City names in URLs
-
Hey guys. When targeting a specific keyword that mentions a city (eg. Dover Used Cars) would it be a good practice to include that city in the URL when creating additional pages (eg. placethatsellsusedcars.com/dover-used-fords)?
Thanks!
-
Hi Anton, Is your business local or virtual? If local, then yes, city landing pages are extremely common and typically contain the city name in the URL of the landing page. However, it is key with these types of pages to be sure that you are creating unique, high quality content that will be of value to the user. Do not simply duplicate content and change out city keywords across multiple pages. That would be spammy. City landing pages work well for service radius businesses like plumbers, landscapers and general contractors, because the staff travel to clients in a number of cities. They are not as good of a fit for brick-and-mortar businesses like dentists, restaurants or retail shops, because in such cases, all clients come from their locations to the locale of a business. If a brick and mortar business wants to write about cities other than its city of location, it has to discover a valid reason for doing so. For example, a doctor located in City A might have hospital privileges in City B and give seminars in City C, giving a good reason for him to publish content about his involvement in these other cities. But, to simply create pages for cities in which he has no involvement, just because he hopes patients living in those cities might travel to him, doesn't really make sense So, what you do with your city landing pages is a case-by-case situation. One rule covers all scenarios - always build unique, quality content on the pages with the goal of helping users.
-
Is this for a national site? if so, you will need to further segment the URL placethatsellsusedcars.com/used-fords/de/dover or if you have multiple pages for the same city, you can furthe segment the URLS by zip code - placethatsellsusedcars.com/used-fords/de/dover-11010. Most importantly is that you provide user value on every page and the pages don't seem like duplicates to each other. Google frowns on directory sites and you need to provide much more value then just a directory of links.
-
Keywords in the URL is part of the algorithms, so I would suggest it if it is not used in a spammy way, which you are not.
I might suggest these URL's: placethatsellsusedcars.com/dover/used-fords or placethatsellsusedcars.com/used-fords/dover
I suggest this because it will benefit your website's architecture. It will give you website a good flow and organization. Use the one makes most sense for your website. Be sure that the /dover or /used-ford pages have links to all of the next level pages.
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
-
Why is my image Alt Text showing up under my URL and title on the Google results page?
I just realized this happened 😞 I optimized this page over a week ago. I changed out the old image on the page, along with the Alt Text. Now I see this when I do a search for it. No Beuno. Can some one please tell me how I get rid of the alt text in the result. many many thanks in advance. http://thumannagency.com/business-insurance/contractors-insurance Contractors Liability, Work Comp Insurance in Dallas, Texas ... <cite class="_Rm">thumannagency.com/business-insurance/contractors-insurance</cite>Your page is not mobile-friendly.Dallas, Texas Contractors Insurance. Contractors Insurance Quote. General Contractor working on a roof in Texas. Thumann Agency specializes in providing ...
Image & Video Optimization | | MissThumann0 -
WordPress image file names SEO question
I’m using a plugin to upload images directly from Adobe Lightroom to WordPress and while the process is very convenient it adds “wpid-“ to the beginning of every image file name, so my “seo-friendly-image-title.jpg” becomes “wpid-seo-friendly-image-title.jpg”. The plugin author claims that it’s a WordPress thing and there isn’t anything he can do about it, yet it doesn’t happen when using the same plugin to upload to the NextGen Gallery Plugin instead of the built in WordPress media manager. I’m not really a fan of NextGen though so I’d rather use the built in WordPress media management. This is obviously an SEO forum not a WordPress troubleshooting forum, but I wanted to give a bit of background. My question is whether that “wpid-” at the beginning of all my image file names is going to cause any sort of SEO issue. If not, I won’t worry about it, but if it does I’ll have to either find another plugin or just go back to exporting from Lightroom to the desktop and then uploading through WordPress. Thanks in advance for any input.
Image & Video Optimization | | StephenWeigel0 -
Google Local pulling incorrect business name
A client mistakenly put her business name in one of the directories with "In" after the name for" incorporated". She wants to remove the "In" because it just looks weird, but we cannot figure out how, its showing up in google local too now. She did update her infousa listing but that didn't help.
Image & Video Optimization | | handsun0 -
Setting Up Localized City Pages and Duplicate Content issues
We are setting up landing pages on our site that will cater to specific cities, in an effort to be more relevant to the users in those cities and also capture more localized traffic. These regional pages will each have a unique paragraph at the top, but below that is a sentence or two about each product line that would be difficult to rewrite with quality more than 10 - 15 times. Would the paragraph at the top of the page be enough unique content (about 4-5 sentences)? Obviously the duplicate content wouldn't be to my advantage, but is it really necessary to rewrite the other sentences about the product lines? What's the most efficient method to complete this project in a whitehat fashion?
Image & Video Optimization | | InetAll0 -
How does google decide what city a blog belongs to?
I'm trying to build links from more local blogs at the moment and considering a huge list of blogs that are in my city, of which many do accept guest posts. I'm trying to discover a metric to thin this list down further. Is there any way of finding out if google considers a specific blog to be local to a certain area? What signals does google consider when it is making this analysis? Is it the content? or is it the "about the blog author" section? Thanks, Storwell
Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg0 -
Alt text in combination with images from another source / url
I have a feed that is parsed on my website. All images do come form another source( and url that differts from my site). However I can change the alt text. I concerns hotel mages worldwide. In order to relate the images with the different language I want to add a small phrase "airport hotel" translated in the laguages that are present on my site Example alt text will be alt="airport hotel: Mercure Schiphol Terminal" or in German alt="Flughafen hotel: Mercure Schiphol Terminal" Will this have a positive effect on my SEO despite the url of the images are not related to my site?
Image & Video Optimization | | fctexel0 -
Is it a bad idea to include a single keyword phrase at the end of the business name in Google Places?
I'm concerned about this for local SEO and citation purposes. It's not spammy and it flows well, and it sounds like a logical extension of our name, but I'm concerned that it will make it harder for Google to pick up our citations. Any thoughts?
Image & Video Optimization | | greghard0