Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
-
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example.
One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com.
I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past.
What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
-
Hi KJ,
Agree with the consensus here that building mini sites is not the right approach. Take whatever energy you would have put into developing these and channel it into making the landing pages for your locations the best in their industry/towns. I was just watching a great little video by Darren Shaw in which this is one of the things he covers. Might be worth sharing with your team:
http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/70-website-optimization-basics-for-local-seo
And earlier this year, Phil Rozek penned some pretty fine tips on making your pages strong:
I am curious about one element of your original post. You mention, "We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations." I wasn't sure whether you were saying that you've never done well in them, were doing well in them until something changed (such as the universal rollout of Local Stacks) or something else. With the latter, I would guess that a huge number of businesses are now struggling to cope with the fact that there are only 3 spots to rank for any keyword, necessitating greater focus on lower volume keywords/categories, organic and paid results. Everybody but the top 3 businesses is now in this boat. Very tough.
-
Hi KJ,
First things first, do you have a physical address for each location and are these set up in Google My Business? I doubt you have premises in each location, so ranking for all the areas is going to be an uphill task.
Google is smart and knows if you have physical premises in the targeted location, after all it's all about delivering highly relevant results to its users. Lets say for example you're an electrician and a user searches for "Electrician in Sheffield" - realistically, if you only have premises in Leeds, it's going to be difficult to rank above the company who is actually located in Sheffield.
I would firstly target 2-3 of your primary locations and focus on building 10x content, I would aim to write 1000+ words for each page (completely unique content) whilst focusing on your set keywords, but be natural and don't keyword stuff. Put reviews from customers in that specific area on the landing page and build citations from local directories.
Again, you can't build citations unless you have physical premises in the location. Trust me, I've done it for years for a Roofing company and it's taken some time to see the results. He's #1 for the city he is located in, but for other cities it's a very difficult task. Writing about the same service for each location is a daunting task too, you should consider Great Content to outsource the content if you're stuck for ideas. It's a low budget solution and will save you mountains of time.
I would also use folders and not subdomains. Build a 'service areas' page, examples of urls for the roofing company below.
-
Hello KJ,
You absolutely don't want to begin creating subdomains for different locations. That will split your link flow across multiple domains (rather than consolidating it within a single domain).
It sounds like you are attempting a silo structure for your website (multiple locations targeting the same keyword) but this can be seen as stuffing if performed incorrectly. Using multiple pages to rank for a single keyword is problematic as it hits both Panda and Penguin red flags. What you want to do is begin ranking for different keywords or at least ensuring that your content for each of these locations pages is unique and sufficiently long (500 words+) to avoid arousing suspicion.
Your site structure sounds like it is okay. For example, a silo we put in place for one of our clients followed the following pattern:
domain.com/country/region/city/service
We hit about 15 cities using this tactic, and they have been sitting 1st page for the last year or so. We also built sufficient links to the home page and relevant pages and ensured that our technical SEO was spotless, so perhaps these are the areas you might engage your team to move forward on.
If you want to know more about our process, feel free to touch base and I will provide what advice I can.
Hope this helps and best of luck moving forward!
Rob
-
Right. You will not beat the other folks with the subdomain approach. You are getting beat because your competitors are taking the time to make better content in a niche. Find a way to get better content on those pages and mark them up with schema to make the info more readable to the search engines and possibly get an enhanced listing the SERPs.
We went through a site relaunch and the review schema on locations got messed up. Did not impact our rankings, but did impact click through from the search engines. None of the stars were showing up in the SERPs due to the schema goof up. Got the schema fixed and traffic was back up.
This link will point you toward the relevant Moz resources
https://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating
If you are happy with my response, please feel free to mark as a "Good Answer" thanks!
-
I agree with you. Some marketing people believe that we cannot beat out smaller companies is that we are too diverse in services. We do great with niche keywords and markets, but are being beat by companies who only focus on one of our key services. That is why they thought sub domains would do better, but I remember Rand posting something on sub domains vs sub folders, but cannot find the original source.
Thanks for your answer...
-
This is similar to the question on if a blog should be on a subdomain (blog.website.com) vs a folder (website.com/blog).
Most people agree that the use of the folder is the better option as with every blog post that you get links to etc, you are building your domain authority and generally speaking, rising tides raise all ships.
You would run into the same issue with your option to setup subdomains for each location. You would also end up having to deal with separate webmaster accounts for each etc. I don't think the subdomain is the solution. I run a site with thousands of locations and using a folder structure the business pages rank well for a given location, if you search on the name of the location, so I know it works and I manage it at scale.
