Creating Content for Several Local Keywords

[Bartell]

I have a client who is in the lead generation business for a specific aesthetic service. The company basically generates leads through SEO and sells them to hundreds of local businesses across the US and Canada.

There is some serious competition for the main service keyword (this is not the real keyword) e.g. “liposuction” and over the past year we have seen rankings fall significantly (from top 3 to 13-15).

But... what I have found is that most of the traffic, particularly the highly converting traffic, comes from local keyword variations e.g. “liposuction in san diego”. However, these keywords are also highly competitive because there are several local businesses in these areas.

How would you suggest creating content for these pages when they are all extremely similar and we need to target 100s of cities? For example the page “liposuction in san diego” is very similar to the page “liposuction in sacramento”, ect ect.

Thanks for the help!

[EGOL]

my client owns the industry domain name. e.g. liposuction.com.

That's fantastic.  There is no better domain to have for this type of site.  I have a couple of these too.

What would you do with the local city pages?

I compete in local SERPs with pages that have lots of local facts, statistics, graphs, maps, links to local sources of services and information.

In an effort to create authority for the domains I have authored lots of content about the most highly searched topics, obtained content contributions from experts in the field (if you own liposuction.com there might be experts in that field who would write an article for you simply because it will be published on the KW.com and visible to a lot of people.  These are not SEO articles from people who want a link they are informative content from people who have a message to spread.  Most of this content is written to be "the first document that a person interested in learning about a subject should read".

Owning this type of domain gives you an enormous advantage over your competitors.

[Bartell]

If you have a root keyword similar to "liposuction" then you are going to be under major major attack from doctors who are willing to invest big money for an ongoing web visibility campaign.

A few things that I forgot to mention: my client owns the industry domain name. e.g. liposuction.com. Also the website has been live and owned by the same person since 2000.

1) a sustainable plan that will create and continuously increase a  massive level of  authority for my website.....  an enormous library of best-on-the-web liposuction articles that attracts thousands of links from med schools, physicians, bloggers, government health sites, etc.... that thousands of people post to facebook and tweet about....

How would you go about this from an SEO stand point? Most of the traffic in the industry seems to be coming from local search. This strategy would appear to gain links and ultimately rankings for general search terms that are not at a local level.

What would you do with the local city pages? Would you get rid of them all together? Or would you keep them in place and ultimately have their rankings driven by the internal pagerank of the website? If you would keep them what sort of content would you have on these pages.

Thank you for your help. It's much appreciated.

[EGOL]

There is some serious competition for the main service keyword (this is not the real keyword) e.g. “liposuction” and over the past year we have seen rankings fall significantly (from top 3 to 13-15).

As local businesses become SEO savvy and aggressive your job is going to become more and more and more and more difficult.   To hold your rankings you must be able to respond to SEOs attacking your SERPs in every city where you want rankings.  If you have a root keyword similar to "liposuction" then you are going to be under major major attack from doctors who are willing to invest big money for an ongoing web visibility campaign.

If I was in that niche I would be looking for one of two things.....

1. a sustainable plan that will create and continuously increase a  massive level of  authority for my website.....  an enormous library of best-on-the-web liposuction articles that attracts thousands of links from med schools, physicians, bloggers, government health sites, etc.... that thousands of people post to facebook and tweet about....

or....

2)  I would start working on a project that will diversity my income