Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Our company originally started in one city, now it is in multiple and the city we started in is actually now less important to our business than some of the new cities. We've of course have Google Places for Business listings for all our cities and are listed in the other prominent directories for each City (Bing Places, Manta, Superpages, etc etc) We have created once city page for each city in our domain.  All this has improved our Local SERPs for those cities but they pale in comparison to our dominance in the city we started out in.  We did have the first city in our home page title, we took that out. The obvious problem is from an SEO standpoint your home page is your "strongest" page but how do you make your home page rank top for multiple location intent searches:  "{city} {target keyword}"  ? The 3-pack is KEY.  For example, for one city we make it into the local 3-pack but we are not in the organic SERPs on page 1 outside of the 3-pack. As far as I can tell the major factor in 3-pack ranking is of course proximity of business to the user's location or user's location intent.  I would say followed by the natural ranking factors (or at least a large subset of them) that Google uses for its normal organic rankings, followed by Google Places reviews.  You would think the Google places reviews really make a difference, but not as much as you think. So how do you dominate local searches in different cities when competing against local-only companies?  My only guess is you need to create as much content as possible.  You don't want to make micro sites I think as you lose all the link juice going to your main site.  But how much content can one make that isn't duplicative.  You can describe the same products and services over and over for each city but that's not useful nor wise.  I guess you could do some re-writing.  But other than a different address, phone, and staff members, if your service is identical for each city it doesn't leave a lot of room for useful content creation to improve local search SERPS. I guess this begs the overall question, can a multi-city company ever dominate local SERPS when the search has a location intent (city name in the search) it there is even just a couple competing local companies doing some SEO work. it seems it is an extreme uphill battle if not next to impossible. (Never say never.)

I'll make this quick and simple.  Let's say you have a business located in several cities.  You've built individual pages for each city (linked to from a master list of your locations). For SEO purposes is it better to have the URL be a subfolder, or a parameter off of the home page URL: https://www.mysite.com/dallas  which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/dallas/index.php or http://www.mysite.com/?city=dallas  which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/index.php?city=dallas

** This question is about QS of Broad Match and how it pertains to THE AUCTION ONLY.  Not looking for opinions on campaign/ad group structure/strategies. For an Adwords account where all the ad groups are using modified broad match keywords I see that some keywords are assigned quality score.  Obviously a broad match keyword can be triggered by a very wide variety of actual keyword searches.  So I assume/guess that Adwords assigns a quality score for every single keyword entered that matches with that broad match and then makes the quality score for the broad match an average of the actual search term used quality score weighted by the volume of searches for that search term? Or am I wrong and the quality score for a broad match is the exact match quality score for that term (I doubt that since broad match the words can be in any order.) So for example, let's same I have this broad match score: +auto +insurance This is going to match with: auto insurance companies, auto insurance prices, luxury auto insurance, auto insurance brokers, and on and on and on. Let's say my landing page happens to have a lot of content about ratings for auto insurance brokers.  If the CTR for that terms is high, when it's matching my modified broad match, does that mean Adwords assigns a higher quality score, internally, to the search term "auto insurance broker" so if that term is entered, for the purpose of the auction, Adwords doesn't use the quality score of the broad match but the quality score it has calculated for that specific search term -- I just can't see what it is because I don't have that term as an exact match term on my account. Or, does it use the broad match quality score no matter what search term is used that matched the broad match?  I would be highly surprised if that was true.  If this were true, then you would want to break out the important terms into their own exact match keywords.  In many cases, the more efficient strategy for an account is to have fairly narrow modified broad match terms coupled with a very large negative keyword list. The question is mainly, is there any advantage from the perspective of competing in the auction to have the term be an exact match versus matching a modified broad match keyword?  If QS is stored for the actual search term, then I would assume the answer is NO.  I know it would provide more granular reporting and the ability to more fine tune landing pages etc etc etc but I'm just talking purely from the perspective of the auction.