I would get back to looking at any technical issues you have and your on page options for the pages. Anything you can further do to make these pages 10x better than any other page on the net for those locations?
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
International website. Di I need a new website
i am looking to expand from the UK and open a location in the US. i curretly have a .co.uk domain. what would you recommend I do with th website, create a new one wth a .com domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Outside Top 10 Even though - Higher Domain/Page Authority/Higher On Page Grade
Hi, Note: this is for Australian search results - for people in Perth.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HeadStud
The website is: http://thedj.com.au I am trying to optimise for the keyword 'perth wedding dj', but also 'wedding dj perth' and for some reason my website isn't even in the top 10 results. Here is what's weird though: My on-page grade with the On-Page Grader for the keyword 'wedding DJ perth' is an 'A' for http://thedj.com.au (http://awesomescreenshot.com/0135135hca) When checking the Keyword Difficulty in the Google Australia search enginge for 'wedding DJ perth' - there are 4 results which have a lower domain authority than 15 (in fact one result has a domain authority of 1) - http://awesomescreenshot.com/03f5134zd1 http://thedj.com.au has a Domain Authority of 23/100 and a Page Authority of 34/100. (http://awesomescreenshot.com/0bb5134tb8) So seeing as the page has gotten an A for on-page optimisation for the keyword 'wedding DJ Perth' and has a higher domain authority then many results in the top 10... why isn't it in the Top 10?! Bonus Question:
Why is DJ Avi showing up at the top of search results (Local listing) depsite the fact that:
a) He has no website to link to
b) No reviews for his listing
c) No keywords that I can see (other than the fact that he's a DJ)
Screenshot: http://awesomescreenshot.com/05151349cb Meanwhile our Local Places - Thanks,
Kosta
http://www.headstudios.com.au0 -
Redesigned Website
Hi, I have redesigned my website in html whereas it was in .asp earlier. I have resubmitted my google sitemap but it still showing me old site pages in search except home page. My question is how i can immediately change my web presence. How i can get the benefit of my .asp page ranks? In addition my website still alive with .asp. What should be the strategy, should i remove this websites or have to redirect all pages to new. If i make 301 redirection then will it cause any issue in SEO, ranking etc ? Thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 1akal0 -
Google displaying the homepage instead of the landing page
I have a landing page that was ranking before for web design philippines its http://www.myoptimind.com/web-design-philippines Early this year, we dropped our rank and google displayed our homepage http://www.myoptimind.com When i search for "web design company philippines", i rank. however, for "web design philippines" I am on page 2. When I try "web design philippines" site:myoptimind.com it shows the landing page as the 2nd result. Last week, we tried to change the content of the page to reflect content that is more related to the keyword and moved the old content to http://www.myoptimind.com/web-design-services-philippines. We also changed the title of the homepage from Web Design Philippines | SEO Company Philippines to Web Design & SEO Company Philippines Still nothing has changed. I just wanted it to show the landing page instead of the root domain. Any idea how this can be solved?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimind0 -
First Link on Page Still Only Link on Page?
Bruce Clay and others did some research and found that the first link on the page is the most important and what is accredited as the link. Any other links on the page mean nothing. Is this still true? And in that case, on an ecommerce site with category links in the top navigation (which is high on the code), is it not useful to link to categories in the content of the page? Because the category is already linked to on that page. Thank you, Tyler
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Help With This Page
This is page - http://www.kempruge.com/location/tampa/tampa-personal-injury-legal-attorneys/ - is the most important one to my business, and I can't seem to get it to rank higher. It has the second highest authority and links, second only to my homepage (though none are all that impressive) but it is just buried in the SERPs. Granted, I know Tampa Personal Injury Attorney is the hardest keyword for us to rank for, but there must be some way to improve this. I know getting high quality links is an appropriate answer, but I'm looking for anything I can do solely on my end to improve it. However, if anyone has some ways to make the page more linkable, I'm all ears! Please, if you have a second to take a look, I'd appreciate any and all feedback. Thanks, Ruben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Should I merge these pages
I have this business and am not sure if I should have a separate page for all of the different roofing subservices or if i should put them all on one page. Even though they are separate, but related services, I feel they could end up competing against one another If I merge them I will also have more related and keyword rich content on one page that I could focus my efforts on.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Google Filter? Drop from top first page to bottom second page?
My site has dropped from the first page top spots to the bottom second page, about 2 month ago. From time to time it reappears in the first page, is this some kind of google filter? How do I solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ofer230