HOW TO: City Targeted Landing Pages For Lead Generation

[AM213]

Hi guys,

So one of my clients runs a web development agency in San Diego and for lead generation purposes we are thinking of creating him city targeted landing pages which will all be on different domains ie. lawebdesginstudio / sfwebdesigngurus

I plan to register these 20-30 domains for my client and load them all up on a my single linux server I have from godaddy.

I noticed however today using google's keyword tool that roughly only 5-10 cities have real traffic worth trying to capture to turn into leads. Therefore I am not sure if its even worth building those extra 20 landing pages since they will receive very little traffic.

My only thought is, if I do decide to build all 30 landing pages, then I assume I will have a very strong private network of authority websites that I can use to point to the clients website. I mean I figure I can rank almost all of them page 1 top 5 within 2-3 months.

My question is:

1. Do city targeted micro sites for the purpose of lead generation still work? If so are there any threads that have more info on this topic?

2. Do you suggest I interlink all 30 sites together and perhaps point them all to the money site? If so i'm wondering if I should diversify the ip's that I used to register the domains as well as the whois info.

Thanks guys, all help is appreciated!

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Ruth,

I guess you are right after reading what I have been focusing on. I am making of mountain out of a mole hill and please understand I don't mean to waste your time l I do agree there are many other things considering putting your address on your website will probably get you more than what I'm inquiring about but I thought I would find out. Thank you for taking the time to respond to me and my question. The main reason I kept asking was I did not want to ever give somebody the wrong information so in the future I will not list this as good or bad for SEO until I know better.

Thank you again and I want to say what wonderful job everyone here at SEOmoz has done.

Respectfully,

Thomas Zickell

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Thomas,

I think you are over-thinking this.  Go ahead and put in your location - but also do other things to let Google know where you are located.  This one thing is not going to make or break your local rankings.  I would recommend putting this energy into local signals on your site, rather than worrying about your location in your DNS.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I have taken a screenshot of my any cast DNS and exactly what it's looking for under the option of "LOC"

you can view it here https://blueprintmrk.sharefile.com/d/s1384a16f958407a8

I apologize about the information contained in the document I just gave you it was not what I wanted to show you when discussing this. If I am wrong I am sorry I wasted your time and appreciate you taking the time to let me know what this feature could or could not do for search engine results.

Sincerely,

Thomas

s1384a16f958407a8

[RuthBurrReedy]

The service you link to here appears to be more about displaying localized content to users based on their IP - a good example would be a news site that has a widget saying "local weather for Seattle, WA" when I visit.  This will not have a benefit for SEO since search engines will view the default content when they crawl the site, but can be a good user experience.

Google understands that your site isn't always hosted at your same location, so allows you to send local signals in several other ways.  Adding your location to your DNS is a start.  You should also be sure to put your city name and state on the site where it makes sense to do so.  Schema.org also provides a lot of options for marking up your address to make it clear to search engines "here is my address."  Check out www.schema.org/place, www.schema.org/localbusiness, and www.schema.org/restaurant for more on this.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Dear Ruth,

while I have you here–should say when I spoke to the gentleman in private yesterday his decision was exactly what you spoke about just now to optimize landing pages methods like PRWeb but only use the one domain. I wanted to ask you your opinion on local IP http://www.neustar.biz/enterprise/digital-marketing/what-is-localized-web-content

As I do not want to give up the wrong information however I am getting conflicting information on the web about rather not it will get you to rank for local I know DYN & UtraDNS will allow me to put in my latitude longitude and height above sea level. In your opinion is this of value to local seo?

respectfully,

Thomas

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi,

I would not recommend taking this approach, for a few reasons:

1. As you say, individual city-keyword combinations have a low amount of traffic - even if you were to get all 30 of these sites ranking for that combo, you probably wouldn't see a bump in traffic to make it worth the work.
2. Building 30 different sites on 30 different domains means building 30 times as many links in order to get the same domain authority, which will take a lot of time and effort.
3. It will be very easy for Google to tell that all of these sites belong to you (all on the same server, all linking to each other, etc).  In the best case scenario, Google will simply devalue all of these links from one site to the other.  A far more likely scenario is that Google will actively penalize you for attempting to build this kind of link network.

This is exactly the kind of strategy that both Panda and Penguin are intended to combat, and I don't think that the potential payoff is worth the risk and effort this strategy will take.  Instead, I recommend spending that time and energy on making your client's site as strong as possible.  Use schema.org to send strong local signals that you're in the San Diego area.  If you're having trouble ranking for head terms such as "web design," look for lower-volume, more specific keywords to target.  Create great content showing your design prowess and cultivate an audience to share it with.

To answer your questions - micro sites for lead generation CAN work, but I don't think local-focused is the way to go for a product like web design for which Google doesn't provide local search results. I DO NOT suggest that you build 30 microsites, interlink them and then point them to your home page, as this is likely to incur a penalty.

I hope that helps! Good luck.

[BlueprintMarketing]

just wanted your opinion on what I said below as you are an associate please tell me if it is unfair or incorrect in any way of me to say that. Again I will say I do not wish to have any answer for this regardless of if I am right or not just because I've brought this up and I would not want to look like somebody trying to change the score if you know what it mean.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Oh hey I just wanted to give you a heads up that the way most people and a message that has been answered is with a thumbs up or a thumbs-up and a good answer to the person that gave the best answer. You can use thumbs up if you agree with both as well as good answer to as many people as you like and you can use thumbs down if you disagree however it is commonly only done if you strongly disagree with what they say. That is the way that all of us get ranked here on SEOmoz so just a heads up for post in the future give people recognition if they help you and that's kind of the way the whole system works.

Just so you know I felt like saying that because I think a lot of people ignore the thumbs-up or answers when starting out and that's normal because you're just getting acquainted. However just thought I'd let you know and I would NOT give me a thumbs up for best answer on this because number 1 I private message to you number 2 I have shared this information with you and don't want you to feel like you are being asked to give an answer that is not deserved.

All the best man and enjoy a SEOmoz

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Aim213, I'm popping by because this thread was posted in the Local SEO category, but because Google stopped displaying true local results for web design firms several years ago, this is pretty much a straight up SEO/SEM question. I'm going to ask some of our other associates to stop by and contribute what they can here. Please, stand by.

[BlueprintMarketing]

you will not want to run them all off same server. You will need different C blocks for each site or Google will penalize you if this is not done exactly right. I would Google hosting for SEO C Class IP's use http://www.seohosting.com/

I just sent you a private message because I did not want to post the link I have built for a similar site. As long as you keep the content 100% new and relevant to the website do not spin it or try to use The same site for every major city. You may use the same template but do not use the same wording. in fact make the wording very very different even though you're going to be selling the same thing over and over again. Have a look at the link I posted below and please look at the link I sent you in the private message I built that and it returns a good amount revenue.

http://www.localseoguide.com/

Sincerely,

Thomas Zickell