 Now, despite everything we've heard in the last couple of days, especially from Rob on Monday, especially from Mike yesterday, and even with that fantastic introduction from Brian, when I come on here and it's clear that I'm going to be talking about local SEO, probably a bunch of you immediately switch off. And that's a shame, because what I'm talking about today and increasingly local intents in general are not just for brick and mortar businesses. In fact, this applies in all sorts of verticals that we do not normally think of as local SEO verticals. In fact, it applies pretty much everywhere. So just to get a few things clear right off the bat, I'm not talking about this. This is a local pack. It's useful. It's interesting. It's increasingly common. It's very valuable if you can appear in it, but it's not what I'm talking about today. It's out of scope. I'm also not talking about this. I actually had a conversation at breakfast with a woman who was looking at trying to register an office and not use it so that they could have a local address and a local map pack appearance for their remote agency. The trouble is this is kind of the same as having a PO box or a post box. It can be an effective tactic, but it's kind of grey hat, and it's not what I'm talking about today. And lastly, I'm not talking about this. This is just the website of a local business. Again, there's a brick and mortar location involved here, so it's not relevant for my talk. This is what I am talking about. This is a local landing page. So in this case, the search is for jobs in Seattle, and we've got a landing page from Indeed.com, which is Seattle specific. So that could be from a national or international business. It's worth noting, and Rob alluded to this on Monday, even if I search for an apparently non-local term like jobs in SEO, Google will assume that I'm not interested in international travel for work, so it will show me a local landing page, in this case, a London specific page from Total Jobs. So today's topic is surprising the universal. But also, and this is kind of the reason I'm doing this today, I've never heard it talked about at conferences like this one. Even though for quite a few years now this has been a common, effective tactic, it doesn't seem to get any coverage or discussion. And I'm also going to give you an easy framework where basically you can go away and get a bunch of extra-mercial traffic. So before I get further into this, I just want to quickly cover some examples that I've worked on to give you a bit of context for the kind of thing I'm talking about. So this is AutoTrader UK, they're the UK's largest car listing site. They have no physical premises, they have no four courts, no car salespeople, no dealers, no stock. And this is their landing page for Rolls Royce Silver Shadow used car sale in London. Obviously in the UK, this is the kind of thing that all of us drive. This is Interflora UK, the UK's largest flower delivery network. Again, no florists, no flowers. This is a pure online business. And yet, here's their landing page for Flores and Bermondsey. This is Zoopla, our equivalent of Zillow. Again, they don't have any real estate agents. They don't have any local offices, they're only in buildings. Yet these are all businesses that get huge chunks of their revenue from local queries. So here are the three questions I'm aiming to answer for you today. Firstly, whether you need local landing pages. Secondly, which ones you should have. And lastly, just a bit of tactical advice. However, there might still be a few stragglers here. So I do think that some of you will already have decided this doesn't apply to you. And in that case, I wanna quickly explain why you should carry on paying attention. The first and I think most important reason is that you're wrong. I'm genuinely quite bullish about how broadly relevant this is. But even if by some fluke it doesn't apply to you, who knows what you'll be working on this time next year. Secondly, this is kind of cool, especially if you're quite nerdy about SEO, which I suspect a few people here might be. This is something that is an SEO tactic that is only existent, only extant for SEO reasons. If you miss the days when SEO was more of an independent discipline, when it wasn't so tied in with brand building and UX and site speed and all those other things that John O opened with on Monday, then this is for you. So there's a third reason too, and that's that we're actually gonna learn a lot about Google here. I'm gonna talk today about implicit intent, about internal linking, about on-page optimization and copy, and all of that applies whatever kind of SEO role you're fulfilling. So let's go on to question one. Do you actually need local landing pages? Now I'm the kind of guy that thinks the best way to answer a question is to cheat and ask the examiner. So we're gonna find out what Google thinks and go look at some search results. I've got four steps for you, and this is the framework I mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, step one is keyword research. And I say unfortunately, because I mean, there was that alt tag guy earlier, but most of us don't enjoy this kind of work. I'm not gonna go into depth on how to do keyword research. There are a couple of resources here I recommend, and I'll be tweeting the slides out later so you don't need to take notes. But basically, you're just trying to find out what the top few transactional queries are for your business. You might already have that information, quite