.png)
If you manage a website for a city or town, you may be interested in learning what you can do more to attract more tourists, engage locals, and rank well on search engines to provide resources and information to those who need it. By focusing on user-friendly design, rich content, and smart internal linking, your site can get in front of more eyes and become a central hub that makes your town or city that much more enjoyable, creating positive word of mouth.
Building meaningful landing pages is the first step in ranking any website. This involves creating content that connects emotionally and logically with visitors. These pages should be dedicated to a single topic and answer the most pertinent questions a visitor might have about topics, such as accommodations, attractions, and dining options. All while incorporating SEO strategies down the page that target both broad and niche keywords.
For best practices try:
Each website has a handful of pages that most of its users land on, start here, and then build out to other topics you want to rank for.
Enhance the user experience by showcasing galleries of high-quality images and detailed calendars of local events. These elements not only make the site visually appealing but also serve as valuable resources that provide a real sense of what the town has to offer. These images will often rank in Google Image searches, and the calendars are a good way to interlink to your upcoming event landing pages.
Effective internal linking connects content organically, guiding visitors to relevant information that enhances their understanding and engagement without feeling forced. This strategy improves site navigation and usually boosts rankings by showing search engines the relationships between different content areas, enhancing the site’s credibility and authority.
Once you have your site set up with quality landing pages, engaging visual media, and proper internal linking, you can start to build a base of keywords across the pages on your website. Below, we will talk about a few ways a city or town website can easily create content to build up a site’s keywords for years to come.
Content that local businesses are already posting can be a treasure trove for a municipal website’s SEO if handled correctly. With clear communication between you and the businesses, you can often repackage the content they are already posting or use it for quick inspiration to improve your own website’s traffic. Because the town website will always be viewed as authoritative by search engines, you have a leg up in ranking potential and can even frame it to the businesses as a way for you to send more traffic their way.
Develop content that remains relevant regardless of the season, such as guides to annual events or features on year-round attractions. This evergreen content can be easily updated and re-promoted throughout the year, keeping the site dynamic and informative without requiring constant major updates.
If you have taken the steps above into consideration, your website will be heads and shoulders above the average municipal site, and you will start to wonder what else it is that you can rank for. One strategy our content team at Mad Mango employs for our government clients are blogs about state wide topics. If you post an article about the Top 10 County Fairs in Your State, not only will you start to rank for more keywords, but you can expose more people to the attractions in your state closest to your town or city, bringing in more tourists and revenue for the businesses in your area.
The more credible websites refer to yours, the more your website tends to appear in search engines. For town and city websites, this task is easier than most other businesses. Effective backlink building for towns requires leveraging relationships with the local businesses in town, light outreach to travel blogs or influencers, and sometimes handling national media. These efforts help fight off commercial websites from stealing traffic that is better suited for a customer centric government site.
Encourage local businesses to collaborate on content creation, providing them a platform on your site. This not only enriches the content of your site with authentic local voices but also builds a network of local stakeholders who are invested in the site’s success, leading to natural backlinks and shared promotional efforts.
One strategy many deploy is creating directory pages for the types of businesses in town. In exchange for listing them on the site, some cities and towns offer a badge for the business to place in the footer of their site, showing they are in good standing with the local government. Having a backlink in the footer of every business in town is a backlink builder’s dream.
You can also easily partner with travel bloggers and influencers who come to your city or town if you know how to look for them. This approach can yield not only high-quality backlinks but also word of mouth and social media influence that is difficult to duplicate. Set up Google Alerts and learn to search social media for those with a following who stop by and offer them a link from your site in exchange for one from them.
Keeping tabs on when your town or city is mentioned is critical for linking building, and the aforementioned Google Alerts is a good place to start. Keep an eye out for when your area is mentioned and then skim the article to see if there are any places where linking to a resource on your site might add additional context for the reader. Reach out to the news outlet from a .gov email and suggest the edit.
Mad Mango has direct experience providing towns and cities with SEO services. Our client, Crane Lake, which came to us by way of Whiteout Media, has seen speedy and effective results. Crane Lake saw significant traffic increases when we took the following steps outlined above.
Website Structure Improvements
We reorganized the main menu of the Crane Lake site with more engaging titles. These also became our target pages to grow keyword-wise.
We also improved the layout of each landing page inside of each main menu option by adding interactive maps, FAQ content, and interlinking to relevant resources.
Blogs like the one above have allowed the Crane Lake site to be found for searches like “best summer vacation lakes in Minnesota.” Not only do real travelers find this article, but we have also seen several travel blogs link to this page without our backlink team reaching out.
Articles like the one above are examples of the breadth of content a town or city website can cover and still maintain authority.
The example above is from a local business in town. We were able to secure a link by placing the town logo in their footer. This practice adds credibility to both sites.
The example above is a link built by using our traditional backlink building strategy here at Mad Mango.
Municipal SEO can break free from stale, corporate tones by adopting a more engaging, community-focused approach. By prioritizing an easy to use website, content that resonates with both residents and visitors, and a light backlink building strategy, town and city websites can become vibrant hubs of activity that accurately reflect the community’s spirit and values. Reach out to Mad Mango to learn more.
.svg)