Should I mention locations in service-specific landing pages?

[Greenery]

I'm writing new landing page copy for a client in the HVAC industry. The client has one office, but its service area includes several cities in a metropolitan area.

I'm writing two types of pages:

1. Service-specific landing pages (e.g. "Air Conditioner Repair," "Furnace Inspections")
2. Location-specific pages (e.g. "Dallas Heating & Air Services," "Plano Heating & Air Services")

My question is whether I should also include specific locations within the service-specific pages if I'm already doing the location-specific pages as well. For example, would it make sense to do a page on AC repair with title/H1 elements like "Dallas Air Conditioner Repair Service" or "Air Conditioner Repair in Plano and Dallas" in light of the fact that there will already be 10-12 location-specific pages?

My preference is to NOT include location-specific stuff in the service landing pages except for maybe a passing reference to something like "...need HVAC services for your Dallas-area home" or similar. It just seems more natural that way. Thoughts?

[MiriamEllis]

Hey James,

Just want to offer a proviso here: the fact that Google localizes results automatically for queries they feel have a local intent does not mean that the optimization of the local business website can simply overlook local keywords. In fact, it's fundamentally important that each page you create targeting a specific city/neighborhood includes those city terms. Not only does this optimization signal to Google what your page is attempting to be relevant to, but it's also so important that human users know that your Sugarland page is for them in Sugarland, or that your Dallas page is for them in Dallas.

I can see why Google's automatic localization of results might cause people to think they can overlook geographic optimization of the website, but to do so would be to fail to send the clearest possible signals of relevance to specific geographic intents or users-as-centroids.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

Yes, the strategy you're mentioning is a good one. In your scenario, I recommend:

1. A set of city landing pages

2. A set of service pages

It just gets too confusing if you try to mix the two up. *Just be sure each page you get is of very high quality and non-dupicative. This article might help:

https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

As might this one, though it's 3 years old now:

https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Good luck with the project. The more you can involve the owner/expert staff at the business in this phase of content development, the better

[Greenery]

So I'm glad you mentioned this because I'm also curious as to whether it makes sense to do the location-specific pages at all.

What is the general consensus in the SEO world these days about location-specific landing pages to cover various parts of a business's service area? If it's clear that the business is in, say... Dallas or Phoenix or wherever, do we no longer have to worry about not appearing in search results for nearby cities and towns that have a different name than the city in which the biz's office is located but are still within the biz's service area?

[Greenery]

Thanks, Sally. I think I'll just stick to doing service landing pages and location landing pages and keep it at that. It makes the most sense to me and makes for more natural-sounding copy.

If I included the locations in the service pages, I wasn't planning to do a location-specific page for every service. With 10-12 locations and 20ish services, this would make for an untenable experience for visitors!

[Sally94]

Hi Green Web,

I tend to agree with you of not putting the location in the header of the service page. I do recommend linking to your location-specific pages somewhere either in the menu or in the content if it is relevant. Good internal linking is going to be a good bet.

If you were to include locations in each service page would you be creating a page specific for each service and location? If so this could end up with an issue of having competing content across the site. Especially because it would be difficult to create really different content.

If you want to further target specific services and a location. Something that works well for me is to set up a blog that covers case studys. This allows them to provide a honest experience that includes your select long tail keywords.

Hope that helps a little