — here are the things you need to know:
- Images (Relevant to the Location)
SEO professionals are often guilty of channeling all their SEO efforts towards other aspects of their SEO campaign, but they often forget the importance of images.
Failing to optimize images is usually heavily reflected in a GEO Landing Page that lacks a unique image. Local Search Marketing endeavors require unique images on your GEO Landing Page. A unique image in this sense should have no prior presence on the internet. It must be related to the topic and must resonate with the target audience. In my article “How to use SEO Optimized Images” I shed light on this important topic. To suit our example above, we will need to make sure that the image selected will have elements related to, for example “Advertising” and the location “San Diego”. - Display a physical location to represent the service
The location of the business can be essential to running a successful GEO SEO campaign. A Local Search Optimization will be more useful for Google if there a physical address on your GEO Targeted Landing Page. Google has many capabilities that will allow it decipher your address from the content on your Landing Page. - Google Map
With your address on your Landing Page already, many people would tell you that it is important to embed a Google Map on your Landing Page. However, that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do in 2024 in our experience, anymore.
Read more about this issue in my article “Does the Usage of Google Maps Affect Your SEO Rankings?“
Let's Take Things A Notch Higher!
Once you have implemented Step 2, you will have a great Local Landing Page on your hands. But what can we do to make our GEO Landing Page outstanding?
- Fresh Content
I discussed how to “Get More Traffic Using the SEO Fresh Content Technique” in this article. It’s worth a look before reading on.
To achieve this, the content on your page should provide variables that can be easily modified. With this, you wouldn’t need to completely update the entire content on your page as the changes yon these variables will keep your content fresh.
In case you are wondering why you need smart content and shouldn’t do it manually, then think in terms of having to update hundreds and perhaps thousands of Landing Pages that you will create with time. Creating fresh content for each of the hundreds of pages regularly is a daunting task, hence you need content with easily modifiable variables. These variables are also called data points in SEO. - The More Landing Pages, the Better
Creating a GEO Landing Page for an area within a city is good, but not good enough. This is because a city is a makeup of several geographic sublets. In essence, you need to target each of these geographic sublets (counties, neighborhoods, places etc.). That’s why you need to create more Landing Pages to target each of these places if you want very good results for the bigger target you have in mind. For San Diego, which is our example, you for example would need need to create additional Landing Pages for La Mesa, Chula Vista, La Jolla, Pacific Beach, Point Loma and others. You also need to build Landing Pages for other nearby cities such as Carlsbad, Oceanside, Poway, Encinitas, Escondido, etc. - Linking Up the Created GEO Targeted Locations
To finally complete this step, you will need to bring all of your SEO GEO Targeted Locations together by interlinking them. If for instance you have created a Landing Page for San Diego with the tag “Advertisement Company in San Diego, California,” and you have mentioned Oceanside, then you should to include an anchor link to the Landing Page for Oceanside.
Becoming the Unbeatable Local SEO Grandmaster
Having applied Steps 1-3, your expertise of Local SEO can be now considered above average. This next step will equip you with all of the SEO juice and would make you a grandmaster of Local GEO Targeting.
Interlinking Method: The Local SEO Vicinity Method
The interlinking method can be a solution provided by a tool. I have found it to be particularly invaluable for several SEO techniques for GEO-targeted Pages.
With this method, websites pages can provide a specified number of locations around the targeted location of the GEO Landing Page. One of the brilliant features of this method can be its automatic interlinking capability of certain locations.
At the moment, the focus on GEO targeted Landing Pages is not pronounced much because most SEO professionals do not focus on the automatization aspect. However, travel companies mostly utilize GEO Targeted Landing Pages for their SEO. Have a look at this example below:
As you can see from the screenshot above taken from www.skyscanner.com in 2020 on their landing page “Cheap Flights to Paris”, a GEO Location Interlinking Method is used to interlink Landing Pages by displaying the distance to other nearby locations such as “Paris Charles de Gaulle”, “Paris Orly”, and “Amsterdam”.
Let’s have a look on another example:
This example above from bark.com on their San Diego Landing Page for Dog Training under en/us/dog-training/california/san-diego/ (Screenshot from 2020) another GEO Location Interlinking Method is used by interlinking to other Landing Pages they deem to be nearby “San Diego.
As for Thumbtrack.com, they also seem to have GEO Location Tool that creates location at the end of their landing pages (example shows their page under lake-elsinore/handyman/) – see below:
Another example below shows another Interlinking Method to create interlinks automatically by calculating the vicinity of other locations. Thus, each and every GEO Landing Page would have their unique interlinking widget.
An additional feature is the automatic calculation of cities, towns, neighborhoods for each GEO Landing Page as shown above Page. This can guarantee that all of the Landing Pages will receive regular updates.
SEO Benefits of the Interlinking
Interlinking GEO Landing Pages is an effective way for SEO experts, and its efficiency in the following areas is second to none:
- Interlinking of Locations
With an interlinking method, all the targeted locations can be easily indexed. Other locations can be easily created and this can allows Google follow the links and out weight on them. - Unique Pages
Interlinking can arrange pages and locations using different mileage number specifications to make each GEO Landing Page unique. - Location Metrics Analysis
Google carefully analyzes the available mileage information and groups Landing Pages into GEO local parks with this information. Landing Pages with available mileage information are therefore considered much more valuable from an SEO perspective, and this will most likely lead to higher ranking than websites without GEO funnels.
Do I Need This?
The basic importance of GEO pages for businesses is the ease of providing services, products for audiences in specific areas. This is highly beneficial for every business in today’s competitive business landscape and it does hold the same benefit for businesses and branches that are not even considered brick and mortar.
The Science Behind the Interlinking Method
The concept of utilizing a such an interlinking concept as mentioned above has been around for some time.
The general idea for providing interlinks between different pages is that Search Engines such as Google can crawl pages more easily. For example, when Google crawls a GEO Landing Page “San Diego”, it would then follow the links to “Chicago” and “Miami” since they would be listed on the same page.
This is a concept also known as “Interlinking” or “Crosslinking” that has been around since the foundation of Google and was named from the founder of Google Larry Page:
The Stanford University discussed this method and concept as early as 1999 in their paper:
The concept of linking entities to each other by Larry Page however was adapted by the “Citation Index” that has been used in libraries since the 12th century:
Below are some good reads about the Citation Index:
The Citation Index then was adopted from the invention of the Encyclopedia which goes back 2000 years.
These concepts mentioned above such as “PageRank” in Search Engines, the “Citation Index” in Literature, and “Encyclopedia” all have in common that one source links to another source, and at the end, all sources are connect to each other.
This original concept was known as a Circle-Concept, where the name “Cycle” from Latin derived and therefore “Encyclopedia” evolved as in “encircling information” — information that is connected to each other — today in SEO used as “Interlinking”, “Internal Links”, or “Link Juice”:
