Have I made a mistake

[ayetti]

i have set up my local service site using my index page for my main city that I am targeting.  I have then created three more pages targeting three surrounding cities.  I am now link building using good anchor text to each of the appropriate pages.  I think I am doing right but i have read some stuff today that made me question my technique

here is the site http://winecountrycarpet.com/

Thank you in advance for any advice I can get.

[RobertFisher]

Yes you have. First, your content is the same on every page except for adding the city info. That is duplicate content and not good. You would be better served to use your home page as you are and mention the other three cities there. You can even use a link to a page telling how you have a truck in San Luis Obispo on every Tues,/Thurs. etc. 
Also, you need to go into Google and set up a Google Places account How to for Google Places. Go into Bing and set up a Bing Business Portal Account,  and then set up with Angies list, BBB, merchant circle, etc. These are going to help you a thousand times more. You can only set up an account for a business where you are located in that city. You can't do Atascadero and then set up accounts in other three cities. But it will help a lot in Atascadero.

Hope this is helpful.

edit added links

[ayetti]

How much different does the content need to be to avoid duplicate content? I believe I have used different wording on each of the landing pages and switched up the images, different titles, different alt tags, I know when I audit the site with seoMOZ it doesn't trigger duplicate content? now you have me a bit worried.  I was more concerned that I might be split a little thin regarding linking. I definitely have a google places (postcard is in the mail) and same with bing and yahoo.

[MSWD]

I think you are on the right track.  But I would work harder at making more unique content for each of your geo targeted pages.  I go so far as to create a specific set of images unique to the city page all saved within a folder named after the city.  Then the alt tags for the images are city related.  It really doesn't take too much different content.  But I think that by creating / naming the images this way it sure helps eliminate the chance of being hit as duplicate.

I also insert the geo tags in the head section.  Some say this isn't important but I say it can't hurt.  It's one more spot to mention the city name.

I use the geo tag generator:  http://www.geo-tag.de/generator/en.html

[MiriamEllis]

Greetings Alex!
Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I'm the Local SEO Associate here in the forum and will do my best to give an honest, helpful answer.

My first impression on hitting your website is that it needs big help, both from a Local SEO standpoint and a human usability standpoint. Most critically, I have no idea when I land on your homepage where you are located or where you serve. 'Wine Country' is too generic a term to help me instantly 'get' your geography. I live in N. California and to me, the phrase 'wine country' means the Napa/Sonoma region - not Atascadero. I realize that this is your business name, and that's fine, but your header, which occupies nearly half of the screen space above the fold of your page should absolutely include your complete address and local area code phone number. This will be the very first signal to visitors that you are local, and you've got to make it super obvious.

You are on the right track creating landing pages for each of the cities in which you serve. This is a standard best practice for on-page Local SEO. I am seeing two areas of improvement you can work towards. Firstly, the decision to bury the links for these important pages down near the footer of the website is not ideal. You should be putting your location and service areas front and center on the website. Put a tab in your top nav for 'where we serve' or something like that and put the links there.

Secondly, as other members have noted, the content on these pages is thin and I also find it to be awkwardly optimized. Yes, it's good to have your keyword phrases in the content, but when you have only a couple of paragraphs on each page and they are so obviously using italics to highlight the phrases, the end user experience is not satisfying. I am not convinced, as the visitor, that real effort was put into showcasing your work in your 4 distinct service cities. I am left feeling that these pages were put together solely for the sake of SEO - not for my benefit as the visitor. I recommend looking at the pages again and asking yourself honestly whether they are displaying real care for the education and engagement of human readers.

Don't get too focused on the percentage of difference between each page. I have a copywriting client who runs a carpet cleaning company and the ONLY thing that is duplicated from page to page on his city landing pages is his linked list of services. Everything else is unique and different. Different text, different photos, different stories to share. This is what you should be shooting for - telling a story that is persuasive.

In addition to things I've briefly mentioned here, your website lacks overall Local optimization. Your contact page has not been optimized - don't let this page be nothing more than a form. Your complete NAP (name address phone number) preferably coded in hCARD or utilizing schema or what have you, and more unique text about your business will take this page from weak to strong. Don't forget hours of operation, a Google MyMap of your location and other good things like that that can be added.

In addition to putting the complete NAP in the header of your website, I would suggest that you put it across the footer, site-wide, and I recommend hCARD for this as well.

I hope my straight-shooting advice is empowering, Alex. All of these problems are actually major opportunities for you to improve. More care put into the design, layout, optimization and copywriting, coupled with your claiming of your local business profiles across the various indexes, is going to make your business a force to be reckoned with, and that's what I'd love to see happen for you!

Miriam

[ayetti]

Thank you Miriam I actually really appreciate a straight answer (they are not easy to get these days),

I will definitely start to implement the changes you outlined.  I have been a bit embarrassed of my copy the whole time, but I am going to sit down and just pound out a few versions of it for each page.  I absolutely agree with what you say about making it feel as local as possible on each landing page.  I was happy with my picture of Morro Rock for that reason.  I am just going to have to get more stock photo's of local landmarks is what I am thinking for each landing page., I tried it with my own pictures and it just looked bad.  I am going to actually hire a photographer to take a picture of us and the van for the header though.  I feel like people like to see who they are letting into their home.

Do you think it is important that I ad the hCard ? i really try and keep my address of the page as much as possible since it is not a commercial building, just my home and a shop, but I am open to it if there is a benefit SEO wise or if you feel the end user would appreciate it.

