 Wow, I am so excited to be here. I hope you are as well. I am just loving the energy of this conference in this room This is the first in person event. I've been at in a long time. So I hope you are as thrilled as I am So today I am gonna be talking about how to get your local SEO recipe right with content and schema But more specifically I'm gonna be talking about how we can use content and schema to create a recipe for awesome Location pages because I think there's a lot of opportunity there the reason I chose this topic is because I see a lot of location pages for small businesses with just a few locations all the way up to bigger brands that Basically location pages are kind of just a rewritten or regurgitated version of the home page Maybe there's a different city in the H1 and you know a different address in the footer But they're kind of all saying the same thing. They don't have unique value So the problem that we are trying to solve today is how do we create unique value on our location pages when Every location does the same thing offers the same product or the same service So that's the problem. We are trying to solve spoiler alert. The answer is content and schema But before we dive into the actual recipe that i'm going to give you I want us to collectively Dessert our outdated ideas about what local SEO actually is So for a long time and for many of us and maybe even to a certain extent today Local SEO is kind of synonymous synonymous with things like google business profile optimization adding that perfect Suburb to your h2 to rank in a new neighborhood Local backlinks and directory listings But I would challenge us to think of local SEO a bit more broadly The way I see it local SEO is any SEO that you are doing for a Local business a more eloquent way of putting this is local SEO is figuring out how we can leverage Organic search to connect with local customers at every step in their buying journey So this means that we have a lot more opportunity now It doesn't just have to be those elements that are unique to local SEO like directories and local backlinks and google business profile and all that good stuff But instead it's any search engine optimization for a local business or client or customer Sweet, so how do we do it? How do we create this unique value across our location pages? Well step one is be is going to be creating awesome content The goal of content is to build location pages that are satisfying to both humans and search engines So you have two audiences there The way I see it There are three types of content that you can add to your location pages. The first one is boilerplate This is content that you could copy and paste across any location And it would be true It is easy to create and it doesn't really give you a lot of return on your time investment though Because it is truly boilerplate. It is duplicative essentially The second type is technically unique content, which I have added in quotes for a reason So this type of content would pass a copied content audit In the sense that we're using different words, but we're saying essentially the same thing So it's technically unique, but it's not relaying any value that is unique or specific to the location We're talking about the third type of content and the one that i'm going to focus on the most today The one that we want to include in our recipe is unique value content And this content is any information Or data and content paragraph form Photos all that good stuff that only applies to the location that the page is about and that's the type of content we want to focus on All right, so i'm going to give you a list of ingredients that are always or almost always or sometimes unique or have the potential to create unique value It's just a long list and i'm going to run through it pretty quickly, but don't worry The list is in the deck for you. Okay. First one is hyper local content. This is just content in paragraph form I could describe something like Emily's bakery is located across the street from such and such landmark at the corner of this street And whatever avenue that type of info even if I rewrite it with different words It doesn't apply to any other location If you've ever optimized a google business profile, you know what attributes are those little plan your visit bits of data that you can add If you've checked off something like whether or not you have gender neutral restrooms or the payment options You accept these are attributes if you're adding them to your business profile You should also be adding those to your location pages And don't just stop at the things that your google business profile allows you to highlight You can add any type of info here that's relevant to your customers Even if you have something like free parking at every single location Go ahead and add all of those pieces of data because aggregately they're going to create unique value Something I recommend a lot but see implemented Kind of rarely because your content writer might hit you after you ask them to do this over and over again is staff bios This is a great way to create relevant content that gives people a realistic understanding of what is it like to go to Emily's bakery location number three, right? Why is the baker there so passionate about red velvet cupcakes? And that is unique and specific to that location your hours of operation and your address and phone number It's the most rudimentary form of unique value content But don't take it for granted add it to your location pages as well And when you're adding photos make sure that you are adding photos that are specific and unique to that location Humans and search engines are very good at picking up on those types of patterns So if you're adding the same kind of sanitized branded storefront to every single location You're not doing yourself your customers or your SEO strategy any favors In a way you can think about reviews as customer generated content for your location pages So when you're adding reviews to your local landing pages make sure that they are for the location that you're talking about When it comes to inventory even if you have the same products at every single location I recommend adding them to your location pages because from a customer perspective I only care if red velvet cupcakes are in stock at the location nearest to me So it has an element of unique value to it Similarly by virtue of the way that proximity and maps work nearby locations is another opportunity to create Aggregate unique value. It's also a great way to improve customer experience if I'm traveling out of town and want to know Where the nearest emily's bakery is Special some coupons is probably the least unique of everything I am recommending However, I wanted to include it because I think there's an opportunity here No, I don't think you should have unique discounts for every single location That is not a viable solution and would get really complicated But I do think that it's worth adding Regionally specific discounts and playing around with adding another layer of unique and specific value to your location pages when you can Much like staff bios FAQs are going to require a lot of heavy lifting on the part of your content writer But it's a great way to include more unique rich data on your location pages And when you're creating FAQs, make sure that your FAQs will elicit a specific response So if I make gluten-free cupcakes at every location That's probably not the best FAQ to say do you have gluten-free cupcakes because it's just going to be yes Yes, yes every time so instead ask something like How do I get to your storefront from the nearest public transportation? Because that answer is going to be unique across every single location. Now we have unique value Finally add your departments and services for certain types of businesses This is going to be really obvious like an auto dealership, but in our bakery example. We can still have departments and services Let's say I do wedding cakes at my flagship location only and just a few locations have ice cream parlors Well, now I can add that to my location page All right, so that's the list. Those are your ingredients for your location