Will having a big list of cities for areas a client services help or damage SEO on a page?
-
We have a client we inherited that has flat text list of all the cities and counties they service on their contact page.
They service the entire southeast so the list just looks crazy ridiculous.
--------- Example: ----
South Carolina:
Abbeville, Aiken, Allendale, Anderson, Bamberg, Barnwell, Beaufort, Berkeley, Calhoun, Charleston, Cherokee, etc etc
------ end example ------
The question is, will this help or hinder their seo for their very specific niche industry? Is this key word spamming? It has an end-user purpose so it technically isn't spam, but perhaps the engines may look at it otherwise. I couldn't find a definitive answer to the question, any help would be appreciated.
-
Right on! It worked for the tortoise.
-
Excellent suggestion. Slow and steady wins the race.
-
Scott,
Curious if the business in question has a blog? Could he blog about 'an engine I fixed for a client in Abbeville, SC', and put a content strategy in place to start blogging about his projects in his major cities? Maybe just start with the top 10 cities from which he gets orders for engine repair? Craft writeups of each project he accomplishes for a unique client in each city and make it a blog post. Then, move onto the 10 next-most-important cities. So, maybe he would be starting with the capitols of South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and then moving on to other busy cities.
Eventually, you could have a page on the site (or a menu area) designated Successful Project Showcase that would link permanently to these posts.
My goal here would be to find an authentic and natural approach for showcasing his work in a way that adds great content to the site and doesn't simply list every city in the South East. This strategy, in combination with his service area map, could work well, I believe.
-
That certainly solves the design problem, but would not help someone in in Abbeville, South Carolina find the business (and the business certainly won't have a unique landing page for such a small city). Decisions, decisions. Thanks for the suggestions.
-
While I can't say this would results in an actual penalty, as you say, it looks spammy, so anything like that is kind of shaky ground.
Have you considered making a service area map instead, showing all of the client's service states/cities?
If he services every city in every state of the South East, I simply cannot find a logical justification for listing them all. A map would send the same message, but in a logical, visual manner.
-
Good answers. They do some seriously technical stuff with broken engines. They only have one location, but because it's so niche and there are so few competitors they have clients all over the country that ship their engines to the client in Florida for repairs.
It certainly looks spammy design wise (and we'll find ways to rectify that with some jquery drops), but I'm more concerned with any potential penalty this might cause, if any.
-
Hi Christopher,
Yes, I'd say that would end up looking pretty spammy if they've got a list like this for every state in the South East on their contact page. For the same reason that an e-commerce website wouldn't list all 1000 items they carry on a single page, this is not something I'd recommend.
What's the business model? Virtual or Local? If local, a more natural approach to this would be to have unique pages for each of their physical offices. I very much doubt they have an office in every one of those cities in South Carolina, right? But, perhaps they have 10 offices throughout the South East and could have a unique page for each of them?
Maybe you could share a few more details about the type of business this is?
-
I would create a page called "Service Area" and put an unordered list (ul) may look nicer, and is less spammy. Without knowing the product or service, I'm not sure if that will work for you.
Ex:
South Carolina
- Abbeville
- Aiken
- Allendale
- Anderson
- etc.
Georgia
- Atlanta
- Blah
- Clah
- Dlah
Most importantly - DO NOT post that list in the footer or sidebar of every page. It will significantly dilute the effectiveness. Containing this information on a single page, and peppering the rest of the site with some of your larger markets will be likely most effective for you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Client wants to repackage in-depth content as PowerPoint files and embed on site. SEO implications?
Hi, I've a client who is planning to build out "courses" for their site. Their ultimate goal is to have videos (which will have transcriptions) but since the videos are not yet ready they want to launch with the content in PowerPoint format instead. Thing is, the pages they have now are really good content/in-depth. In short it seems videos are Phase 2, so their Phase 1 preference is to take all their courses content and put them in PowerPoint slides and add them to their web site. While I understand standalone files like PDFs and PPTs can be indexable, my recollection is that embedded slides are not (like SlideShare). Is that correct? My worry is that by taking this content and reformatting it into PowerPoints will hurt their site instead of helping. Any insight is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | CR-SEO0 -
J-Son Schema via tagmanager for Blog Post Listed at Blog Category Page
Hi Experts, I am implementing J-son Schema via tagmanager. For my blog category page i have many blog post listed so now I have to use blog posting at category page via tag manager so can anyone guide me how to implement? Hope you are getting my question. Like my blog site - a) abcd.com/blog b) blog category - abcd.com/blog/cloth d) Blog Post - abcd.com/blog/cloth/ my-favourite-dress. My query is at this page - abcd.com/blog/cloth many blog post listed. So I have to implement for all post "@type": "BlogPosting" via tagmanager so how to do that? Without tag manager I know how to implement via loop but via tag manger dont know? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Johny123450 -
How to Remove Web Cache snapshot page & other language SEO Title in Google Search Engine?
