Which internal page approach is better? Couponsite/Kohls OR Couponsite/Houston/Kohls

[couponguy]

Google will use the user's location for a restaurant search but it doesn't look to me like it uses it for a national company like Kohls.  Is there a way to determine that?

Assume I have no physical local presence in Houston for answering the question.

Assume also that the coupon I list is a national one that applies everywhere.  It seems to me that a facebook post that uses the first one as a link is better because more people live outside of Houston than inside and will see it as relevant, AND I may list it for more than one city.  But, for specificity perhaps it makes sense to have the second one as it may be more likely to show up in a Google search result by someone in Houston..

Your thoughts please?

Thanks.

[couponguy]

Kane,

Thanks for the response.  I agree that few will type that in but I wonder if the user's location matters--That is: since Google knows where people are located why wouldn't Google try to match up their location with the webpage content?.  For restaurants, it appears to matter to Google--when I put in a national restaurant like Bob Evans one of the results is all-menus.com/state/myneabylocaltown.    Why not for a retail store like a Kohls that also has a physical location?  .OTOH a coupon site isn't a store with a local presence--it's just a site that can exist anywhere.  Still, logically it seems to me that if my content is geared toward a physical location (ie the coupon is good locally), then Google would/should check for whether a user search has a potential location-connection, and prioritize that in the results---like it appears to do with the allmenus.com site.

This issue has caused me a lot of grief lately as I want to have the location breakdown but fear it won't be rewarded, yet logically IMO it should be.  Kane if you or anyone else has further insight please do share.

[KaneJamison]

I doubt users will be searching by "houston kohls coupon" for coupons. Most Kohl's have the same coupons, so it makes sense to just search "kohls coupon".

With that in mind, I'd probably stick with the top level page and not do cities.

[couponguy]

Hi Marc,

Thanks.  My target will be people in every major city.  However, I can set it up to have one page for Kohls, or a page for each city for Kohls.  I am wondering if Google ALWAYS takes the user's location into account, which is obvious with restaurants, but not with national stores.  If they don't and they rely ONLY on the keywords, then I understand that if the user enters "Houston" it would help to have a Houston/Kohls page, but my guess is that very few users actually include their own city when searching for a national store..dunno..nor do I know how to find out..

Thanks for the caution on duplicate content.  I would have a title and some content in a hover 'info' box that would tie it to the city. Hopefully that would be enough.

Thanks again--please provide any more thoughts.  I've put 5 years into developing a site for mobile coupons --local and national--and now that I'm about to launch I've come to realize that it HAS to succeed organically for me to succeed, and so 'structure' of pages is something I'm really concerned about.

[dotfly]

well this depends on the question whom you want to target???

Do you want to spread/offer this coupon nationwide or just for interested people in Houston?

If you use this local "parameter" then your site CAN be more relevant if the visitor can be located in this area or if he/she uses the word "Houston" in his query... of course your site should be optimized for this relevant keyword!

by the way: if you just decide to offer this coupon in different locations you should do more than just change the city within your content otherwise its DC or at least partial DC and that wont do you any good.