Local Keyword Strategy

[matthewbyers]

Good morning!

I'm working on building out a new website for a regional insurance agency specializing in auto insurance for high risk drivers (ex. Tickets, Accidents, Dui's, etc.). Due to the competitive nature of our industry, I believe it is best to focus on very localized long tail keywords, instead of broad terms I don't have any chance of ranking for.

Our keyword research indicates that there is an opportunity to optimize and potentially rank for keywords that include geographic modifiers for towns and cities within a roughly 50 mile radius. The problem is, there is only so much you can say about auto insurance. On the one hand, I would like to have individual landing pages for each keyword phrase. On the other hand, I don't want to look manipulative to Google or hurt user experience by creating a bunch of pages with relatively similar content.

Can anyone offer some advice on how I can structure the site/content to optimize for each geographic modifier without having lots of pages that are very similar?

Thank you!

[ResslerMotors]

Infographic on where the vast majority of tickets are handed out in a city?  Hot means the most tickets, etc.  Not only are you offering a service to your customers with great insurance rates, but you are also telling them where they need to slow down!

Include this in all your city specific landing pages to try use as link bait.  I'd also include local pictures from those cities, using file names that describe them well, in order to seem much more relevant.

For Internal links:

Use footer links for your most important cities, and a chart listing where you do service for all of your cities.  By using the chart on enough pages you should be able to imply that they are your most important pages.

[MiriamEllis]

Greetings, Matt!

Thanks so much for coming to Q&A to ask your question. Your assessment of the situation is an honest one - how much can one say about auto insurance over and over again? Member, Ressler Motors, has gotten you off on the right track here, thinking outside the box to discover creative types of content that could make each page different.

I would further recommend discovering how you can personalize the pages in a meaningful way. For example, each city page could tell a real story about insuring a real driver there. This would take some doing - you would need the company to identify a happy customer who would be willing to tell their story and you would have to arrive at a level of privacy for them that meets their comfort at the same time. So, you might not publish photos or full names, but getting a driver from City X to describe why he needed to come to your client's company would make this page different than your page for City Y.

Similarly, you can mine the staff at the company for other stories. Get them to describe what is most common in different towns in terms of the types of issues that make for high risk drivers. Does town X have a lot of DUIs, while the highway passing through town Y engenders a lot of speeding tickets?

Does the company offer any type of seminars about improving one's driving record? Could these be featured on certain pages?

How about interviews with highway patrol officers explaining their side of the story?

How about advice for parents whose teens have already racked up a bad driving record? When should they take the keys away? When will the law take the keys away in these cities, towns, counties?

Ressler's idea about photos is excellent, complete with good captions, of course, and I definitely think there is room here for videos. Statistical videos (with text descriptions) showing worst traffic areas in town with stats of the numbers of accidents and violations would be unique and very local.

How well your client is funded and how invested they are in the creation of quality pages vs. squeaking by with the least possible effort is likely to determine how far you can take this. Assuming that the client has only one main office, I would expect the pages to have to be pretty strong to break into the organic SERPs because the client is likely to be outranked by companies with actual physical offices in the neighboring towns in the Local SERPs.

I think the overall picture needs to be one of telling a compelling story about what happens in each of the towns in terms of driving problems, who these issues affect and how the company can help. You may want to engage a creative copywriter to manage the project, but I do believe your richest data sources for whatever is written or produced will be the company's clients and the staff.

I hope this helps. Good luck!

Miriam