Targeting different cities for my service - Geo landing pages

[interstate]

I am breaking my head trying to figure out the best way around this... so we have an hvac company located in nyc. We want to also target all the different boroughs.

We have a bunch of different major keywords

hvac repair + location

hvac service + location

along with keywords such as air conditioning repair + location,  heating service + location   , and so on.....

Should each borough + keyword have its own page? Or should we just have one page called brooklyn and in that page target all the different keywords like hvac, air conditining,  and heating ?

Also does it matter how we have it laid out? Domaim/hvac-repair-brooklyn or should I add domain/service-area/hvac. .....

Some of my competitors have the same content written on each borough page just moved around a little  with different city names, how are they ranking so well? Isn't that duplicate?

Would love to hear from some people with success in this local area.

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

For the sake of convenience, I prefer this:

/service-area/dallas-tx

Hope that helps!

[cbizzle]

My thought was to have a master service area page that would be at mydomain.com/service-area. That page would have a service area map or the like that would link to the service areas themselves, which would be located at /service-area/texas/dallas or /service-area/dallas-tx, and which of the two is preferable is the essence of my question. Thank you!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Chad!

Getting to discuss these topics with the community is the highlight of my work day, every day!

In your examples, above, what is this meant to represent:

service-area

Are you saying the domains would actually say 'service-area' in them or is that filler text for something you are meaning to convey? Please clarify. Thanks!

[cbizzle]

Miriam, as a follow-up, do your recommendations for city pages change if a company serves a large number number of cities across several states? In particular, which of the following link structures would you recommend:

1. mydomain.com/service-area/texas/dallas and mydomain.com/service-area/louisiana/shreveport
2. mydomain.com/service-area/dallas-tx and mydomain.com/service-area/shreveport-la

Seriously, Miriam, this is all so helpful. Thank you for spending your time this way!

[Mutatio_Digital]

Hello all, I have very recently taken on a local business to manage and quite new to all of this. Your posts on the subject of multi-location have been incredibly useful and your original blogpost on Local landing pages Miriam is in my reading list and I am sure will be revisited regularly.

I have another question on this obviously complex subject, what to do about tracking your keywords in MOZ Pro? I have subscribed and set up my main keywords and linked each to the 40 different service locations for our business, which looks like its a similar set up to Chads, however this now gives me 400 keywords to track, which seems way too much and unmanageable. Can you give me some advice on how to make this much more effective?

Many thanks,

Sarah

[MiriamEllis]

Sure thing, Chad!

[cbizzle]

Thank you, Miriam!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Chad!

I see. If you have just one physical location, I recommend the following structure:

1. Include your city of location on your main pages (home, about, contact and the landing page for that city).

2. Create a unique landing page for each service city. Be sure the content is of very high quality on these pages.

3. Create a set of services pages, describing each of your company's services. Optimize these for the service keywords.

#3 has some grey area. If it is most important for you to rank for your city of location, then include that city in the optimization of these pages. If the service cities are of equal importance to the city of location, then do not optimize these for the cities - just optimize them for the services.

And, of course, be sure you are not duplicating content on any page

[cbizzle]

Thanks for getting back with me so quickly! I'm asking about a business that has only one physical location, but a broad service area. Should site pages be primarily optimized for the physical location or should I leave city names out of most page titles if I'd like to rank beyond the city of my physical location. Given that I have only one physical location, but a broad service area, which option is better (or is there a third):

Option #1: Optimize Most Pages for Physical Location

• Homepage: "Company Name | HVAC | New York City"
• About Page: "About Company Name | New York City"
• Service Page 1: "Service 1 | Company Name | New York City"
• Service Page 2: "Service 2 | Company Name | New York City"
• Service City Page 1: "New York City | Company Name"
• Service City Page 2: "Albany, NY | Company Name"
• Service City Page 3: "Philadelphia, PA | Company Name"

Option #2: Optimize Only City Pages for Physical Locations

• Homepage: "Company Name | HVAC"
• About Page: "About Company Name"
• Service Page 1: "Service 1 | Company Name"
• Service Page 2: "Service 2 | Company Name"
• Service City Page 1: "New York City | Company Name"
• Service City Page 2: "Albany, NY | Company Name"
• Service City Page 3: "Philadelphia, PA | Company Name"

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Chad,

Are you asking about a multi-location business? I believe so. If no city is more important than any other, then you would likely want to focus on the brand/keywords on the homepage and focus on the various cities on the city landing pages. If there are more details you'd like to share, feel free!

