Best url structure

[jlane9]

I am making a new site for a company that services many cities.

I was thinking a url structure like this,

website.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3/cityname1-cityname2-cityname3-cityname4-cityname5.

Will this be the best approach to optimize the site for the keyword plus 5 different cities ?

as long as I keep the total url characters under the SeoMoz reccomended 115 characters ?

Or would it be better to build separate pages for each city, trying to reword the main services to try to avoid dulpicate content.

[evolvingSEO]

Joseph

I'd make each page totally unique to the city. Don't worry about/focus on getting a penalty or not. Make the pages so useful for the user that if you have a sentence or two that's similar you won't get a penalty. Useful to me would be information that's entirely specific to what the page is "about". A page with some testimonials and an in-depth case study, photos and useful info in regard to that location should really deliver and give people what they need to know about the services in that location!

-Dan

[jlane9]

Hello Handcrafter,

thank you for your reply.

We have one long tail keyword per page but service about 15 cities with only 3 offices.

So we need to attract business from multiple cities is my dilema.

Just trying to get advice how to do this the best way.

Having one main service page and then listing all cities served in the description and content.

Or make a page for each city with case studies and testimonials unique to the city but same basic description of the service.

In your experience how much content would make it seem like duplicate content ?

[jlane9]

Hello dan,

Thank you.

We do have many testimonials and case studies for each city which would be unique content for the city.

So we could describe the service in general which would have to be basically the same, but could add 2 or 3 testimonials and 5 or 6 case studies related to that service but for that cities customers.

Is that first description going to trigger a duplicate content issue  ?

Would that be based on percentage of total content or having one paragraph basically the same be penalized ?

[jlane9]

Thank you for all the input, some great help for sure.

After reading some answers, I was thinking to myself, what was I thinking...lol

I should have been a little clearer about the keywords.

Keyword 1, 2 and 3 are one long tail keyword not 3 separate keywords.

Example   shiny blue widget

My client has a company that travels across a big area to do service calls for this shiny blue widget.

So we want the company to rank in multiple cities. There are 3 offices servicing 15 cities.

@mat - I totally agree about the URL.

[evolvingSEO]

Right on the money Matt, thank you!

So now the challenge is somehow creating separate pages about each location that are not duplicates and are actually useful.

Not sure what the niche is, but let's say you're targeting a city the business is not actually located in. How could you make a page about that? You could make a page all about that town with case studies of clients from that town. With testimonials of customers from that town. The company could hold or sponsor an event in that town. Or a piece like "The State Of [company type] in [town]". Perhaps that may get some ideas going.

-Dan

[stephenfishman]

Hi Joseph- What will people be searching for? Does each keyword have it's own unique focus? It seems you may want to create unique pages covering each keyword or group of keywords that stand alone. Within that content you might list locations or services unique to each city. If the services are all the same, could you make 1 unique page describing those services? That way you could simply list the cities and use text links to the services page. Good luck- Handcrafter

[matbennett]

If you saw that address in a search result would you actually click it?

I'd say cramming that many keywords in to a URL would send a bad signal anyway. More to the point though it is going to look like someone jumped in Marty McFly's Delorean and came back with a boot full of spam from the late 1990s.

Ranking is NOT the most important thing (even if this would help, which I would doubt). If the listing looks poor quality then that ranking will bring less traffic.  Less traffic means less money.

I would much rather see a short URL without the keywords, and use the keywords in the title.   Better still break it up in to every page that makes logical sense and have an appropriate URL and matching content for each.   There is no "trying" to avoid duplicate content though - you have to avoid it