SEO For Local Searches

[Anthony1982]

I run a driving school of over 100 instructors in the UK. We cover around 60 different areas.

My homepage www.driveJohnsons.co.uk is optimised for 'driving lessons' and 'driving school' search terms mainly.

My area pages are optimised for the same but with the area included ie: Driving Lessons Birmingham or Driving Lessons Leeds

I've taken a drop in many areas...

I've cleaned up my incoming links using the disavow too and upped more relevant links associated with the same industry as myself.

The question i have is should i change my URL's for my area pages from www.driveJohnsons.co.uk/driving-lessons-leeds to: www.driveJohnsons.co.uk/leeds

I've been told stuffing the URL with keywords for an area actually dilutes the strength of my homepage and all the other areas.

At the moment i have 60 area pages with: www.drivejohnsons.co.uk/driving-lessons-area

It use to work a treat, but i've started seeing some companies change their URLs to: /area and excluding the driving-lessons

If i make this change then i'm either going to have to bit the bullet on build up links for those areas again or do a redirect for each area.

I've added most areas to google places and i've added google map to many of area pages too.

If anyone knows a bit more, please let me know...

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Anthony,

So glad the resource helped!

[Anthony1982]

Hi Miriam...

I found the local listings article very interesting, quite frightening in fact. It all makes sense but you have put a lot of things back into perspective.

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, these kinds of pages, regardless of the URL, can present problems for organic SEO (even when they have some local SEO benefit). If the 60 pages are basically cookie cutter - the same content except for the city/region, then this is the kind of thin content that can cause problems with Panda. The keyword-loaded URL might marginally increase the problem, but I think the risk is real either way.

As Miriam said, if it's a few locations, it's not usually a big deal. Hundreds is definitely a risk. Sixty is a bit borderline, IMO. If your site had 1,000 indexed pages and 60 local pages, probably no big deal. If you have 100 pages total and 60 local, then I'd be concerned. There's no easy solution. Either you: (1)focus the regions and pare it down a bit, or (2) work to create more unique content on each of these pages and make sure they don't look thin.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Anthony,

Back again. You might like to check out the good examples of multi-location businesses in this article from Local U:

http://localu.org/blog/designing-business-location-website-pages-part-2-multiple-location-business/

I'm still pretty much sticking to my original suggested URL structure, and I think these examples may be useful in your planning.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Anthony,

You've raised an interesting point. I've asked some of our traditional SEO experts if they would weigh in on this with you. My clients typically have just a handful of locations, in which case, it's been a no-brainer for me to go with the /service-city url structure, but I think what you're asking is a valid question. It might still be the best choice to go with this structure, but if you're really concerned about it, you could go with just a /city URL structure for the office landing pages. On the other hand, the URL is only one step in your optimization work. Even if you did just go with the /city structure, wouldn't you be optimizing the tags and text of the pages with the core service phrase? Another thought, too, would be to go with /business-name-city, but when one considers that many business names may contain the core service phrase (Superior Driving Lessons, for example), this brings us back to square one.

When things become messy like this, I try to step back and ask myself if what I'm doing is natural. In this case, I think having pages on your website that specify that driving lessons are offered in X city is totally natural. It's not like you're trying to game anything with explaining this. You're giving an honest representation of what the business does and where it does it. Sometimes, I can over-think things about my clients, in which case, coming back to what is natural and honest can often provide a guiding light.

As I've said, I think your question is worthy of an answer. I've shared my thinking on this, but I really hope you'll get feedback from some of our other staff on this as I believe several heads may be better than one in hashing out the technical specifics of this.

[Anthony1982]

Hi Miriam

I've got physical addresses for the areas. A google postcard has been sent to the area to authorise.

I'm not bothered if i rank on the first page locally or organically.

My concern with the URL was if i have 60 URL's saying /driving-lessons-AREA

Would that not dilute dilute each areas strength because of the heavy use of driving lessons and also dilute my home page optimisation which is for the whole of the UK for driving lessons.

As for links, i've had a good clean up around 2 months ago but it seems the disavow tool takes time as these horrible links are still present in my webmaster links to site section.

It's weird i have another website that is spammed to hell, bad links and poor content and that sits on the first page of local listings and i've done no work on it since the penguin update - as there was too much to do and i had other priorities.

All i've tried to do with my main site is good seo practice.

So you think the driving-lessons for every area page shouldn't make a difference ?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Anthony,

Are you saying that your business has a physical office in each of these cities? I am assuming this is so, as you are only allowed to create Google+ Local pages for physical offices. If there is some chance that you've done so, lacking physical offices, then you could expect Google to remove these listings if they become aware that they don't represent physical offices.

I see no problem with your URLs. I'm curious as to what you read. Those look like perfectly fine URLs for local landing pages to me.

Are you aware that there is currently a shakeup going on in Google's local results? It's possible that this could account for any fluctuations you are seeing.

If not, it sounds like you may have had some link problems in the past. Is there any chance that you might have run afoul of the Google Places Quality Guidelines in some way? Here's a link to them: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en

Ranking fluctuations happen in Local. Sometimes they are caused by tweaks to Google's algo. Other times, they occur when you are surpassed by a competitors' efforts. And, in some cases, a business drops because of engaging in bad practices. Consider these three scenarios and see if one of them fits your business most closely. Hope this helps.