[cbizzle]

How would you recommend optimizing the site for its physical location? Would the homepage Title, for example, be something like "Company Name | HVAC | New York City" if that's the physical location of the business or would it be better to go with "Company Name | HVAC" as not to nullify the attempts to rank well in Albany, New Brunswick, and other surrounding cities?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Brian - Your instinct about this is correct. Spun pages tend to be of very low quality and largely duplicative. Ideally, if you have an important city/service combination, you should be investing the time it takes to create a unique page from scratch about it. If the term is worth it, the time is worth it.

[BrianAlpert78]

Sorry to revive an older post (I'll delete this if necessary), but I had one quick addition/question about this. I'm going to assume that using spinning software to cover the various city/service combos is out of the question, right? That it'd be better to simply not have a page devoted to a specific combination than to have a spun page?

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Jamie,

Well, in my suggested structure, the city landing pages wouldn't just say 'New York' on them in the titles,(by which I believe you're intending New York City, right?). They would likely include whatever the overall keyword is for the company...which would be HVAC if that is the category this company is in. What I wouldn't do, though, unless you do have the resources to create an enormous number of pages for all individual service/city combos, would be to have NYC+Heater Repair, NYC+Air Conditioner Repair, Brooklyn+Heater Repair, Brooklyn+Air Condition Repair, etc. On a limited budget/with limited resources, I think the structure I've suggested above would be the best way to convey all cities and services without repetition and without the risk of creating thin or duplicative content.

[JamieU]

Miriam,

When structuring the pages as one for each domain.com/service and another for domain.com/city

would you still show up in the google search if someone was searching for the city and service?

Example new york hvac company

I found that when I used the keyword example new york hvac company in my title, page keyword, content I ranked relatively high.  Thoughts as to the differences?

Thanks in advance!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Raymond,

If I were building this from scratch, and you only served one city, I would likely recommend:

domain.com/air-conditioning-repair-brooklyn

domain.com/air-conditioning-service-brooklyn

domain.com/hvac-installation-brooklyn

domain.com/hvac-repair-brooklyn

etc.

But, if you are working with more than one city, I would have a set of pages like this:

domain.com/city1

domain.com/city2

domain.com/city3

etc.

And another set of pages like this:

domain.com/service1

domain.com/service2

domain.com/service3

etc.

So, 1 set of pages for the cities and another set for the services. How to structure this sensibly really depends on the business model (single city vs. multi-city). Most service area businesses I've worked with serve multiple cities, so I've found the above works well and keeps things simple.

[interstate]

Miriam,

I read the article, great post by the way! So in otherwords you are saying to do the following

domain.com/service-area/brooklyn/hvac-repair

domain.com/service-area/brooklyn/hvac-service

domain.com/service-area/brooklyn/hvac-installations

domain.com/service-area/brooklyn/air-conditioning-repair

domain.com/service-area/brooklyn/air-conditioning-service

domain.com/service-area/brooklyn/air-conditioning-installations

Or should all HVAC related keywords just be one page? Something along the lines of domain.com/service-area/brooklyn/hvac-repair-service-installation

thanks in advance!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Raymond!

Jim has linked you to my great big post on the art of local landing pages. Hopefully, you can read it and identify a sensible strategy there.

Now, I'm not a New Yorker, and so this business of boroughs has always been a bit of mystery to me, but one thing that I will add to what you'll read in my post is how clearly hyper-local sensitivity is ramping up in search. My honest preference for structuring local websites is:

• one page per city

• one page per service

I totally understand that every local business owner worth his salt wants to rank for every possible combination of service/geo-term. Of course! But the only time I feel this landing page strategy should be undertaken to represent every possible combo is if the business owner has considerable creative or financial resources to devote to make a potentially enormous number of pages of a very high quality. Clearly - your competitors aren't hearing this advice if they're just spinning thin/duplicative content to cover the waterfront.

Now, all this being said, with Google become more and more intelligent about neighborhoods, and the mobile (and desktop) user becoming the new 'centroid', my take on this is that neighborhood (borough?) names are only going to become more important in signifying that a business is physically close to a given user. So, if I were consulting with a small HVAC company without endless funds, I'd probably suggest something like this strategy:

• one page per city

• one page per service

• frequent but gentle mention of boroughs/neighborhoods throughout the website, as appropiate

• hyperlocal blogging on an ongoing basis that emphasizes these boroughs, if the company or copywriter can swing something authentic and good to write about

I think frequent content of this sort could make phones ring. Hope these are helpful ideas!

[JVRudnick]

Here's the iconic post on just that area - http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide - from Miram who's on staff here at Moz.com...

And she addresses that too....well worth the click/thru eh!

[itpseo]

Hi Raymond,

You can create few pages like a/c to service area and then use the keywords for each service area page.

Also, domain/service-area/hvac url structure is good for your business

Kind Regards!