URL Importance In Search

[severitydesign]

This may have been addressed before. If it is, please link me to the thread. I'm trying to SEO for local surrounding cities my client services. It was suggested I purchase domains relevant to those cities and create separate pages optimized for those local keywords. Wondering if this is a good tactic.

For example my client's business is located in Chicago, but services the surrounding suburbs of Chicago. Whats the current, best way to SEO?

[Boodreaux]

One website with cities n url's for other pages is strongest I would think.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Russel,

If you were my client, I would advise you to stick with your one website and then work on building out awesome content for your surrounding cities. Why would I advise this:

1. Everything you build on your one website serves to strengthen your overall presence. Rather than dividing things up onto a bunch of different domains, you're building a big, powerful website.

2. I seldom find it warranted for a single business to have more than one website. For example, a San Francisco-based plumber is offering identical services, whether within San Francisco, or traveling to serve clients in San Jose, Oakland and Mill Valley. I'm not convinced of the genuine need for him to have millvalleyplumbing.com, sanjoseplumbing.com, etc. To me, it looks like an obvious attempted grab for rankings rather than a client-focused decision.

3. Tied into that is the fact that few plumbers have the time to develop enough truly unique and helpful content to flesh out multiple websites. This puts the client in danger of suffering EMD or duplicate content penalties for publishing a bunch of thin content (or worse, duplicate content) websites. From my experience working with local business owners, I've found that an attainable goal is creating a really strong, unique page for each of their service cities...not creating whole websites for each of their service cities. There could, of course, be exceptions to this, but this is what I've found to be the case most of the time.

4. It's so much easier for the client (and you) to manage a single website than a bunch of different mini sites.

So, those are some reasons I'd advise going with a single website and creating city landing pages on that site for the client's service cities. Do not create duplicate pages. Create fantastic, unique pages. This is a must. Hope these make sense. And yes, write good URLs, for the city landing pages when you create them.

[severitydesign]

how does duplicate content affect this strategy?

[irvingw]

One website, one URL with internal pages dedicated to regions.

The only reason for separate sites would be if you were trying to get exact match domain names.

[TommyTan]

Hi Russell,

You can either purchse separate domains for each location or create separate pages for each city under the same domain.  Both way works.  But I would prefer using the same domain and create different pages for each location.  This way, you will have all the backlinks/link juice to one website instead of having to build differetn backlinks for each website.

For each location, you can create a page and insert the location name in the URL so that Search Engines and visitors will know that that page is for that location.  For example: www.sample.com/locationA/services/folder, www.sample.comlocationB/services/folder

Hope this helps.  .