Landing Page Idea

[MissThumann]

I have an Insurance Agency and I'm working on new landing pages to hit our surrounding cities.

my 1st question is: On my Homeowners Insurance Page, can I add a section for Area's We Insure. To look like this

Area's We Insure

• Allen
• Plano
• Frisco
• McKinney
• Highland Park

Then make each one linkable to it's City Landing Page? Is there any reason this would hurt my seo?

2nd Question: Can I have the City Pages hidden from my navigation- as I already have a huge drop down menu already.

Would any of the above hurt my seo**? **

Huge Thanks in Advance!

[MissThumann]

Yes, thank you for that. Makes sense. I just really have to think about the best way to approach this.

[MiriamEllis]

Thanks for the further details. So, basically, the architecture of your website and its navigation send signals to humans and search engines about which pages you deem to be most important.

Take a look at the homepage of Moz and the main menu at the top. For example, we're linking to our blog, signalling that this is a core component of this website, but, we're not linking to every single blog post on the blog, meaning we don't consider each post to be as important as the main blog link.

Similarly, we have a link title "Learn SEO" which takes us to a page that is basically serving as a sub-menu of the educational tutorials we've developed. We don't link to each tutorial from the top level menu, but the path has been created to get there.

For a local business, the top level menu typically includes:

• Contact Us page

• Reviews/Testimonials page

• Blog (if they have one)

• Link to or dropdown for the pages that describe each of their services

• Link to or dropdown for the pages that describe each of their physical locations or service cities

At the minimum, that's what you'll typically see, but the size/complexity of the website will play a role in influencing what you put in the top level menu, with the goal being that you are highlighting the pages you feel are most important for users (and search engines) as the very top pages of your website.

To ask if it hurts you to put some pages in the top level navigation while leaving others out somewhat oversimplifies the issue. All website owners have to make these choices to prioritize what goes in the menu. It's not really a matter of being hurt - it's a matter of being sure that your core pages have received maximum prominence in the menu.

Now, if you built a page that was like an island with no path to it from anywhere in the site, then, yes, neither humans nor bots might ever find it. But, at the end of the day, a website with 20, 50 or 5,000 pages can't put all of them in the top level menu, so best advice here is to carefully, thoughtfully plan the navigational architecture of the site so that core pages are immediately accessible via the main nav, but that there are very clear and abundant paths to less prominent pages as well.

I hope digging into this a bit more this way is helpful

[MissThumann]

There not core pages, but Ideally, I still want these pages to rank. Would it make a big different to the SEO if I put them some place else - meaning will it hurt me if I hide these pages?

Sorry, I hope that makes sense...

[MiriamEllis]

Hi There!

It's fine to include a short list like you've highlighted. What you don't want to do is to create a large block of text that is simply a list of tons of cities or zip codes as Google has specifically stated they don't approve of this. But if you are just mentioning the 5 cities you serve, I think you'll be A-OK, particularly as you are linking to internal pages for further detail.

As to not including these in your top level navigation, the decision about this would need to stem from how important these pages are to your customers and your business. If they are secondary pages rather than core pages, perhaps you'd want to create a section for these landing pages with a small sub-menu that governs it? But, if these are core pages, I'd want them in the top level navigation.

Hope this helps!