As a storage facility, your location pages are some of the most important pages on your site.
These are the pages you will be trying to get ranked in the search results, and the pages you will be linking to from your Google My Business and Bing Places listings.
Here is an example of the Birmingham location page on Access Self Storage.
These will also be the pages that convince a user to request a quote from you. This means the pages have two main functions:
- Drive traffic to them
- Convert that traffic
Because of this, these pages have to find that delicate balance between being optimised for search engines and for users.
But don’t worry! It’s not difficult to provide users with all the information they need in an SEO friendly way. In this article we’ll take you through all the information you should be adding to your storage facility location pages and the best way to do this.
Name, Address, Phone Number
Name, address, and phone number (NAP), are essential for local SEO. Ideally these should be the same NAP that appears anywhere else on the web.
You also want this information to be very visible on the page as you can see in the snapshot above.
Your location’s name is a good place to use the keyword “Self Storage” especially if you plan on using that term in your Google My Business listing.
But beware that Google My Business (GMB) won’t let you use “Self Storage” in your name if it doesn’t reflect your real world name. E.g a self storage company named “TruSafe” technically shouldn’t use “TruSafe Self Storage Birmingham” as their Google My Business name.
Google will check your landing page, so if you have included ‘self storage’ on your GMB page, make sure you also include it on your facility’s location page so you don’t get caught out.
Email Address & Opening Hours
This is purely information for users, but it’s very helpful. It should be given a prominent place on the page.
Reviews / Review Ratings
Assuming you don’t have terrible reviews, then showing these on your storage facility location pages should increase the likelihood someone will get a quote from you. There are many reasons why it’s important to put in place a strategy for collecting more reviews, this is just one of them.
Also, reviews, when handled correctly can show in the search results, giving you a better looking listing, as underlined in red below.
Self storage companies can continue to receive these ratings despite Google stopping showing these “self serving reviews” back in 2019. However, this requires setting up your Schema in the right way, and appears to be an oversight on Google’s part, rather than a planned exception, so there’s no guarantee that this will always be the case.
Photo of Site / Photo Gallery
This one is obvious but you would be surprised at the amount of storage companies that don’t have an image of their facility on their location page.
You should have some high quality, attractive photos of your storage facility for all sorts of marketing purposes. Using these on your site gives users an idea of what to expect; and, if these are external photos, will help them feel more confident about finding your facility when they visit it.
“Get Quote” Button
If you’re not capturing quotes through your website you’re missing a huge opportunity. Most users are getting quotes from multiple sites, and want an easy way to do this. Don’t make it awkward for them at this crucial step. In fact, research shows that you should just give your potential customers the price on your website.
Exactly how you implement this quote button / form / section will vary depending on the way you implement your quote & booking system. But there’s no excuse for not giving users a way to get a quote online.
Key Features / Benefits / Differentiators
If your store offers 24 hour CCTV, 24 hour access, undercover loading areas, free trolleys, or any other useful features and differentiators these should be mentioned on your page.
Often these will be put in a separate section of the page dedicated to Key Benefits, but you can also mention these in a block of text.
There isn’t an SEO benefit to doing one of these over the other, but putting things in a key benefit section will make it easy for customers to scan what you offer, and decide on your facility over another.
Here is an example taken from a Safestore location:
Google Maps Embed and Directions
Directions are useful for both SEO and user experience. The user experience aspect is obvious and doesn’t require further explanation.
The SEO benefit comes from using locally relevant terms on the page in your directions. You’ll likely mention local landmarks, roads, and place names. All of this information tells search engines that your page is relevant to your location.
This is useful when you’re optimising for searches on “self storage in [location]”.
More Local Information Content
As mentioned above, it’s important to have content that shows search engines that the page is relevant to a particular location, after all, these are your storage facility location pages, not your homepage.
Adding directions will do this to an extent, but adding more to these pages will provide even more benefit.
You can see an example of how Armadillo / Big Yellow goes about this here:
Offers Running at the Site
This is self explanatory. The whole point of running offers is to entice users to get a quote / book with you. If you’re running offers, you should be displaying them on the page you expect users to be visiting. This is especially important if your offers are location specific.
If you’re stuck on what sort of promotions you should be running, check our post on the best self storage promotion ideas.
The following are not essential, but good to have.
Link to Nearby Storage Sites
If you have nearby storage sites, then linking to them is fantastic. It’s great for your users, they might not realise there is a storage facility closer to them, or, if your site is full, they know there’s another one an acceptable distance away.
This also gives an SEO benefit. More internal links to your individual storage location pages shows search engines that these are your important pages.
This is in the non-essential section of this article because not all storage businesses have enough facilities to pull this off.
Virtual Tour
If you have a bit of spare cash and want to show off your facility in a new way you can get a virtual tour put on Google street view. If you don’t want to pay a professional for this, you can try it yourself, some of the accepted cameras are at quite an accessible price.
Once you have this tour on street view you can embed it on your site, and use it on your Google My Business profile.
Here’s an example from Lok’nStore:
FAQ
FAQs are great for adding more content to your page. The downside is that you’re often going to have exactly the same FAQs for all of your sites. Also, most of the frequently asked questions should be answered by the main content on your page. It’s up to you whether you think this is worth it.
Summary
This of course isn’t an exhaustive list of everything you can put on your location pages, you can put links to your social media, space estimators, prices for different storage options, and more.
But these are the most important aspects to ensure you have on the page from a user perspective, but also from an SEO point of view.
As always, if you have any questions, or need help implementing anything you see here, you can email us at info@storist.org
