I'm trying to determine the best way to set up a website to rank for a similar set of keyword phrases in three different cities. The keyword phrases I want to rank for are all pretty much the same with the only difference being the city associated with the keyword phrase. For example, "Austin water restoration" vs "San Antonio water restoration" vs "Houston water restoration". Each city needs about 7 or 8 pages of unique content to accurately target the group of keywords I'm trying to rank for.
My initial thought was to write up unique content for each city and have each city act a site within the main site. For example, the main navigation for xyz.com/austin would be Austin specific, so when you land on xyz.com/austin and go to Services - Water Restoration, it would be all Austin specific content. The same would be true for San Antonio and Houston.
The only problem with this approach is that I have to build up the page authority for a lot of different pages. It would be much easier to build up the page authority for one Water Restoration page and just insert a little "Areas we serve" on the page that includes "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" and maybe work the coverage area in again at the bottom of the page somewhere. However, it would be much more difficult to work "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" into the title tags and H1s though, and I couldn't logically work the cities into the content as much either. That would be a downside to this approach.
Any thoughts on this? Wondering how large companies with hundreds of locations typically approach this? I'd really appreciate your input.