The point about optimizing my contact us page is interesting.  I have pretty much left optimization out of the extra pages, the services and the contact us pages, thinking it was all about my landing pages.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Alex,

I'm delighted my input is helpful. To get you in the right mindset for approaching Local SEO, in general, it's important to understand that the whole thing hangs on NAP. Your legal business name, physical address and local area code phone number are the three most important details about your business in the eyes of all search engines. Without these three items, you don't qualify as local and don't qualify for a Google Place Page.

Because of this, you want to send the strongest possible geographic signals from your website. This means optimizing your footer (or masthead) sitewide with your complete NAP, having it on your contact page and possibly on other pages such as your home and about pages. All tags and text should also be written with your local focus in mind (your cities, regions, neighborhoods, zip codes, etc.) Approach everything from the perspective that you are A) a neighbor who needs information B) a bot that needs to understand you are local to a certain location.

I do recommend using hCard as it strengthens the signal.

Finally, I want to address this comment you've made to be sure I'm giving you the best advice. You write:

i really try and keep my address of the page as much as possible since it is not a commercial building, just my home and a shop, but I am open to it if there is a benefit SEO wise or if you feel the end user would appreciate it.

We've just addressed how critical NAP is to your entire local campaign, and lots of businesses are run out of a home office. The one thing I wanted to double-check on is your mention of a 'shop'. Do you mean there is another business (a shop of some kind) running out of your home at the same address? If so, come back to me about this as there will be different issues to consider. But, if that's not what you meant and yours is the only business running out of the home address, that is no problem. Bottom line: highly publicizing your NAP is the foundation of Local. Hope this helps!

Miriam

[ayetti]

Thank you again Mirriam, I am in the process of implementing the changes that you have outlined, I just had a couple of questions. The shop is just my garage, their are no other business at the address.  I am going forward completely with your changes regarding nap and everything else.

Should I add the nap to the footer in a different way so google can read it? If I add it into the image that won't help with google will it?

Should I add the nap to the alt tags of images? approximately how many of them should I add it to?

Will adding my Atascadero Contact information hurt me in the rankings in the surrounding towns?

I am going to add it to the meta description of each page, this is what I had in mind

Does that look right to you?

Thanks you SO much for your help so far, I appreciate it a lot, its a confusing world out there and I appreciate you clarifying it for me.

[MiriamEllis]

Hello Alex,

Yes - at the very least, the NAP needs to be in real HTML text in your footer - not within an image.

Identifying your business as being in Atascadero is not going to hurt your rankings in other towns. It's going to help establish you where you are located. Bear in mind, though, that Google is always going to consider you as being primarily relevant to the town you are located in - not the towns in your extended service area. The point of doing city landing pages for your service cities is to try to compete for ORGANIC rankings - not local ones. Google will almost always show your competitors who are actually located in the other cities in their local results for these searches, whereas you will have an advantage for Atascadero searches if they are not located there. So, Atascadero is your true local city for which you are hoping to get locally ranked (with a red/grey pinned result) - your service cities represent opportunities for you to attempt to do content creation/link building for secondary organic rankings.

Your sample meta description looks more like a title tag to me. Meta descriptions should typically read like a complete sentence - a mini sales pitch. What you've written with the pipe symbols is the common format for a title tag.

Finally, regarding ALT tags, you could experiment with adding NAP to some of them, and using others to highlight some of your main keywords, such as 'carpet cleaning in atascadero, ca', etc. ALT tags should always be an accurate description of what's in the image. Perhaps the image of your company truck would be a good one to put NAP on, but images of you doing work with various machines could be good opportunities to focus on other key terms.

Hope this helps. I'd like to close with the suggestion that you consider consulting with a good local SEO at some point, if this is within your budget. I can only provide limited guidance here in the forum, but you've got lots of questions and would probably find it very valuable to seek professional consultation at some point. I'd be happy to work with you further in future, Alex.

Good luck!

Miriam

[ayetti]

I really appreciate this tip! I had forgotten to come back to this thread, I have been busy implementing the changes that Miriam outlined for me. That is a great tip. Should I insert the geotag of the city for each landing page? I am still wondering if I should add hCards for my business to the landing pages (since I am located in a different city)

I have actually added a bit of new content and enough new images that I believe everything is now unique on each page (I will have to check now that I say that)

[MiriamEllis]

Good to hear how hard you're working on this. Way to go! I like to use hCard in 2 places: in the footer site-wide and on the contact page. If you have multiple physical locations, you could also use it on each city landing page.

[ayetti]

I ended up adding it in the sidebar because I just felt it looked more natural there due to my site layout. Do you think this will decrease the effectiveness of it? I have so far only added the hCard to the index page (targeting city were business has places page etc)  and all of the other non landing pages.  I have left it out of the city landing pages for now, but I will slowly add it one at a time and see what it does.

So far I don't believe the site has been crawled since I made the changes so I can't speak to the effect just yet, but hCard makes a ton of sense now that you turned me onto it.

I did  add geo tags to the head of those pages for the city that they are targeting and I am excited to see if that makes any difference.  On the same note, once my places page is more established, I am considering using rich snippets to pass those along on my other organic rankings.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Again, No, I don't believe it makes any difference whether your hCard is in the header, footer or nav, so long as it is sitewide.

[ayetti]

cool thank you soo much again.  You have been a huge help.