Use of Location Folders

[sqmedia]

I'd like to understand the pro's and con's of using a location subfolder as an SEO strategy (example: http://sqmedia.us/Dallas/content-marketing.html), where the /Dallas folder is holding all of my keyword rich page titles. The strategy is to get local-SEO benefits from the use of the folder titled /Dallas (a folder which is unnecessary in the over all structure of this site), but how much is this strategy taking away from the page-title keyword effectiveness?

[sqmedia]

Hello SEO5,

Since I'm a virtual business wanting to rank well here in Dallas, as well as build my ranking nationally over time,

you're feedback on these two examples would be interesting:

http://sqmedia.us/dallas-tx/customer-experience-optimization.html

http://sqmedia.us/customer-experience-optimization-dallas-tx.html

The first address is the easiest to work with, as I have a keyword in each page URL, although having the keyword not so far back in the URL might be better for keyword ranking. Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Steve

[sqmedia]

Hi Miriam,

Yes, I have a local number and a unique physical address.  I'll change the phone number on the site to the local number instead of the 888 number, and forward to my service. I'll also aim for organic results. I'm a virtual business wanting to rank well here in Dallas where I'm located. Many thanks, Steve

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Steve,

Do you have a unique physical office and dedicated local phone number in Dallas? This is the only way to go after true local rankings for any service. Without this, your SEO efforts will need to have organic, rather than local, results as a goal.

If you are virtual business attempting to get some organic traffic for different cities where you have clients, which is what I'm guessing the hope is here, it would be most typical simply to create a city landing page high in the architecture of the site for each target city. So you'd have: mysite.com/dallas-content-marketing-services  or mysitecome/austin-content-marketing-services

I don't see a need to put these things in different folders, but, I definitely do see a need to be sure you are creating totally unique content for each of these landing pages. That is critical.

Does this help answer your question? If not, feel free to provide further details.

[SEO5Team]

Hi Steve,

I'd like to reference this site www.cityfeet.com that i did in one of my earlier posts. This site ranks extremely well for any geo targeted search for the keyword "office space for lease" . Type in " office space for lease dallas" or "office space for lease new york" they are always in the top search results. Their URL structure is below:

http://www.cityfeet.com/cont/new-york-office-space

http://www.cityfeet.com/cont/tx/dallas-office-space

So it seems like you may have to adopt a dual structure on the site. For the more competitive search terms you can have the keyword close to the domain name. For the others , you can have a state abbreviation and the city keyword next.