Local SEO - Rich content and list of towns enough?

[SamCUK]

I'm working on creating pages to target local SEO. I've created pages for example 'wedding band london' with useful content and optimised them with title tags, alt tags etc and will continue to do so for major cities and queries where there are significant search volume. However, I also want to pickup longtail local search queries such as 'wedding band camden' etc... Will adding a list of towns somewhere on the page for each city or county help drive traffic to the site from such queries? Is so what's the best way to structure the page?

[GerryWeitz]

So I'm no expert, but I've spent a lot of energy and money with several revisions related to local SEO.  Here it is for what it's worth and you'll have to judge for yourself.

The more cities and town names you add to any one page the more you will dilute the organic value in the one town or city that is most important to you.  You may want to include the names of a few towns within a city if they are a logical and natural language why in which people speak about a given place.  For example, if you were writing a page about New York, you could logically include info on Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Manhattan and (you might want to not bother with Staten Island), but you certainly would not want to mention services in Nassau and Suffolk which are well outside the city boundaries.  But that wouldn't negate the thought of a separate page for each borough.

So how do you deal with services across a large geographical area without massive duplication?  There are more and more problems arising with SEO placement with duplicate and "near duplicate" content.   On my core website I have tried to use templates with some success, where I generate pages for different cities and towns using some common content, but leaving room for custom content on each page - more than just a city name variable.  (Be sure that the meta data is also very unique).  For my business, which is pest control, weather has a big impact on pest pressure.  So I have a template for coastal, inland, mountain and valley towns - plus a few more.  Then I also leave room for additional custom content for each city/town page - to eliminate near duplicate content and to address real differences between towns.  Each town has it's own demographics and culture - so I address that as it relates to the products and services I offer.

Still, the best bet is to create totally unique pages for each targeted geographic area.  That takes time.  I am gradually addressing this, but wow, serving all of Southern California means creating a lot of unique local pages.  I your business too, I am sure that in different cities and towns you will find that customers have different preferences and budgets.  You can address that with unique pages for each geo.

I came across a company that for a while has had very good SEO placement, but with a tactic that I think will get detected.  This company has massively duplicate content, but it is not on the same website.  They have purchased separate domain names for every town and populated the identical content across these websites.  I am sure Google will start smacking this website soon enough.

I hope this helps.

Gerry

[SamCUK]

Hi Gerry,

Thanks for your reply. It makes sense not to include too many towns so as not to risk diluting the value of the main keyword. Most of the long tail search terms I'm talking about are likely to bring me 2 - 5 clicks a week as an estimate. It does seem, and IS a lot of work to build pages for low traffic keywords so I guess I need to figure out if it's worth my time or if my time is better spent building links and improving domain/page authority. The reason I think building local pages is the best option is simply because the industry is so competitive for the main keyword terms and I think that perhaps highly targeted local terms would convert better anyway.

I think I'll go with the strategy of short but useful content (maybe around 100 words) which might be a good compromise as theses pages wouldn't take too long to build. As the long tail keywords are not competitive (most people don't bother with them at all) hopefully they'll rank page one pretty easily. I could potenitially get a few hundred highly targeted leads this way.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Samuel,

Google will consider you most relevant to whatever your physical address is - this is the locale for which you can work towards your main local/blended rankings.

Beyond this, yes, you can work for organic visibility for other towns you serve in. Having a unique landing page for each of your major service cities is a smart way to go. You can then linkbuild to these pages to go after organic visibility.

I agree that you should not simply go the route of listing towns in a list. Have you considered blogging? Instead of putting too many geo terms per page, have you considered using a blog to showcase weddings you've done in Camden, etc.? A few photos of your band, folks dancing, pics of the venue and 400-600 words of text describing the event, songs the couple requested, testimonials from the bride and groom or family members would make a strong blog post on the subject and could get that long tail traffic you seek. The nice thing about this would be that it would naturally generate very unique content. Though I'm sure there are similarities in all your gigs, each one must be a little bit different, right? And, it would enable you to optimize part of your site for things like regional and neighborhood/district names.

I hope this is a helpful suggestion.