Local SEO HELP for Franchise SAB Business

[MilestoneSEO_LA]

This all began when I was asked to develop experiment parameters for our content protocol & strategy. It should be simple right? I've reviewed A/B testing tips for days now, from Moz and other sources.I'm totally amped and ready to begin testing in Google Analytics.

Say we have a restoration service franchise with over 40 franchises we perform SEO for. They are all over the US.

1. Every franchise has their own local website. Example restorationcompanylosangeles.com
2. Every franchise purchases territories in which they want to rank in. Some service over 100 cities.
3. Most franchises also have PPC campaigns. As a part of our strategy we incorporate the location reach data from Adwords to focus on their high reach locations first.
4. We have 'power pages' which include 5 high reach branch preferences (areas in which the owners prefer to target) and 5 non branch preference high reach locations.
5. We are working heavily on our National brand presence & working with PR and local news companies to build relationships for natural backlinks.
6. We are developing a strategy for social media for national brand outlets and local outlets.
7. We are using major aggregators to distribute our local citation for our branch offices. We make sure all NAP is consistent across all citations.
8. We are partners with Google so we work with them on new branches that are developing to create their Google listings (MyBusiness & G+).
9. We use local business schema markup for all pages.
10. Our content protocol encompasses all the needed onsite optimization tactics; meta, titles, schema, placement of keywords, semantic Q&A & internal linking strategies etc.
11. Our leads are calls and form submissions.  We use several call tracking services to monitor calls, caller's location etc. We are testing Callrail to start monitoring landing pages and keywords that generating our leads.

Parts that I want to change:

1. Some of the local sites have over 100 pages targeted for 'water damage + city ' aka what Moz would call "Doorway pages. "
2. These pages have 600-1000 words all talking about services we provide. Although our writers (4 of them) manipulate them in a way so that they aren't duplicate pages.
3. They add about 100 words about the city location. This is the only unique variable.
4. We pump out about 10 new local pages a month per site - so yes - over 300 local pages a month.
5. Traffic to the local sites is very scarce.
6. Content protocol /  strategy is only tested based on ranking! We have a tool that monitors ranking on all domains. This does not count for mobile, local, nor user based preference searching like Google Now.
7. My team is deeply attached to basing our metrics solely on ranking. The logic behind this is that if there is no local city page existing for a targeted location, there is less likelihood of ranking for that location. If you are not seen then you will not get traffic nor leads. Ranking for power locations is poor - while less competitive low reach locations rank ok.
8. We are updating content protocol by tweaking small things (multiple variants at a time). They will check ranking everyday for about a week to determine whether that experiment was a success or not.

What I need:

1. Internal duplicate content analyzer - to prove that writing over 400 pages a month about water damage + city IS duplicate content.
2. Unique content for 'Power pages' - I know based on dozens of chats here on the community and in MOZ blogs that we can only truly create quality content for 5-10 pages. Meaning we need to narrow down what locations are most important to us and beef them up.
3. Creating blog content for non 'power' locations.
4. Develop new experiment protocol based on metrics like traffic, impressions, bounce rate landing page analysis, domain authority etc.
5. Dig deeper into call metrics and their sources.

Now I am at a roadblock because I cannot develop valid content experimenting parameters based on ranking. I know that a/b testing requires testing two pages that are same except the one variable. We'd either non index these or canonicalize.. both are not in favor of testing ranking for the same term.

Questions:

1. Are all these local pages duplicate content?
2. Is there a such thing as content experiments based solely on ranking?
3. Any other suggestions for this scenario?

[vernonmack]

Just want to thank Miri Offir for the question. Her detailed post and this discussion are the answer to my everything!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Miri,

Good feedback from the community. You might also want to check out these, on this topic:

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

and from just this week:

http://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid

[EricaMcGillivray]

Yes, you can a/b test content copy blocks the same as testing which button. However, it will affect your on-page metrics most dramatically, not your rankings. (Which has some ranking signals.)

It sounds to me that your situation is more about convincing your team and higher ups the potential of different marketing methods compared to the current reality of what they're doing.  And to look at some different metrics besides rankings. Check out this blog post from Avinash about the metrics to track instead of rankings for every business size.

A/b testing is definitely a great start to show what could work better. You can always create reports showing potential business that could come in based on those or what you actually wouldn't lose by taking some of those extra pages off your site.

Best of luck!

[Lumina]

To answer your questions:

1. Not necessarily, but I'd be very careful. Content that's very similar isn't far from content that's duplicated.
2. I'm not 100% sure what you mean, but that's not an area I'm well-versed in.
3. What I can tell you is that you may want to consider having 1 website rather than hundreds. That one website can have a primary, large navigational section solely for locations and information about locations and varying services. This is probably something you'd have to discuss with the franchise owners and many others, but the fact that you have many sites and not one, means that you're missing out on SEO. It may benefit you greatly to consolidate everything into one - especially if you're trying to strengthen your brand. I did this with a client of mine recently who has several locations across the country, and they're doing much better in terms of SEO and conversion. But the most important thing to say is that measuring and preparing is often a good step.