Chalet Center increases conversion rate by 150% thanks to local pages

The need to be findable locally or regionally is only growing ever more important. Moreover, this trend is also emerging online. Customers want to know which companies offer specific products or services in their area. One way to meet this demand is to add local landing pages to your website. Local landing pages provide content with a local flavour, for the areas where a company operates. But how exactly are these local landing pages useful? And how do you set them up?

Of course, before you reap the rewards of local landing pages, they must first be added to your website. You need to think carefully how to go about this, as the landing pages frame your local SEO strategy. From experience, a company thinks they know which locations are best to target, but without an in-depth study, you may let opportunities slip by. Therefore, when creating local SEO landing pages, three factors in particular are important: keywords, unique content and the page-specific SEO parameters.

After deciding on the keyword combination the local page will be based on, a copywriter goes to work on the content on the page. This content must be relevant to the product or service, but above all it must be unique. Copy-pasting the same text for each local landing page and only changing the keywords is not a good strategy. That way, you'll create duplicate content, which in fact is damaging for your website's SEO. The content on a local page should provide the user with relevant info about the product or service in question, while placing this info in the context of the location in question. For example, awards won by a subsidiary or events linked to that location. That way, you show visitors that they have landed on a page relating to the right location, and you avoid duplicate content.

Local landing pages are part of a local SEO strategy. That means every page must be SEO-optimised. Not only do the keywords and content need to be right, a unique page title, meta title and meta description are also necessary. Moreover, every image needs to have a relevant alt text and a website should be mobile friendly. Indeed, 18% of local searches on a smartphone lead to a purchase within the day!

Furthermore, each local page should have a clean URL, and together they should form a logical structure or hierarchy. Structured data is also beneficial for the SEO, and of course the entire site, including the local pages, should be correctly built up from a technical SEO perspective. Only when everything fits together nicely does your local SEO landing page have a good chance of success.

Creating large quantities of landing pages is essentially not that different from creating a single local page. They all need to be SEO-compatible and there should be at least one intelligent page design available to which each local page can be linked. The main problem is creating the text. Because what if you want to be found for every location where your company operates? Imagine you're a roofer who takes on projects all over Flanders, your target area would be around 1,200 locations. No copywriter would ever be able to rewrite a text more than a thousand times without duplicating the content. Inspiration is finite, not to mention the hours of work (i.e.: cost)! Tailpage tackles this problem. Indeed, the software provides unlimited, unique content, for thousands of locations. Allow us to explain how Tailpage works in practice, using a case: Chalet Center.

Following an in-depth keyword search, Chalet Center chose to focus on several clusters (with the primary focus being "sheds" + location).   After that, they refined that selection with a number of secondary keywords:

• Buying sheds
• Custom sheds
• Shed construction kit
• Wooden shed
• Painting a shed
• Cottage shed

The area in which Chalet Center wanted to be found organically was then demarcated. They have 9 showrooms, 8 of which are in Flanders and Brussels. The choice was quickly made for these two areas. That generated 1,188 locations:

• Flanders (1,166 locations)
• Brussels (22 locations)

All 1,188 locations were given a local SEO landing page, with the relevant keywords incorporated. Tailpage provided the unique content for each location. What's more, the local landing pages have two objectives. Providing visitors with information about the various sheds marketed by Chalet Center, and encouraging them to visit one of the showrooms. The pages were given an attractive layout and two call-to-action buttons on the side: one for advice and one to show nearby showrooms.

So to answer the question of what local landing pages generate for you is: relevant traffic, which is more likely to convert thanks to purchase-driven search intent.

People performing a local search are more likely to make a purchase or another conversion. If you capitalise on this by placing local content on a local SEO landing page, that page will generate a higher conversion rate for you. This is the reasoning behind local landing pages. We tested it out in the case of Chalet Center.

On Chalet Center's 1,188 local landing pages, 5 goals are measured. We made the comparison for each goal between the conversion rate on the complete website, and that on the local pages.

Conversion rates (period from 17 May to 31 Aug 2021)

The conversion rate on local SEO landing pages is higher than the rate on the complete website for 4 of the 5 targets. In fact, the percentage of all local pages is 150.94% higher than that of the complete website.

Local landing pages are a strong asset for businesses looking to reach their target audience locally. They target an audience that is more willing to convert, on account of their local search. The results for Chalet Center support the claim that you achieve higher conversion rates with local content. Indeed, the local content matches local search intent, leading to more conversions. But bear in mind that local pages are only one aspect of a local SEO strategy: similarly, a Google Business Profile is essential to get rankings locally, and all the normal on- and off-page SEO parameters apply to local pages.