A question about similar services a multiple locations

[Thriveworks-Counseling]

Moz Friends, I hope you can help with this question.

My company has 25 locations, and growing. Our rankings are strong in the Serps and Local Maps.

With each location, we create a new page (with a unique URL) for that specific location (ex: Thriveworks.com/knoxville-counseling). We then write about 15 pages of unique content for that location, each page about one of the services we provide like: Depression Counseling, Couples Therapy, Anger Management, Eating Disorder Treatment, Life Coaching, Child Therapy, and the list goes on and on....

Hence, for each location, we create a pile of URLS like: Thriveworks.com/knoxville-counseling/couples-therapy, ..../knoxville-counseling/depression-therapy, .../knoxville-counseling/anger-management...

We do this to rank for medium-long-tail searches like "Knoxville Marriage Therapy."

As we grow, this results in us writing lots and lots of original content for each location. Original, but somewhat redundant. We would much rather write one AMAZING article on depression counseling, than 25 'okay' ones for each office we open.

So, my question (if you're still reading) is our current approach the right one? Should we continue the grind and for each location create a unique page for each service offered out of that office?

Or is there a better way, where we can create One anger management page that would suffice for each of our local offices?

Has anyone addressed this topic in an article? I Haven't found one...

I look forward to your feedback, and thanks in advance!!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Anthony,

Normally, my answer would be the same as the one given by Bryan. The simplest path in most multi-location business scenarios is to have 1 page per city and 1 page per service, rather than trying to cover every possible geo/keyword combo. However, most people ask about this before they have invested so much time and money in the development of the site and its content.

Because you've already made the investment, this is what I would suggest you evaluate with the decision makers at the practice:

Is the content simply mediocre or is it actually duplicate content?

If the former, can you envision a way to take these pages to a new level of usefulness? For example, what if, on these pages you currently have, you showcased all of the free or inexpensive auxiliary local resources for mental health? I'm thinking of group therapy, mental health department, serene places to walk for meditation, free yoga or tai chi resources, elder advocacy groups, healthy and fun things for children, lectures, seminars, outdoor concerts, community gardens, pet shelters and anything else you could think of that could make a meaningful difference in patients' mind and body health. Because you would be doing this based on the symptoms of certain conditions and the resources of a given city, each page would, by its very nature, be unique and helpful. You would have, in fact, greatly enhanced the hyperlocal value of each page.

But, if the content is duplicative, that's another matter as it could really be hurting the business and not doing much for the practice's clients. You might, in this case, decide to dismantle a structure that probably shouldn't have been built in the first place and go with the 1 page per city/ 1 page per service model, perhaps even implementing some of the hyperlocal suggestions I've brainstormed to improve the city pages, the health condition pages or both. You could cull the duplicate pages for their best work, build fewer, much better pages instead using some of the old work and greatly adding to it and end up with a very strong but slimmer site.

I think either path is viable, depending on the resources available to you. Hope this helps!

[Thriveworks-Counseling]

Thanks Bryan, really appreciate it!

[Lumina]

Unfortunately, I don't have any on hand - just experience running something similar with one of my clients. Yes, you'll lose juice for search terms like the one you've mentioned, but if you optimize your pages in a way that uses a lot of good, service-oriented content, it may not have as much an effect as you might expect. I can't give you any hard data or examples on that, however.

[Thriveworks-Counseling]

Bryan,

Thanks for replying, and so quickly!

I'm concerned that if someone searched for "Knoxville Child Therapy", that a non-location specific Thriveworks.com/child-therapy wouldn't rank as well as a location specific page at Thriveworks.com/knoxville-counseling/child therapy (with a 'Knoxville Child Therapy' H1 tag)

Do you happen to know of any studies, principles, or examples that might help assuage my worries on this?

[Lumina]

If your services are no different between locations, I would suggest having a single page for each service rather than a page for each service in each location. To compensate for that, make sure you have pages dedicated to each location (as I'm sure you do, based on what you say). You could also write about what makes the location's services special.

• Who works there and what do they do that's unique to that location?
• How do you service that location?
• How does bringing your services to that location benefit it, specifically?
• etc. (you get the idea)

It can be taxing to write original content, do research, and such - but there's no magic bullet for content. I'm not sure how your business is structured, but as an aside, having the specialists themselves write articles about what they're doing would likely lead to very rich, organic content. Probably not plausible, but something I'd recommend nonetheless.