frankly. And the next step is gonna be to categorize them. And particularly to categorize some of their variants. So, I'm gonna walk you through an example of an SEO job board. Imagine we were doing this for that kind of business. The first group of keywords I'm interested in is implicitly local terms. And by that I just mean terms that are not mentioning a location anywhere in the actual search query. So I've got SEO vacancies, SEO jobs, jobs in SEO. And if this starts to look familiar from Rob's talk on Monday where he had the categorization of different types of local query, that strangely is actually a coincidence, but it's basically the same framework. Second group is explicitly local terms. So Rob called these in-city terms, although for our purposes it doesn't have to be a city. It could be a county, a state, a region, a postcode, whatever. But an example would be SEO jobs in London, SEO jobs in Birmingham. And lastly the near-me terms or nearby terms. In the case of, this is real data, by the way, from the UK, in the case of an SEO job board, turns out that near-me is not a popular search modifier. But obviously this is gonna vary a lot by vertical. So third step, we've now categorized our queries, we wanna categorize the search results. So when we're done with that, we'll be able to match them up. So there's a back of the envelope version here that you could literally do during the next coffee break. We're gonna take a look at some search results, a handful relevant to our present location, and we can go through and categorize the results on every page. So in this case, I've searched jobs in Seattle. You can see the top result is a local page, by which I mean a local specific page on a national or international site. Then in fifth, we've got a local business. In this case, the Seattle Times happens to have a job board. There isn't one on this page, but you could also have a national page. So for example, the indeed.com homepage or the indeed.com jobs in SEO page would be examples of a national page. So for the back of the envelope version, we could just go through and count result types on three to 10 SERPs, and then get a rough picture of what's going on. If you wanted a more sophisticated approach, we could use a click-through rate curve and thousands of keywords. The easiest place to get that kind of data if we wanted to do this at scale would be tools like stats, which will give you the top 20 ranking URLs for any number of queries, search for from any number of locations, and AWR has a bunch of click-through rate curves that you can download. Now, I know Russ talked yesterday about the unreliability of some of this data, and he's exactly right, but for the purposes of what we're doing today, we only need it to be proportionally and directionally accurate, so this is fine. Once you've got all of that data, you can start to categorize it using Excel and Screaming Frog. I've put some logic here for categorizing the URLs, but you don't need to worry about this hugely. Like I said, I'll be showing the slides later. So step four is to get a picture and an overview of the field, and we can go through it from left to right and say, okay, so it turns out for an SEO job board for implicitly local terms, national pages are dominating, so that's the SEO jobs pages on the big job aggregator sites. For explicitly local terms, the local pages coming through, and near me, which given the volume isn't that important here, is also unusually dominated by national pages. Again, this will vary hugely by vertical, but what we're trying to do here is establish whether there is a business case for building some local pages, and in this case, we can see that for the explicitly local queries, which have some volume, we're good to go. So what do I actually need to get started? You do have to be careful. I've worked with a lot of businesses that have done this before I work with them, and what happens is they take a location database or they scrape Wikipedia or something, and they just build a page for every location, and it produces some charitably unfortunate results. So I'm going to walk through an example from a flower delivery site in the UK that I haven't worked with. This is a bunch of copy from the flowers delivered to Thursford page, and you don't need to read this, obviously, but this is just a couple of blocks of SEO copy from the page. You've probably all done this. You probably have pages with this kind of copy on it, particularly if you work in e-commerce or a sector like that. And the trouble is it quickly starts to get quite messy, so the copy opens, located in the heart of Thursford, your local flower shop. Thursford is at most 10 houses in a barn. There is no heart of Thursford. There is no local flower shop. And it gets worse. Located in the heart of Thursford, your local flower shop has an expert knowledge and are very accustomed with the immediate area and arranging flowers for delivery to and further away. It doesn't even make sense. So this is getting pretty embarrassing. But you can rest assured that our Thursford local flower shop, which doesn't exist, to take care of your local flower delivery whatever the occasion, Thursford. With our in-depth local knowledge of Thursford, where we deliver gorgeous flowers right across town, that's the non-existent town to be clear. If you know where you're sending out flowers, we also deliver to full stop. So this is just a mess. It's full of lies. It's not great. But it's worth noting, even if you have good SEO copy, it can be a negative