Cities in Footer

[EmSt]

Good afternoon!

For SEO I put all of the cities and states my customer serves ( over 40) in the footer.  Will this help or hurt seo. Also if it does hurt is it better to create a page of cities we serve and write some content around the different communities?

Thank you!

[GoogleDowner]

Yeah we've done that for clients due to limited budget but we're working on the idea that I mentioned earlier on our site, which is currently undergoing a redesign, to see how Google reacts. The tricky part is content and avoiding duplicate information but we're setting it up so that the services page contains average but informative content. However each local services page is where we are putting the exceptional content and information with local testimonials and case studies which should make them unique. I haven't seen anyone take this approach so we're hopeful that it will yield positive results. I was curious if you had any experience with it and I really appreciate your feedback on this topic. Thank you!!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jes,

You can approach this in the manner you've specified with a page for each city/service combo, but what I find is the challenge there is coming up with really valuable content in this scenario. My preference is to go with:

• A page for every city

• A page for every service

In other words, let you your service pages be about the services, because they are the same services regardless of where they are rendered. If you've only got 2 locations, you can of course mention those 2 cities on the service pages, but the main keywords on them should relate to the service. Then, have separate pages for each of your cities. Link to everything from the top level menu.

That being said, if you've got awesome writers and large resources, you could go with the approach you've specified to cover every possible keyword-city combo, but my advice would only be to go this way if you have the budget/available talent to make each of these pages amazing instead of so-so. What you definitely don't want is a big set of thin or duplicate pages that have been created solely to cover the combos rather than to educate and help the user.

Hope this helps!

[GoogleDowner]

Hi Miriam,

Great information that we follow as well. The big question I have, related to this topic, is whether or not it's wise to create an optimized service page for each service in each city. Here is what I mean by that:

Let's say we have a customer that has a physical location in two cities and they provide the same services to each city. Does it make sense to have a "generic" page for each service AND have a more optimized service page for each city with unique content? In this case the structure would like something like this:

/services/generic-service1
/services/generic-service2
/city-a/optimized-local-service1
/city-a/optimized-local-service2
/city-b/optimized-local-service1
/city-b/optimized-local-service2

In your experience is that the best approach or do you recommend a different method? Thanks!

[EmSt]

Thank you!!!!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Nichole,

Wow - sounds like you're getting it right in a lot of areas. That's fantastic, and so good that the landing pages you've created for the 2 physical locations include video, etc. Regarding the possible project of creating a new set of landing pages for your non-location cities, here's what I think: to cover 3 states, you'd have to build thousands of these to cover every possible town and city. Given the vast resources it would take to make this many pages unique, I would suggest a more refined approach. Perhaps something like this -

• Identify 3-5 most important location-less cities in each of the 3 states.

• Over the next year, task staff with doing photo or video documentary of beautiful projects in each of the target cities.

• Write text descriptions of each documented project.

• Secure good testimonials from the associated homeowners

• Create one other unique section of the page for each target city showcasing information that is not on any of the other pages. The sky is the limit with this. You might do cleaning tips for certain types of flooring, explain sustainable flooring choices, showcase made in the USA products, interview the business owner or staff members, offer a city-specific special, etc.

At the end of the year, you will have added 9-15 extremely strong pages to the top-level menu of your website that you can then hopefully build up internal linking to as well as hopefully earning some inbound links, too. Whether you expand beyond this to further cities should be determined on the success of this initial project, but at any rate, I don't believe this approach could hurt you, but it could certainly help you.

Hope this helps!

[EmSt]

Miriam,

I can't thank you enough for your though response. Here is where we are for your specif points.

1. Our Landing pages are exactly what you described including video. 2) Done and looks good 3.) Have not done. 4) Working on it - they have a few more reviews.  We are google certified photographers and have Business View in their profile that I believe has given us some local listing/map juice 5) We have a tremendous amount of video including a video blog that gets hits, comments and questions from all over the country. 6) We identified a few opportunities (not many) and fixed. 7) We use Crazy Egg heat mapping and we're killing it.

Given all this,  do you think adding an individual page with cities, towns states and counties with local descriptions of neighborhoods, landmarks etc. will help or hurt?

Thank you!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Nichole!

Thanks for sharing some more about this. I totally know how frustrating it can be when competitors with supposedly-taboo practices are surpassing you in the results. I would be quite surprised if the secret sauce for them in stuffing the footer unless Google hasn't looked at this area of their data in years, but I do have some suggestions. My advice here is general, in the absence of actually being able to look at your client's site and his competitors' sites, too.

1. Be sure the city landing pages you've build are of high quality - no thin/duplicate content. Building statewide landing pages is really a tough challenge when what you are offering is essentially the same service in every city. Showcasing completed projects in the various cities and getting user generated content from your happy customers will likely be key here.

Your two truly local geoterms relate to the 2 cities in which you have physical locations. My advice is to put 75% of your effort into developing a strong local pack presence in the 2 physical cities and use the additional 25% to see what you can do organically for the non-physical cities. This 25% may be devoted to improving your on-site landing page quality or to other efforts like social promotions and sharing, video marketing and offline promotions. Start with 5 non-physical location cities in which you would benefit most from visibility for and develop a creative approach to marketing in these communities. If organic efforts fail, you may need to consider PPC for these location-less cities, depending upon the competitiveness of the various geographies.

The following comments relate solely to your physical locations:

2. Run your site through moz.com/local/search to get an initial sense of how the client is doing in terms of citations. This is a good free place to start, as it will give you instant data about the business on 15 of the major platforms, including info about incomplete, inconsistent and duplicate listings. Then, follow up on this with further citation analysis, either manually or with other tools.

3. Run your key competitors through Moz Local as well to see if you can identify any weaknesses in any of their citation profiles. If there are weaker competitors, set your sites on surpassing them first. If, however, your direct competitors are all doing well with citations already, this is likely not an area that's going to give you a lot of room for competitive advantage.

4. Assess your Google+ Local reviews in terms of number, quality and recency, vs. those of your competitors. Can you earn more reviews for the 2 showrooms than competitors have earned.

5. Are your competitors doing a good job with social and/or video marketing? Can you surpass them with a more creative effort?

6. Audit the overall basic SEO of the website.

7. Audit the usability of the website.

Analyzing competitors can yield clues, but once you have those clues, the hope is that you can create your own strategy that really shines out, and that Google will reward that instead of rewarding spammy practices. In some cases, this can be an uphill battle, but don't give up hope. A really successful social campaign or other effort can sometimes break through a stagnant situation and end up with the rewards you're hoping to win for this client. Good luck!

[EmSt]

Hi Mariam,

My customer is a wood flooring installer, has two showrooms in one state and covers 3 states. He physically sees customers in each city. We've build out individual unique landing pages for each city but am dumbfounded because his competitors are keyword stuffing in the content of each web page then have all of the service areas ( quite a few) in the footer. I'm almost positive they have benefited from it. Also, they do not have showrooms.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Nichole,

Glad you asked about this. No, this is not a good idea. It is, in fact, cited by Google's webmaster guidelines as a practice called 'keyword stuffing' that is frowned upon. These guidelines are here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en. Please read those.

Are you able to share a bit more about your client's business model? Are they meeting face-to-face with customers in 40 cities/multiple states? Or is this a virtual business? The more information you can share, the better feedback the community can provide. It's really good that you've asked about this!