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I'll start with the story, but the main question is at the bottom. Feel free to scroll down :-). I've got good news and bad news regarding a client of mine. It's a service area business that only serves one metropolitan area. We've got a great blog with really valuable content that truly helps people while firmly establishing my client's industry expertise. As a result, local traffic has spiked and the company generates more leads. So that's the good news. The bad (bad-ish?) news is that the client also gets tons of traffic from outside the service area. Not only that, people are calling them all the time who either live in a different state and don't realize that the company isn't local to them or are located out of state but are calling for free advice. On one hand, the client gets a kick out of it and thinks it's funny. On the other hand, it's annoying and they're having to train all their intake people to ask for callers' locations before they chat with them. Some things we're doing to combat this problem: 1. The title tag on our home page specifies the metro area where we're active. 2. Our blog articles frequently include lines like, "Here in [name of our city], we usually take this approach." 3. There are references to our location all over the site. 4. We've got an actual location page with our address; for that matter, the address is listed in the footer on every page. 5. The listed phone number does not begin with 800; rather, it uses the local area code. 6. All of our local business listings, including our Google My Business listing, is up to date. 7. We recently published a "Cities We Serve" area of the site with highly customized/individualized local landing pages for 12 actual municipalities in our metro region. This will take some time to cook, but hopefully that will help. "Cities We Serve" is not a primary navigation item, but the local landing pages are situated as such: "About Us > Cities We Serve > [individual city page]" **Anyway, here's my main question: **In light of all this, is there any other way to somehow shield my client from all this irrelevant traffic and protect them from time-wasting phone calls?

I'm familiar with the SAB best practices outlined here. Here's my issue: Doing local landing pages as described here might not be ideal from a user experience point of view. Having a "Cities We Serve" or "Service Areas" link in the main navigation isn't necessarily valuable to the user when the city-specific landing pages are all places within a 15-mile radius of the SAB's headquarters. It would just look like the company did it for SEO. It wouldn't look natural. Seriously, it feels like best practices are totally at odds with user experience here. If I absolutely must create location pages for 10 or so municipalities within my client's service area, I'd rather NOT put the service areas as a primary navigation item. It is not useful to the user. Anyone who sees that the company provides services in the [name of city] metropolitan area will already understand that the company can service their town that is 5 miles away. It is self-evident. For example**, who would wonder whether a plumbing company with a Los Angeles address also services Beverly Hills?** It's just... silly. But the Moz guide says I've got to do those location pages! And that I've got to put them high up in the navigation! This is a problem because we've got to do local SEO, but we also have to provide an ideal experience. Thoughts?

I've linked to some screenshots so that it what I'm talking about makes more sense. Sometimes, when I perform a search, I see an article with the correct article title listed as the page title in the SERPs. Other times, I see the wrong page title – it's a generic somethin' or other done by my client's web design company with a bunch of keywords thrown in. The latter (not the correct article title) also appears at the top of the browser tab for every article on my client's site. I know this is bad, but what can be done about it? This would never happen if my client used Wordpress or some easily modifiable CMS, but they're using a proprietary one maintained by the group that designed the website. open?id=0BxB_dYL1ylGgVVF1dHlwdXp2dFU open?id=0BxB_dYL1ylGgdWJjdlJoRlRIR00

I'm writing new landing page copy for a client in the HVAC industry. The client has one office, but its service area includes several cities in a metropolitan area. I'm writing two types of pages: Service-specific landing pages (e.g. "Air Conditioner Repair," "Furnace Inspections") Location-specific pages (e.g. "Dallas Heating & Air Services," "Plano Heating & Air Services") My question is whether I should also include specific locations within the service-specific pages if I'm already doing the location-specific pages as well. For example, would it make sense to do a page on AC repair with title/H1 elements like "Dallas Air Conditioner Repair Service" or "Air Conditioner Repair in Plano and Dallas" in light of the fact that there will already be 10-12 location-specific pages? My preference is to NOT include location-specific stuff in the service landing pages except for maybe a passing reference to something like "...need HVAC services for your Dallas-area home" or similar. It just seems more natural that way. Thoughts?