Conquer Local Listings: Get Your Location Pages Indexed Now | Friday SEO Tip

In an indirect way, today’s tip is brought to you by Gary Illyes, an engineer on the Google Search team. In this video, Gary explains how Google Search indexes pages. The entire video is only about five minutes long, and I highly recommend watching it to learn how and why Google indexes web pages.

What makes indexing a timely topic? Well, thanks to the changing search landscape, monitoring the pages on your own site is more important than ever. A few days ago, I talked to a potential client who has about 20 brick-and-mortar locations. Because of the kind of business they operate, customers must go to one of their physical locations for their services. Unfortunately, after looking at their site, we had to give them some bad news. During our assessment, we found that the content on each of their location pages was pulled from other pages on their site. Consequently, Google considered those location pages to be duplicates and did not index them. Check out the video above to learn more.

So, how do you get a location page indexed? In the video above, you can see that when you conduct an incognito search for “Denver search engine optimization,” our Denver location page is the first organic result. This is the power of a well-optimized location page, and it’s a must for businesses that rely on customers to come to them.

In Google Search Console, there’s an entire section devoted to indexing that will show you how many pages on your site are indexed. If there are a lot of pages that aren’t indexed, don’t worry too much. Often, pages aren’t indexed because they simply don’t need to be (e.g., privacy policy pages, internal search pages, archive or staging pages, secure pages containing login forms, confirmation pages).

Sometimes, however, pages that should be indexed aren’t. If you notice any such issues, it’s worth doing a little digging so you can make the changes needed to change their indexing status. For example, the potential client I talked about earlier needs to create fresh, original content for each of their location pages, so they’re no longer considered duplicates.