pages But before I move on and start talking about schema I want to highlight something and I think I think if you take nothing else away from this stock Remember this because it's uh, it's a point that will serve you well If something doesn't scale. It's really tedious. It's hard to do. It takes a lot of manual effort But it's good for your search engine optimization Your competitors are probably not Doing it another way to think about that is if something is hard to do and it's not scalable And it might not strike you as the low hanging fruit strategy that you want to go after first It's probably going to give you some kind of competitive advantage because that's what your competitors are already doing So when you review that list that I gave you of all of those great ingredients Do not gloss over the ones that are going to be the most work Because those are the ones that could give you the most competitive advantage when you're building out your location pages All right, let's talk about schema or structured data if you know I'm going to use those words interchangeably here if you know the technical difference Don't at me for the sake of this conversation schema and structure data are the same thing So schema is if you haven't worked with it before it's basically a bit of code that you add on the back of your site That tells search engines. It's a cheat sheet, right? It tells search engines What the website is talking about so what your business does where you're located all that good stuff It's important because it gives your content context and specificity that is a lot easier to type than it is to say out loud Here's what I mean by that so context is going to tell search engines how all of the things make up the Larger entity of your business Think about it like this. You know, my name is emily. You know that I have two cats and I talk about local SEO But what if I also told you that I love to go wine tasting? I'm married. I live in brooklyn and william falcher is my favorite author Now you start to understand me a little bit more as an entity Structure data can do that for your location pages. It can do that for your website content It gives context. It also provides specificity It removes the confusion caused by the ambiguity of language and keywords There's a lot a lot to think about there, but here's what I mean Uh funny story. I used to think the word chuffed meant annoyed because it's a colloquialism I didn't grow up hearing and phonetically. I think it sounds a little annoyed So I made an assumption and I was wrong and I was very confused when people started saying how chuffed they were to Have a new speaking engagement or started a new job Obviously a dictionary could have solved my problem and it eventually did But my point is when we're using language alone to assign value to something or to describe something There's always a margin for error when it comes to the other party understanding Structure data removes that margin for error when it comes to google Understanding your business. So it gives specificity Another example of this is the word avocado if I'm talking about avocado all over my website I could be talking about the fruit or the mattress brand But if I've used structure data to mark up my content properly There is zero ambiguity from the perspective of a search engine as to what I am referencing Schema also helps you get rich results. I'm going to mention two types really quickly The first one is FAQ rich results if you mark up your FAQs with the proper structure data You may be eligible to get those sweet little drop downs underneath your search result Which is a great way to take up space on page one The second type is review snippets review snippets are a little bit tricky because for local businesses Technically, they're considered self-serving. So do not take all your google reviews and mark them up on your site You will get in trouble. I will get in trouble. We don't want that Really the only time a local business or a multi-location business could use this is if you are marking up a product So if you are eligible Great idea But do your due diligence and make sure that you are actually eligible to do it because for local businesses alone Review snippets are not always applicable, but they're great if you can have them All right, remember all of our unique content from before well, most of it translates to structured data Here are some examples So person schema schema for our bios you can mark up photos your nap information with business schema reviews sometimes if we're talking about a product What's in stock? Things like your discounts and specials for offers and also your FAQs Schema can also inform your content strategy So if there's something in that list of schema that I just mentioned that you don't have content to accommodate That's where your strategy is going to start so you can actually use scheme opportunities as a way to create a content strategy What do I add to my pages? Well things that are a structured data opportunity Before we move on to our takeaways, I want to highlight one additional thing Be as specific as possible when you're using structured data markups So there are 145 types of local business schema. Yes. I did count them by hand This is basically 145 specific types of businesses under the umbrella of local business schema. So if you're adding If you're adding schema for a dentist don't do local business do dentist schema or a cafe or legal service Or what have you there are a bunch of different types. So do your research and make sure that you're using the most specific one All right takeaways got just a couple minutes left And I'm going to view a few small bites for your seo to go box One reframe the way you think about local seo Do not mistake local seo as an entirety for the things that are simply unique to it But instead expand your horizons if you're focused largely off-site on things like Your google business profile or directories or local backlinks Maybe start to look on site for those opportunities like structured data and content to focus on providing unique value Yes, we want to differentiate ourselves from our competitors, but that's not what i'm talking about here Well, it kind of is What i'm talking about here is differentiate your locations from each other That's going to be the way that you actually differentiate yourself from your competitors because location pages with diluted value Are so common. So focus on creating that unique value on your pages And then finally seek out your competitive advantage This is kind of a high level takeaway, but I wanted to conclude with this because there are two points I want to make I want to speak to large multi location businesses enterprises and also smd's So if you are a multi location enterprise business, you have hundreds or thousands of locations, right? Your competitive advantage is the sheer volume of data that you have and in all likelihood You have a data warehouse somewhere where all of that information is stored Some of that data could probably be very useful for your location pages It may be some of that unique value data that we talked about So your job is to figure out, okay How do we utilize that data and get it onto our website in a way that is useful to customers and creates unique value That's your competitive advantage. You have a lot of data You have the resources to ideally get get that content on your site in a somewhat programmatic or automated way If you are whoops got one more point If you are in smd, if you're a small business Your competitive advantage, let's say you have two five ten even 50 locations Your competitive advantage is the fact that you actually can Do this work manually. That's how you compete with the big guys You actually can create those staff bios in this FAQs manually over time and create all of that really rich Data by hand doing that heavy lifting to Gain competitive advantage. So my my final point is this and this is a takeaway here Is whether or not you are a large enterprise business or an smb You definitely stand to gain something by investing the time and creating unique value on your location landing pages Thank you. That's my time