Better page optimization for specific locations

[brantwadz]

I have a client that gets great ranking in a certain city mainly because that is their main corporate office and the address and city name is all over the place in their content.  I am about to embark on getting them higher ranking in other cities as well and am looking for the best approach to make that possible.

My thoughts...

1- create seperate content for the other locations, but the body information would probably end up looking duplicate, but I could be more specific with title, description and content realting to that specific city.

2- add the additional cities to the current content???

Need some expert advice.

Thanks

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Corey, "My initial thought was to build out a single page for each of the locations he wants to rank for, and then build deep links to those pages. Obviously I would make the content as unique as possible, but there would certainly be some overlap." Yes, this is the way to go, but keep the overlap to a absolute minimum. Thinking about this from a keyword perspective, each city term = 1 keyword. Obviously, you can optimize any page for 15 keywords, so while it won't hurt to mention your service cities in a few places (homepage, about etc.) you shouldn't think of this as optimizing for them. Rather, think of this from a user perspective. The user will want to know if you serve in his city, so it is good to list all the places you serve in a few prominent places, but the actual optimization work really needs to hinge on individual content about those different cities. Hope that helps! Miriam

[ATMOSMarketing56]

Miriam,

I have a similar situation where:

• My client is a Windows Installation company

• He is located 30-45 minutes from ~15 cities with 50,000+ population/each

• He is currently ranking well for the largest city nearby (2.5M population), but wishes to rank higher for these other smaller locations.

Since there's about 15 cities that he will be wanting to rank for, the only way I could really add those cities to his other pages is to include a list of "locations we service" on each page, otherwise it won't read well for the users (i.e. "We will come to you in city1, city2, city3,...,city14, city15").

My initial thought was to build out a single page for each of the locations he wants to rank for, and then build deep links to those pages. Obviously I would make the content as unique as possible, but there would certainly be some overlap.

So the question is.. do I try to rank my main pages for all the locations, or do I make new pages for each location.. And, if it's the former, how do I go about doing that? If I list the locations like I mentioned, then I'm only getting the location keyword on there once, and it won't be in the H-tags, title, or multiple times throughout the page.

[MiriamEllis]

Hello Brant!

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your excellent question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to give a helpful answer. I'm going to respond in reverse order to the questions you've put.

On your second question - should you add the additional cities to the current content - the answer is, yes, probably, in a modest manner.

So, for instance, let's say your client's homepage is optimized for San Francisco, because this is where he is physically located. Let's say he is a plumber. In addition to serving San Francisco, he also serves clients in neighboring Oakland, Berkeley and Mill Valley. In such a case, there is no problem with including a mention of this on his home page. Something along the lines of: We Come To You in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Mill Valley.

There might be a few other pages on the site where such language would be appropriate and not detrimental.

But, this leads to your first question.

On question number one, I would encourage you to discuss with the client whether he is truly committed to going about this in the right way. If you simply put up pages for each of this service cities but don't make the effort to write truly unique content for each of the them, then it's not something you could really call a user-centric, commendable effort. One or two elements might be the same (as in the case of the plumber, a list of services such as septic backups, appliance overflows, clogged drains, etc.) but apart from that, everything should be unique if the client's heart is in the right place about this. I like to teach my own Local SEO clients to make their efforts for the benefit of their clients. Recognition of effort from the bots usually follows hand in glove with this if the person doing the writing understands Local SEO.

So, ideally, what you'd be looking at is a combination of simple mentions of the service cities on a few pages, and then a strong page of original writing for each of the service cities. These can then, of course, be added to main menu of the site, increasing its overall optimization for a wider set of terms.

Hope this makes sense.

I'd like to finish with a note and a question. Note: the client needs to understand that Google will always see him as most relevant to his city of location. Unless he is in a rural area or an industry with little competition, he should not be expecting these efforts to help him outrank his competitors in other cities in the local results. The point of this type of content development is most typically to gun for organic rankings, typically below the local results. Important to let the client know that.

And, finally, I did want to verify with you that the business model I am describing (along the lines of a plumber) matches that of your client. Does he want to rank for other cities because he goes to clients in them to do business, or is this not that type of business?

Cheers!

Miriam

[Naghirniac]

In my personal opnion, you should include additional cities for the current content. You already have pages with goog PR and backlinks. If you create new pages, you will need to work on SEO from beginning.

One good solution is to make use of alt image texts and inside your website content. It will be easier and faster than creating new pages.