Setting Up Localized City Pages and Duplicate Content issues

[InetAll]

We are setting up landing pages on our site that will cater to specific cities, in an effort to be more relevant to the users in those cities and also capture more localized traffic. These regional pages will each have a unique paragraph at the top, but below that is a sentence or two about each product line that would be difficult to rewrite with quality more than 10 - 15 times.

Would the paragraph at the top of the page be enough unique content (about 4-5 sentences)? Obviously the duplicate content wouldn't be to my advantage, but is it really necessary to rewrite the other sentences about the product lines?

What's the most efficient method to complete this project in a whitehat fashion?

[JamesNorquay]

To be honest it would be better to have unique content on the whole page, but if that is not possible just place the unique content near the top of the page so it is crawled first then have the other content after that.

[duncan274]

What about making the writing into an image(that way it wouldn't be crawled it might look cool or weird not sure? How are you going about setting up the localized pages? I'm about to do something similar and wouldn't mind a few tips

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question, which is a great one! I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum. Members are giving you some good suggestions. I'd like to add to this.

I strongly recommend that you put more effort into your city landing pages than what you are describing. 4-5 sentences is really just a blurb - more like an intro than the content of a whole page. I recommend that you find more to say about each city in which the client serves than this. Then, if you have in the midst of this, a small list of the client's services/products, only a tiny percentage of what is on the page will be similar.

Creating city landing pages is one of the most common tasks I accomplish for my clients, and I treat each city as being deserved of a full article. It's an approach I have seen work time and again and I highly recommend it!

Hope this helps and best of luck!

Miriam