Localised content/pages for identical products

[AlecPR]

I've got a question about localising the website of a nationwide company.

We're a small dance school with nationwide (40 cities) coverage for around 40 products. Currently, we have one page for each product (style of dance), and one page for each city; the product pages cover keywords like 'cheerleading dance class' while the city pages target the 'london dance classes'-type keywords.

To make 'localised product pages', I feel like we should make a page for every city/product combo 'London cheerleading classes' - but that seems like a nightmare for both writing sexy & original content, and link building/social stats. The other thing I can think of (which I refuse to do because it would look stupid & flag the page as keyword stuffed) is filling the page with the keyword phrases which are appropriate for every city.

Is there another way to let google know 'this page is appropriate for these cities...'? We do currently list the cities a product is available in, but it doesn't seem to help local rankings very much. Would this just be a link building job, using hyper-targeted anchor texts (inc. city names) for each product? How do the pro's tackle this problem?

[KaneJamison]

40 x 40 =  1600

Yikes!

Do you really have 40 products, or can any of those products be combined in a reasonable way? For example, after looking at your site, can some of the "hen parties" go on one page titled "Cambridge type hen parties" where type is changed out with a different phrase? Then that page can have a few paragraphs of content and unique photos, and then link to the specific "salsa hen party" but non-city-specific page? This would be a lot easier to manage, and it's hard for me to imagine that "Cambridge salsa hen parties" gets a ton of traffic that you couldn't capture with a more generic page.

If you were to have just a few pages per city at most it would be reasonable to rank them for those long tail keywords such as "cambridge hen parties" using some good anchor text links in addition to good unique content on each page.

On the topic of unique content for localized pages:

There was a good post that went up today that addresses this topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update

I'm going to quote directly from the article because he gives a few good ways to add more content to these localized pages:

**Unique Localized Page Content: **This is the true issue with localization. Most sites have cookie cutter content that might rank for locations, but it also might lead to a nice Panda slap for duplicate content. I would not build content and just replace the location information. If you are still doing this you are playing on dangerous grounds. Scaling localized page content is not easy, not very fun, and definitely not sexy. So, the companies that can make it easy, fun, and sexy are going to be the clear Venice winners.

Here are some ideas:

1. Location based reviews – Instead of one testimonial site wide add a testimonial in every market you can. It helps to sell the “locationalism” to the searcher and it’s content that doesn’t have to be written by you… just gathered.

2. Gather “Why I love my city” user generated content – Ask customers to write up information about their local city and why they like it. It’s unique and fun to read.

3. Write out directions to each location – Have you ever heard people tell directions the same way? No chance of duplicate content with directions…ever.

I would also add that you should consider the following on each city page:

• Information about the facilities in each city (this is assuming you have physical locations)
• Video from the facilities or video testimonials from customers in that city is excellent content

[MiriamEllis]

Hello Alec,

Kane Jamison is right - if you were to do the 40x40 project, you'd have to write 1600 pages of content! Though not totally impossible, it's pretty much the next closest thing to impossible.

Kane is on the right track. What you are in need of is a plan for organization. Such a plan might looks something like this:

-Have a landing page for each of your dance schools.

-The page must be well optimized for the schools' locations.

-Write good, unique content for each of these landing pages (at least we're only talking about 40 pages here).

-List the main classes that are available at each school on its respective landing page.

-Build an onsite blog.

-Every week, write several posts about special classes, new classes, events, etc. going on at different schools.

-Have an area on each dance studio page from which you link to some of the blog posts that are specifically about something at that studio.

In this way, you can build content in a gradual way about different things that happen in each of the schools, without undertaking the crazy work of trying to write copy for 1600 pages.

Chances are, you won't rank #1 for every single thing you offer, but if you out-write and out-link most competitors, you should end up getting lots of good rankings.

What' I've suggested is just a strategy brainstormed in a couple of minutes. You can work out the fine details. You definitely need to decide on the architecture of the site first.

Good luck!

Miriam