How do you optimize your site for surrounding areas?

[RickyShockley]

For example, If I am optimizing a site for a dentist in West Palm Beach, Florida (the primary city) how do I ensure I am also optimizing my site for the smaller cities/towns that are part of West Palm Beach like Royal Palm Beach, Wellington etc.?

If I am using "West Palm Beach" in my site and page titles etc., how do I also rank for the smaller cities? What are the basic tactics in terms of on-site and linking?

For instance, lets say I offer Botox in West Palm Beach...how do I also optimize for Wellington, Royal Palm Beach and other local cities? Do I really have to create unique Botox content for each city?

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Richard,

Darin and Thomas are offering good advice for the basics of neighboring town optimization, but I feel more needs to be said, given the nature of your sample client's business model.

First, let's touch bases about keeping your priorities straight, like this:

• You main goal is to optimize and rank well in the blended/local results for West Palm Beach.

• Your secondary goal is to go after organic rankings for other nearby towns (not local rankings, as your client is not physically located there)

Now, here is where I differ slightly from the good advice that's being given by our members: Creating city landing pages is the most common practice for achieving these secondary organic rankings. However, you need to have something real to write about to justify the creation of said pages. For a dentist, this may be a little more difficult, as his business model is by nature stationary.

By contrast, a carpet cleaner has an easy road ahead in creating city landing pages because he actually travels to those cities. What you need to ask yourself (and your client) is what the dentist does that can justify him creating content about those neighboring cities. For example, does he give or attend dental seminars in any of the neighboring towns? That would be a good reason to write a page optimized for the other city terms. Or, perhaps he sponsors a little league team in one of the neighboring cities, or visits elementary schools there? Try to find something to write about that genuinely reflects his presence in a neighboring town and your content will have a point beyond a grab for organic rankings.

But always bear in mind, for a stationary business like a dental office, the bulk of your focus must always be placed on building up his authority in his city of location.

I do not recommend creating a separate set of service pages for each city (botox jupiter, botox royal palm beach, botox wellington, dental implants jupiter, dental implants royal palm beach, etc.). This is awkward and not really useful to anyone, given that your dental client is in a single location offering the same services to all comers. So whereas go-to-client business models (plumbers, chimney sweeps, landscapers) are a natural fit for city landing page development because of their actual work in a variety of cities, stationary business models (restaurants, retail shops, dental offices) must be more creative to have a legitimate reason for creating this type of content.

Definitely don't just throw up a bunch of thin or duplicate pages, swapping out city names in the title tags...but do try to discover if there is a true connection between your dentist and the neighboring towns and then use that as your reason for writing.

[Thos003]

I am sure there are number of opinions on the best way to accomplish this. I for one still believe you can create a unique page for each of the surrounding areas of a metro city. Metro areas are commonly associated with their surrounding towns and suburbs. In fact, if you search "Wellington town fl" in the related search you will find "town of jupiter" which then has "village of tequesta" in it's related search.

I do so for locations like San Antonio. San Antonio is the main city, Converse, TX would be a subset of that metro.

[DarinPirkey]

There are a few ways to do this.

1. You can create individual pages for each city/town (ie. lake worth, west palm beach, wellington, royal palm beach, jupiter, etc.)  So for example...  www.westpalmbeachdentist.com/dentist-wellington

You'll have to make sure you have unique content on each page and unique title tags and meta tags

2. You can add a listing of cities you serve and you can link to your pages using a multitude of anchor text.  For instance if you have your homepage as www.westpalmbeachdentist.com you can link to it using the anchor text "Lake Worth Dentist".

The first one works really well and you can if you set up a campaign in SEOmoz you can actually see those pages rank individually.  You'll add the keyword (for example) "dentist wellington" and when your page www.westpalmbeachdentist.com/dentist-wellington shows up in the top 50 you'll know.  Just keep up with Google WMT to make sure you aren't showing duplicate content.