Attracting custom from 3 cities - Is this the best way to optimize?

[McTaggart]

Hi, I'm working for a client that draws custom from 3 nearby cities - I was thinking of creating a new page for 2 of the cities, reachable from within the website and not simply doorway pages.

Each new page would include (1) General info (2) info relevant to the city in question, if relevant to client - perhaps well-known customers already coming from the city in question (3) transport from the city - directions.

Is it OK to do this, or could Google see it as manipulative seeing that business is not geographically located in all 3 cities (in actual fact the business is in just one location, within the official borders of one city, in another city for some administrative services and 40 miles away from the third).

Thanks in advance, Luke

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Luke, This is a common practice for service area businesses (like plumbers, electricians, carpet cleaners, etc.) who are located in one city, but serve clients within a larger radius beyond their location city limits. It sounds like what you are describing is a bit different - a client to whom customer come from a variety of cities. I do not believe Google would have any problem with what you are doing, provided that you follow what you've planned to do in making the content for these city pages unique. I think a nice thing to do on these pages would be to add some testimonials from customers who come to the business from these other locations. Now, whether these pages will greatly impact your client's ability to rank well for the service+city keywords is up in the air. It really depends on the competitiveness of the industry and locale. If the client is in a situation of modest competition, these new pages could achieve some new visibility and drive some new, qualified traffic, but if the client is in a dog-eat-dog vertical, the new pages may not be able to be of big help. It's really one of those 'it depends' situations. Bottom line, though, it is not my experience that Google views such content as manipulative in intent if the content has a real reason for existing.

[BrianJGomez]

It's only OK to do this if the client has an address in each city. If each site does not have a crawlable NAP, you risk getting hit with dupe content.

Also, if you want be future proof, make sure the copy is as unique as possible along with unique meta tags.

One method that works really well for my clients, is using subdomains for different cities of pages.

Example:

chicago.product.com
orlando.product.com
houston.product.com