Small buisiness multiple cities

[dcstover1]

Say i have a website for a small business...but that business is expanding into neighboring areas.  I still want to have it SEO optimized for keywords in the neighboring towns but I do not want to have to redo the whole website.  Is there a way to do this without having google penalyze me for having duplicate content?

I mean i know i can create a landing page www.mysite/newtown but whos to say the reader wont click the logo and go to the home page and gets navigated to www.mysite.com and get confused because its not the same info or its talking about the original town the business started.  I hope this makes sense...thanks for the help!

I see that craigslist uses the city.craigslist.com so im wondering if this is the answer??

[MiriamEllis]

You are very welcome, Daniel. Good luck to you!

[dcstover1]

Great advice...so in the coming months when we do expand it will be better to make the homepage more "general" and then create landing pages for our cities.  Probably would not change the homepage under the "/city" ranks well for the keywords so that i can change the homepage.   Thanks a lot.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your good question. I'm the Local SEO associate here in the forum. I have a few resources and thoughts to share with you and hope they will be helpful.

Read this post and discussion at Andrew Shotland's blog. It's old, but still worth reading:

http://www.localseoguide.com/geotargeting-location-by-ip-address-seo-death/

Here is a 2010 Webmaster World discussion on a similar topic:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4201741.htm

Unfortunately, I have never implemented this type of IP-based serving and if I had to do so, I'd really, really study the matter to make sure that what I did wouldn't kill my SEO/Local SEO or possibly be viewed as cloaking. It's rather daunting. I'd like to ask one of our traditional SEOs to step in to see if they have a more experienced opinion on this subject.

Now, on another note, I think you are struggling with organization here. Remember, Google views your city of location as the city to which you are most relevant. If you are in San Francisco, then 'San Francisco' is your most critical geographic keyword. Because of this, you are going to want to make the main thrust of the local optimization of your website focus on San Francisco. So, if your homepage, contact page and main content pages are geared towards San Francisco, then this is correct.

Then, if you need to drill down to talk about neighborhoods like the Sunset District, the Castro or Russian Hill, you can build out content about these, but it will always be of secondary importance to your main geo term, 'San Francisco'. You can certainly mention these neighborhoods on your homepage and elsewhere on the site if it will be helpful to users, but your main tags for your main pages and your contact page and footer should stick to San Francisco in most cases. The same rule of thumb applies if you are creating city landing pages, too.

Hope this helps, and sit tight here. I will ask one of our other SEOs to chime in regarding serving different content to different users.

Miriam

[BrandonShoupe]

I think it is possible to detect which city a person is in when they are on your website. I've never done it before but I've seen ads customized for me depending on which city the ad thought I was in. I do know it isn't 100% accurate because I've had ads served to be that thought I was in Ashford (where my ISP is) and not in Dothan (where I actually live). I think there are services that you can subscribe to that would allow you to do this.

If I were you I would try to rethink the way my site was organized. I would try to see if there were a better way than just focusing my home page on the specific city. If you must focus the home page towards the city, then you probably need to have a different website for each city.

[dcstover1]

Its really no problem for me to create new landing pages for each city (www.mysite.com/city) but like i said...since i have a homepage thats geared toward a specific city, once that user goes there he or she will be thrown off by articles geared toward a different city and get either confused or think my website is all screwed up.

So what im really asking is if there a way to create code that knows when a users navigates to the site via a city, that the home page is automatically "www.mysite.com/city" for this person.

[BrandonShoupe]

I ran into a similar situation with an inland warehouse client that wanted to rank for major port names + the keyword "warehouse." Instead of having a page for each port and regurgitating the same content from the home page, we decided to create content around the different ports that gave information about how storing goods at an inland warehouse ment it would be safer from severe weather. Then we also gave an overview of the port and the types of goods it shipped out and received, the types of cranes available, if it was a foreign trade zone, etc.

The point is, you have to find a reason to create content that is valuable to a reader and not just a keyword spamming search engine magnet. Feature a photo that is unique for each city and, depending on the type of business it is, give a good description about how your business is capable of meeting the unique needs of businesses or residents of those cities. If it is important or relavent, provide your estimated response time for each city.

Only you know your client's type of business, but hopefully you can take something I've shared and run with it. It certainly has worked for me in the past.