factor. So still we have an SEO split testing platform called ODN, and we've tested on a bunch of sites removing SEO copy that already existed. And basically, it can go either way. Top graph shows a case where it wasn't a great idea to remove the SEO copy. The bottom graph shows a case where it was a great idea to remove the SEO copy. So don't assume that you actually need this. It's worth testing. Worse yet than the flowers in Thursford case, you could do something like indeed.com. I think it's fair to say they've not shown a great deal of discipline in what they've allowed to be indexed here. So there's some dangers of scaling this tactic too fast. Your site could be full of inane lies, which is mostly an embarrassing, you know, brand issue. You could have some rogue indexation with similar consequences. You could have panda issues. You're essentially generating a whole bunch of fairly similar pages. You could have too many pages and spread your sites link up to see too thin. And then there's the logistics of actually getting together assets and pages and architecture and copy for all these new pages. So instead of that, what I recommend you do is sort by volume, by search volume, work your way down locations, maybe 50 at a time and see how it works. You're also obviously going to need location specific rank tracking. That should make a reasonable amount of sense. You're not going to see what your users are seeing when they search for SEO jobs and see your local landing page. If you're searching from, I think there was an example yesterday where apparently a US generic search is always Kansas City or something, that's the kind of thing you want to avoid. So the last section I want to cover is implementation concerns. How are we actually going to make this work? Two main areas that I want you to take something away from. One is internal linking because there are a bunch of methods that used to exist for getting a lot of pages added to your site and indexed them ranking that aren't looking so great anymore. This used to be really common. This is an HTML site map. It's a no index follow page on the site full of links down into categories and product pages and that kind of thing. The trouble with this, well there's this quote from John Muller on a webmaster hangouts last year where he said no index follow is kind of the same as no index no follow. And I had a bit of a poke with this and it turns out that basically what they're saying is because Google will eventually just stop crawling a no index follow page outright, it becomes sort of de facto equivalents to no index no follow. Just because if they're not crawling it, they're not going to find out what new links have been added to it. And it's pretty unclear whether it passes equity but one would suspect not. So if you can't do that or you would have to index those pages which depending on the scaling question might not be your first choice of option, that leaves you doing this kind of thing. Having big blocks of links at the bottom of your category pages. It's not very pretty and then we have to worry about what this looks like on mobile because apparently if the links aren't there on mobile they're not going to work at some point in the future anyway. So you've got the options there of having an indexed HTML site map or having visible crawling links on mobile none of which are going to be very easy to make look good. Second concern, so I talked to you earlier about what not to do with on page copy basically but what's an actual proactive approach if you decide you do need this? I think you basically just need to try to do something that is both useful or at least interesting to your users and scalable. So I've put together some ideas of things you could do here. You could have common purchases in the area. You could have pricing comparison versus other locations. You could have the nearest branches and their opening times. This isn't pretty but this is an example of a site that's done something quite clever here. This is yet another flower delivery sites in the UK that I've also not worked with. It's called Arena Flowers and on their pages they have a sidebar of essentially SEO copy that is all filled in from the GA API. This is all data that's just come out of their Google Analytics account filtered by location so this is absolutely zero effort to scale and it's way more interesting than all that bump you read about Thursdays earlier. And as a bonus, this is cheaper than hiring a massive army of copywriters. One last tip for you today because I am actually out of time so maybe the time has gone okay. Please don't use near me and your headings or title tags. I've seen this a lot in the wild. I get the logic. You see near me coming up in your keyword research. So you assume, oh I'm gonna put near me in my targeting but actually if you search for most commercial near me terms, you'll find that none of the ranking pages mention near me and that's because Google's a lot smarter than that. So yeah, please stop doing this. Hopefully you already did. One quick recap what we learned today. Go out and actually look at some search results. Apply the framework we talked about earlier. Categorize your keywords implicit, explicit and near me. Your competitors as local, national and local businesses. And try and figure out whether there is a room for what you're trying to do. Start marking about with your on page copy. We're all fed up with that by now. And when you decide to launch this start small and dip your toes in the water. Thank you.