Hi... Please tell me how to remove web cache link given below. I have changed my SEO title but it can't be changed...Any other methods for without using webmaster tools. Kw3arat
Technical SEO | | Thilak_geo040 -
How can I change the page title "two" (artigos/page/2.html) in each category ?
I have some categories and photo galleries that have more than one page (i.e.: http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos and http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos/page/2). I think that I must change the tittle and description, but I don't how. I would like to know how can I change the title of each of them without stay with duplicate title and description. Thank you! ahcAORR.jpg
Technical SEO | | otimizador20130 -
What price should you pay for seo services
A friend of mine has a business site and he has said to me that he has been receiving a number of emails with regards to seo services. He is seriously thinking about using a company to help him as he does not have the time to promote his site and get it in the top of the search engines. Last week he asked me what price should he be paying for a small business site and to be honest i could not give him an answer as i have never used a company who deal with seo before. A lot of the emails he has received are from India, and i would like to know what is involved, do they need access inside your site and what price is a good price to pay. Normally i would have told him to learn seo himself but due to the lack of time he has i can understand why he needs a company to help him any help would be good
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Changing the anchor text of a big amount of links at once is bad for SEO?
Hi there, Our service at fotograf.de is a shopsystem for professional photographers. The customers can build their own website with our tool including an onlineshop to sell their pictures. We have a lot of links from our customers linking to our homepage. The links come from subdomains of our domain and from external domains. We are now thinking about changing the anchor text of half of the links (round about 300.000 links). Do we have to fear a penalization of Google for changing so many anchor texts at once? Do we get better rankings if we choose a more optimized anchor text or does this have no effect because most of the links are from subdomains (each customer has its own subdomain) of our domain? Thanks for answering! Sebastian
Technical SEO | | Sebastian230 -
2 links on home page to each category page ..... is page rank being watered down?
I am working on a site that has a home page containing 2 links to each category page. One of the links is a text link and one link is an image link. I think I'm right in thinking that Google will only pay attention to the anchor text/alt text of the first link that it spiders with the anchor text/alt text of the second being ignored. This is not my question however. My question is about the page rank that is passed to each category page..... Because of the double links on the home page, my reckoning is that PR is being divided up twice as many times as necessary. Am I also right in thinking that if Google ignore the 2nd identical link on a page only one lot of this divided up PR will be passed to each category page rather than 2 lots ..... hence horribly watering down the 'link juice' that is being passed to each category page?? Please help me win this argument with a developer and improve the ranking potential of the category pages on the site 🙂
Technical SEO | | QubaSEO0 -
Homepage dropping back to page 30 and being replaced by a random page?
Hi All Please accept my apologies if i have posted this in the wrong place, i am new to this. I have asked for help over and over again on Google Webmaster Forum but everytime i am faced with sarcastic, unhelpful answers and then moaned at for asking the same question again when i get no answers. Well, my website is http://www.hillfieldscampingandleisure.co.uk. The site is nearly 2 years old and is an ecommerce online camping equipment store. It is hosted on the EKMPOWERSHOP Platform. After a about a year of adding products and designing my site i decided to hire an SEO Company based in the UK, they were a good company with some big clients. Anyways to cut a really long story short....they completely ripped me off by £700 a month for 7 months for my site to keep going backwards, they wouldnt target the keywords i wanted and all they did was provide really spammy, non relevant, no page rank links...my site ended up on number 31 of Google. I managed to drop the company and try to do things myself. I optimized my sites content so it wasn't keyword stuffed I re-wrote all my alt tags to look more natural I optimized my meta and h1 tags I carried on with trying to build relevant, high page rank links Anyways i managed to get my homepage to page 3/4 of Google. It stayed there for a few weeks but over the past few weeks my Homepage is dropping back to page 28-30 and being replaced with a random page of my site on page 4-6. It corrects itself after a while and my homepage returns but then it happens all over again....today i have a random page on page 4 and my homepage is on page 29. Any ideas on what is causing this and how can i get my site up there? I have had some ideas come back that it is the EKM platform i am using but since the seo company took the p out of me, its the only one i can afford at the moment until i start selling. I am a small business with stock waiting to be sold but no matter how much i read and rules to follow my site just doesn't seem to move. Any help would be really really apreciated and be nice!
Technical SEO | | hillfields0