Proper way to change keywords without losing ranking

[SirMax]

Hello Everyone,

The website I am working with offers service in two locations, lets say Service in City A and Service in City B. Those two cities, which are close by, are the main source of clients, so the owner asked me to concentrate on these terms.

I did a decent job for a newbie and now we are on the first page of google  closer to the top for these 2 terms.

The problem that I am facing right now is that

a) it hard to get that extra bit from onsite optimization when you optimizing for 2 different cities

b) Customers may get confused which cities we focus on A or B? We have locations in both.

c) Owner wants to expand services to additional cities.

So I looked at how our competitor handling these time of problem and most of them have a page with titles like "Cities we serve" with links to the individual locations that are optimized for the specific city. That page usually includes paragraph or two about local history and then re-span description of their services.

Is it a good practice to structure one's website like that if you are trying to target multiple locations?

Should I re-target my home page to something less geographically specific and create separate pages for Cities A , B and the new locations?

Would I lose ranking for terms service in city A & service in city B because of that

Or should I leave my home page optimized for Cities A & B  and just add new locations as separate pages?

Thanks in advance for you insights.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi SirMax,

Nice to see you here today. For starters, it's important to remember that local rank is founded not on the concept of where you serve, but where you are physically located. From your description, I'm not totally sure whether your client is planing on opening new offices in new cities or whether his service area radius is simply expanding to include other cities to which he will travel from his physical office to render services. I'm also not certain whether your client has a physical location in City A and City B, but I think you are saying he only has one in city A. If I'm mistaken, please let me know, but for the moment, let's say City A is your client's core local term because it is where he is located, and all other geo terms (cities B, C, D, E, F, etc) are his secondary terms.

In such cases, this is what I do for my clients:

1. City A is in the tags, headers and copy of the homepage and contact page and, possibly, about us. The complete NAP (name, address, phone number) is in the footer sitewide)

2. Cities B-F are mentioned once on the homepage, as in, 'From our location in San Francisco, we come to you speedily in Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose and Mill Valley'.

3. In the navigation, I structure a menu containing landing pages for each of the cities the client serves, including his city of location. The menu links to these landing pages and the pages feature copy that is unique. Landing pages like these are a great place to showcase real projects in each of the cities (i.e. here is Mrs. Jones' carpet in the Sunset District of San Francisco before and after we cleaned it and and here is a testimonial from Mrs. Jones and here is a video of us using our new truck mounted steam cleaner, etc.). Don't just copy and paste the text from one city landing page to another - make it unique.

4. But remember, your exterior local properties (Google+ Local Page, Bing Local Page, Yelp Profile, etc.) are all going to focus on city A, because that's where you are located.

I have seen this method work well for my clients. Now, your concern is that you have already optimized core pages for 2 cities instead of just the city of location and, apparently, your work has engendered high rankings for both the location and service city. If the client is only physically located in City A and you've manage to get him ranking for City B as well, removing city B from his core pages (home, contact, etc.) could well cause a ranking drop for city B. But, if the client has offices in both cities, you can continue to optimize for both on the core pages (this is just fine) and create the city landing page to feature his work in cities C--E in which he is not located.

Hope this explanation makes sense, but please let me know if I've misunderstood your client's business model or if you have further questions.

[activitysuper]

Some seem to have HQ as the homepage and then build internal pages for other locations.

On the other side if you only have one physical location and the other areas you want to target don't I would again put the physical location on homepage and then inner pages.

That being said I personally purely from a structure point of view taking SEO out for the moment would want generic terms on homepage and treat locations and inner locations as categories and subcategories.

But if you do this im sure rankings will be lost until you get the location ranking again on a inner page.

Haven't really given a answer but ive been looking into location specific SEO so this thread interests me.