SEO For sub locations for specific services

[tonyr7]

Hey Guys, I am currently creating a website for my business that will be marketing through SEO very heavily. I Live in NYC, and i'd like to rank up for the individual locations such as Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island and eventually if my domain authority and other long hall metrics kick in NYC.

What I find very tiring is targeting these locations all separately, it means I need to create the same site 4 times with completely different and unique content.

Should this setup work for me, and is there a risk that Google will see 4 web design pages, and basically say even though the content is unique your ranking up for web design with a location too many times? from my understanding this is not a problem now, but is this a future risk? It also becomes extremely difficult for site navigation with about us pages, contact us pages, and other pages that either have to be duplicated or all pages shown on sidebar for navigation.

Please share your thoughts with me, THANKS!!!

[Whebb]

Hello,

I don't think you need to create the same site 4 times. A better approach could be to make one site and then make separate landing pages that have slightly different targets. So for example you could target 'queens web design' on one page and then on a second one go after a variation of the keyword like 'Long Island Web Development'. You also don't need to link these pages to the main navigation, but make sure they are contained as pages on the site. This way the pages will still rank but won't be as confusing to potential customers browsing the site, since they are entering through the targeted landing page and then continuing to browse the rest of the site,  they wont directly see different location pages on the site. It would probably be beneficial to see which location has the most/best search volume as well and then target that location a bit heavier with the rest of the website copy.

[tonyr7]

Well of course it would all be on one website with different landing pages, but the idea is for web design it has to be beneficial to the consumer to understand what we offer, and repeating that 4 times in different ways is such a hassle. unfortunately targeting a large city like NYC for web design, and SEO is way to competitive, we really need to target Queens, Brooklyn, and Long island as a short term goal, and NYC as a long term goal.

Yes we would only show all locations on homepage, each landing page wont show other locations, or anything confusing, the problem i'm seeing is if someone enters a landing page for lets say Queens web design, and there are all the queens related pages such as SEO, online marketing. and they go to any of these, and then maybe deciding to click on about us to learn about us, how would the navigation work there? how would the about us page know where they came from? its becomes difficult with universal pages.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Tony,

I have most experiencing in consulting with true local businesses. Their business models typically fall into 1 of 3 categories:

1. They have a single physical location (like a restaurant)  to which clients come

2. They have multiple physical locations (like a chain) to which clients come

3. They have a central office from which employees go to render services at clients' locations in various cities (like a landscaping company)

In the second case, the norm is to create a set of location landing pages on the website (one for each location) and to link to these from the main site menu. Each page would be optimized with the complete NAP (name, address, phone number) and would contain as much unique information as possible about the respective office.

In the third case, the norm is to create city landing pages for each of the cities in the company's service radius. The content would need to be unique on these, but they need not simply be a repeat of information from page to page. For example, in the case of the landscaper, he could have one set of pages describing his services (softscaping, hardscaping, water feature installation, etc) and these main pages would be optimized for his city of location, as this is the one Google will care about when it comes to his core Local SEO. Then, he can create a second set of pages showcasing his work in each of the various cities in a unique manner. He could include a brief summary of all of his services on these city landing pages, but the bulk of the content would be a showcase of his projects. For example, 'here is an arbor we built in San Jose', 'here is a pond we installed in San Rafael'.  His city landing pages can be a text and image-based gallery of his design projects.

Your case is a bit different, Tony, because Google does not view website design firms as truly local and doesn't display them as local results. Everything for you will be organic in nature, but your scenario is most like my case #3 in that you can take similar steps to showcase your design work for clients in various cities. You don't need to offer an enormous explanation of your HTML, PHP, WordPress and Joomla work on each of these landing pages, repeating yourself ad infinitum. You can have a separate set of pages that go into the specifics of these services and create different types of content on the city landing pages, hopefully showcasing the sites you have developed for clients in various cities. If you need to create a CSS-based (read: crawlable) dropdown in your menu to include these pages under headings like 'See our San Jose Web Design Projects', then that would be fine, because you definitely do want these pages to be indexed as highly important.

Do avoid duplicate content - this is very important. Yes, it's going to take effort, but here is a chance for your creativity and love of your work to really shine through. Get energized! This is really important work and developing pages that wow your potential clients and make you proud of your company should be a fun and exciting challenge for your firm.