I run a business where we offer music lessons in student's homes throughout a local area. We currently rank for phrases like piano lessons + city, or voice lessons + city because we have a page specifically made for each keyword + city combination. The result is a very spammy looking site.
I'm afraid that eventually this duplicate content will be penalized especially when we move into hundreds of cities throughout the US. With that in mind, I came up with a system that would give each page original content specific to the keyword + city. Whenever we hire a new teacher the teacher must fill out a short teaching philosophy which will be displayed next to their picture on pages where they can teach. I go through the teaching philosophy and add a keyword or two for search engines as well.
For example someone who can teach piano lessons in Los Angeles would appear on the piano lessons in Los Angeles page. This way I have some more original content. I am also going to systematically ask for testimonials from all of our customers which will then be displayed on the respective pages as well. Therefore the more teachers and students we get, the more content we have available on our site.
With that said, I'm still trying to think of ways to make a better user experience with more specific content on each page. Recently I was looking through whiteboard Fridays and found this video:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday
I thought it may be a good idea if I went out and found perhaps local sheet music stores and added them to my database. Then I would link out to them on specific pages, saying "this is where you can go to buy sheet music" or "buy a trumpet here". It would be a lot more elegant than that, but hopefully you get the idea. My entire site is database driven so as soon as I put the new stores information in the database it could show up on the instrument/city pages within 10 miles of the store, or something like that.
I'm posting this for opinions. Is this a good strategy? Some of my worries are that these other businesses almost all provide lessons in their store, so they would be direct competitors. I also really don't want to detract from what I'm selling, which are lessons. I'm worried about conversion rates mostly.
The positives to the approach though may be that I can get some good linking to these individual pages from these stores (if they'll link to a competitor), which is something that would be very difficult to do for these deep instrument+city pages. Also I'm thinking if I included the stores physical address then perhaps search engines would be more encouraged that the instrument+city page actually represents a local service.
Any ideas and thoughts are greatly appreciated!
