Best way to link to multiple location pages

[Rogerperk]

I am a Magician and have multiple location pages for each county I cover.

I currently have them linked off the menu under locations/ <county>and also in the footer</county>

However I have heard that a link from the page is much stronger, so I am experimenting with removing the Menu & Footer link and just linking to these pages from within the content.

It's not really a navigation item and most people come in through search to the right page.

Am I diluting the link by having it in the Menu/Page and Footer?

I read a long time ago that Google only considers the first link to a page and ignores the rest - is that the case?

Thanks

Roger

https://www.rogerlapin.co.uk/

[waqid]

Look at how starbucks does theirs in the states. Make it a locatoin info page. Pictures, address, contact info, ratings, reviews, descriton of the area (historical, new, corporate) and anything else like menus, services , valet, and etc.

[MiriamEllis]

You're welcome!

I think it's really important to keep in mind that, while you have one end goal of having these pages rank well in Google's results, the guiding force for creating them should be to convert human visitors into customers.

Service Area Business like yours (or like house painters, visiting home help, etc.) don't have branches that serve as the purpose for creating landing pages. Obviously, when a brick-and-mortar business has multiple locations (like a restaurant franchise) it makes total sense to create a unique page for each branch so that the customer can see the info they need about each branch. But when the business has an SAB model like yours, you want to be very careful that any landing pages you create have the purpose of serving people, rather than simply serving search engines.

This means making any locale-oriented landing page very specific to the locale it represents. For a business like yours, showcasing the parties you've done in X county would be a natural way to do this, along with testimonials/reviews from clients in that area. Any other approach risks watering down the quality of your website. You're lucky to have a fun industry that should easily lend itself to great, unique content!

[Rogerperk]

Thank you for your reply.

I have tried to make the pages unique but it's very difficult when a search for magician <county>is very much the same as another county </county>

I will add more references to venues I have performed at in each landing page -

I have previously created a blog page for a venue and then pointed a link to

Will include the venues on the landing page now

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Roger!

Thank you for bringing your question to the community.  You can have both - links in a menu and internal links from your homepage and other pages of your website. There is not reason not to have both if the links in your content make sense.

One thing I would warn against after taking a quick look at your website: beware of duplicate content and over-optimization. You are styling these pages as "locations", but they are, in fact, areas  where  you offer your services. In order to make sense of creating landing pages for these locales, you should be using these pages to showcase events you've done in each locale. Right now, just at a glance, the pages look very similar to one another, rather than unique, and this could be a quality concern. Also, the language of your subheadings is not very natural. Check both these headings and the text of the pages for uniqueness and naturalness. If how you write isn't how you speak, Google could view the quality of the content as low.

Hope this helps.