Two points of view on optimizing our search pages. What should we go with?

[eVenuesSEO]

So we're in the process of going back and forth with our designer about optimizing our search results, which also doubles as a landing page for visitors searching with keywords like "Meeting Rooms Seattle" and "Seattle Meeting Spaces" We're on the front page in the SERPs, but still have a way to go.

This is our current page: http://www.evenues.com/Meeting-Spaces/Seattle/Washington

And this is something we've proposed for our designer to work with: http://imgur.com/JU1zg

There search page text and links in the top left corner were to be placed for onsite SEO purposes ie we have no real text/content on the page for relevancy.

We're currently in the process of writing the copy for each city on the search pages.

Our designer made this argument:

After giving it some thought I came to the conclusion that we may want to take a step back, and focus on the overall goal of this exercise.

From what I have gathered, you would like to generate more click-throus and improve SEO, right?

In my opinion, adding all of the provided copy and the link farm to the search results page would not necessarily help that. In fact, I think it would actually push the actual results way down. The content you provided me is more suited for a landing page, not a search results page (that is taking into consideration that you want similar content for other locations).

Redfin has done a ton of great SEO work on their site. Using them as an example, if you go to Redfin.com, you will find tiny links in the footer that say "home for sale in seattle" etc.

If you click on those, it puts you on a page like this: http://www.redfin.com/cities/1/seattle?src=homepage and then from there you can click to a neighborhood page like this: http://www.redfin.com/city/1387/WA/Bellevue.

I would recommend that we create a set of location pages with the content the client is asking for, that are specifically optimized for SEO, and provide links in the footer of the site to get to those pages. Then the links on the new landing pages would land the user on the search results page.

By keeping two different pages for two different purposes separate would help keep content more organized and help user find specific info they are looking for.

As a quick fix we could put one line of text under the H1 text on search results as well, maybe with a strong tag.

By doing that we will be able to keep the page looking clean and easy to navigate through.

Anyways, that's just my two cents.

Any ideas/input on this?

[AdamThompson]

Here are my thoughts:

1. I would not use http://www.redfin.com/cities/1/seattle?src=homepage as a template for a good page to emulate - it's just a page with a bunch of links. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future Google decides that page is not providing value to the user.
2. You probably want to optimize a single page for "Meeting Rooms Seattle" and "Seattle Meeting Spaces"
3. You should probably send users who search for "Meeting Rooms Seattle" and "Seattle Meeting Spaces" to the same page, too. I see no reason to have them see two different pages for those queries.
4. Be wary of creating separate pages for SEO purposes. If you have an existing page for Seattle that most users see, there is no reason to create a second page for SEO. In fact, it could hurt you - having two pages for the same basic purpose (for users to see seattle meeting rooms) will divide your social likes/shares and organic backlinks among two pages. (On the flip side, you could work on getting both pages ranked, but I don't think that is what you were asking about...)
5. If you don't want your text content pushing the listings down the page, put your textual content on the right side of the page or even at the bottom, like Zappos does.

Hope these are helpful.

[eVenuesSEO]

Hi Adam,

Thanks a lot for your detailed reply!

We certainly only want to optimize only one page for similar terms. To be more clear, perhaps we should have a landing page with larger pictures/more text optimized for those terms that link to a search page that we don't care about getting indexed? I'm not sure if we have the resources to do this at this time however.

Very helpful, thanks! I'll pass this on to our CEO

Kenji

[AdamThompson]

If users have to click from the landing page to the search results page to see the listings, that's an extra click = fewer people seeing the search results.

You could have two very similar pages - one with the extra text and images, and one without. Add a canonical tag to the one without so all the link juice goes to the one with the extra text and images.

[eVenuesSEO]

I like that idea! Thanks!