What is the best information architecture for developing local seo pages?
-
I think I have a good handle on the external local seo factors such as citations but I'd like to determine the best IA layout for starting a new site or adding new content to a local site. I see lots of small sites with duplicate content pages for each town/area which I know is poor practice. I also see sites that have unique content for each of those pages but it seems like bad design practice, from a user perspective, to create so many pages just for the search engines.
To the example... My remodeling company needs to have some top level pages on its site to help the customers learn about my product, call these "Kitchen Remodeling" and "Bathroom Remodeling" for our purposes. Should I build these pages to be helpful to the customer without worrying too much about the SEO for now and focus on subfolders for my immediate area which would target keywords like "Kitchen Remodeling Mytown"?
Aside from my future site, which is not a priority, I would like to be equipped to advise on best practices for the website development in situations where I am involved at the beginning of the process rather than just making the local SEO fit after the fact.
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks Kane! That answers my question completely. In my area every town is spread out and has a low population so it gets divided up into hamlets and this can make the location targeting a real headache. A "town" might have a population of 10-40 thousand but each hamlet is no more than several thousand. Local people identify with the hamlet so they will only search for their hamlet name and not the actual town name.
It would be a tremendous amount of work to build all the pages necessary to cover all of the Keyword+Town/Hamlet variations even for a relatively small area.
-
For low to average competition:
My preference in this situation is to start by building location pages and service pages, but not location + service pages. As you mentioned, it just feels like a better user experience across the entire site.
In other words, I would have a
- Kitchen Remodel page
- Bathroom Remodel page
- Mytown page
- MyOtherTown page
I wouldn't create a Mytown Kitchen Remodels page or a MyOtherTown Kitchen Remodels page.
Services pages should focus on that service, and briefly mention the areas you serve and link to the area pages for more info.
Area pages should focus on the area (testimonials and photos from projects there, for example), and briefly mention each service individually and link to the service page for more information.
For higher competition keywords:
I wouldn't stray from that model for most of my local clients unless it got fairly competitive for a specific keyword, such as a large city for the location.
For example, metro areas like "Seattle bathroom remodel" and "Tacoma bathroom remodel" will require their own pages. I wouldn't necessarily create a separate page for "Kirkland bathroom remodel" and "Redmond bathroom remodel", however - just depends on what I'm seeing on the SERP for those keywords.
If it is that competitive for each location, then go ahead and make the Location + Service pages, and get unique content on them.
In other words, "Seattle Bathroom Remodels" should have photos from bathtroom jobs done in Seattle, testimonials from Seattle bathroom remodeling customers, list of neighborhoods served, etc. That content will all be unique and different from what you write on the "Tacoma bathroom remodels" page.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Copy partial content to other pages ?
One of our clients looking to redesign their website since we're redesigning the whole website we thought it would be good idea to separate services into individual pages so every service will have it's own page (currently there is 1 page that describes all of the services). what we're planing to do is to write unique content for each service page (about 300-400 keywords), but we also want to use some of the existing content which is kind of explains the process of provided services. so here i need your help! what would be the best practice to use same part of existing content on every service page without getting penalized for duplicated content? here is how we want to structure the page with h1 and h2 <main> Service name (same as page title) Subline new and unique content about 300-400 keywords Part of old content which is going to be placed on every service page </main> any help would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | MozPro30 -
Site with no ads hit by Page Layout update?
Hi there! Can a site that has no ads on it be hit by Google's latest Page Layout update? Can it be hit for just one or two keywords? My site (www.ink2paper.com) has a decline in Google organic traffic in early Feb so my suspicion is the Page Layout update. However I have no ads on the site. Digging into GWMT I find that it is only one or 2 keywords that seems to have taken a dive, mainly [photo paper]. I used to get around 80 imps a day for this term. Then on 6 Feb it was down to 50; 7 Feb = 34; 8 Feb just 4 impressions! I got a spike back at usual levels on 10 & 11 Feb, but since then it has been back down to only 5 or so impressions a day. [photographic paper] took a small hit at the start of February, but has nose dived since the start of April. The homepage performs well for Google organic traffic - low bounce (22%) and good ecom conversion rate (14%) - although this is likely to be largely branded traffic. I feel my site is a 'good' result for the search term [photo paper], although there is always room for improvement of course! Any suggestions as to why Google has stopped showing my site for these keywords? All help is greatly appreciated. Cheers,
Web Design | | SimonHogg
Simon0 -
Moz crawl showing up ?s=keyword pages as errors
Hi all, Hoping someone can she some light on a fix with ref to wordpress and the search function it uses as Moz is craling some pages which reference the search domain.com/?s=keyword Errors showing up are duplicate pages, descriptions and titles. The search function is not important on this site and I have tried to use a plugin which disables the search page which it does but these errors still show up. Can anyone assist as this is the final piece of the puzzle and then we're down to 0 issues on the site.
Web Design | | wtfi0 -
Existing URL structure and how to handle new pages before migration
Hi there! Currently, our site uses underscores "_" within the url structure. We are moving to Wordpress soon (the site is currently static html) but it will be a couple of months before the migration. Here is an example of the current structure: www.oldsitestructure.com/about_us/success_stories/custom_vinyl_banners When we do change, our url structure will have hyphen's "-" to separate terms, so the preferred new structure will be: www.oldsitestructure.com/about-us/success-stories/custom-vinyl-banners The entire site (with the exception of our Wordpress blog) currently uses the old structure. We have about 10 - 15 pages we will add before our migration, my question is: Should we use the preferred url structure starting NOW or stick with the old one? And set up 301 redirects are part of the migration process? Many thanks!
Web Design | | SEOSponge
Jon0 -
Switching from HTML Static to WordPress Platform - SEO
Hi All, Hope everyone is doing well. I am currentyl in the process of having a re-design to myu HTML Static Site, I am switching to WordPress. My site is still running now until the new one is prepared. My question is: I do rank pretty well for some of our strong local keywords, we also have a FEW links pointing to inner pages with an extension of .HTML, should I set the the WordPress URL's to reflect .HTML or will the Search Enginesfigure out that http://www.domain/innerpage.html is the same as http://www.domain/innerpage/ or is it NOT the same. Should I switch or not? Thanks for your input Jimmy
Web Design | | jimmy02250 -
Local Versions of Pages
I have a site that offers services across two states and was wondering if I would see any benefit from creating pages such as: SERVICE in CITY, TX Would I need to change the content on the pages completely or could I simply swap out the city/state if I have roughly 3-5 combos I want target?
Web Design | | nusani0 -
Page Redirection solution
Page Redirection solution needs, there are 2 sites in the same folder and one page of old site is bxxxxxseo.com/products.php new site bxxxxxseo.com/product_list.php .there are many old page indexed i wanna redirect all old pages to relevant pages of new site using SEO friendly way .Any help really appropriate. Thank you
Web Design | | innofidelity0 -
SEO Friendly Image Swap Functionality Software
Anyone know of any software for this... I need a simple way to create SEO friendly Image Swap Functionality on multiple product pages of a static site. The idea is that customers can see different images within the product screen by clicking on thumbnails. For SEO purposes it is essential that: The rollover does not create a new URL when the product images are cycled The image needs to have an alt attribute (a different attribute set by the client for each product) As per: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tips-and-musthaves-for-your-ecommerce-platform Thanks in advance. Justin
Web Design | | GrouchyKids0