Local SEO: How to optimize for multiple cities on website
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Hey Miriam,
You are a rock star my dear. I was thinking to myself, "how do I do this...there's so many towns"...But you're right....you break it off in manageable pieces - going after the the towns that mean the most, then working backwards.
My Elephant of town will be eaten - 10 bites at a time.
So Thank you!
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Miriam can give a more complete answer, but I believe this may be against Google's guidelines.
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Hi Instantly Popular,
As Keri has mentioned, virtual offices violate Google's guidelines which read:
Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist.
See:
http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528Google definitely does not want virtual offices in their index, and though you will see many businesses getting away with this practice, Google is getting better and better at fighting spam in Local and any business with this type of listing is in danger of being penalized...possibly even banned.
Building city landing pages on a website is a good practice, but typically, the results of this will be organic, not local, in nature. There are some exceptions to this, but they have been few and far between since the Venice update in early 2012.
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Hi Miriam,
I know this thread is a bit old, but I was curious about what you meant when you said that "results of this will be organic, not local, in nature." Thank you in advance for your time!
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Hi Brittany,
Organic results are the old, traditional results in Google. Local results are those in Google's local pack of results, specifically containing local businesses. Because Google considers a local business to be most relevant to its city of location, such a business is most likely to achieve visibility in the Local pack of results for the city it is physically located in. If the business wants to publicize its activities/services in cities outside its city of location (like a plumber who travels to 6 cities to render services) then the plumber can build unique landing pages on his website for each service city. However, because of Google's bias toward putting city of location businesses in the local pack, these landing pages will typically show up in the organic results - not the local pack of results - because they are about where the plumber serves and not where he is physically located.
Does this help answer your question? Please, let me know.
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Thanks for the clarification, Miriam. I was pretty confident that's what you meant - just wanted to doublecheck. I appreciate your time.
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My pleasure, Brittany!
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Hi Miriam,
Quick question regarding the "cities we serve" in the main NAV. So are you saying that this item should display all the cities the business serve and each one of them would split up into their respective services with unique content.(see attachment)
Thanks for letting me know!
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Hi Taysir,
This is a good question and one for which there is no 'right' answer, in my opinion. Taking the approach suggested by your spreadsheet, your chief danger would be thin or duplicate content. After all, your services in Oakland are likely to be identical to your services in Fremont, or in the multiple cities in your service area. You can go this way, of course, provided you can find a genuine reason for creating this type of content and have the resources to make each page totally unique. Often, I've found that this is not the case, so I prefer to recommend this approach in most SMB cases:
You create 3 types of pages.
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City Landing Pages, one for each city, talking about the location and summarizing services. These pages would be optimized for your CORE service phrase + city name.
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Service Pages, one for each service. You can link to these from the city landing pages. These would be optimized for the individual service, but not for a particular city.
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Future Pages. I like best to give the client the ability to blog about their projects and news on an on-going basis, giving them the opportunity to begin building up content that covers a variety of keyword combinations, over time.
I find that this approach makes projects with SMBs manageable. We get really strong pages for each of their cities and each of their services onto the website, and then give them the power to begin showcasing their work in various cities via an on-site blog.
So, that's my typical project structure. I'm not saying that you can't go the other way - the way you've mentioned - just that there is an inherent danger in that approach with small, local businesses because they may be tempted to create a ton of content at once that is of low quality instead of being exceptional.
Hope this helps!
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I am resurrecting this thread again as I have a question:
I am working on footer text for a client that serves a large swath of the SF Bay Area. I have separated the cities in the four counties they serve by population and have added the most populous cities into a sentence that will go on every page. Is this tactic tired? Is it played out? I've used it before with great success, but I am questioning it now with all the new guidelines/changes put forth by Google. Unfortunately, the client cannot afford to create unique content for each large city they serve so this is our attempt to get as many cities as possible mentioned multiple times. I am, however, apprehensive about this tactic.
Thoughts?
BusinessXYZ serves Oakland, Hayward, Berkeley, Vallejo, Fairfield, Walnut Creek, Concord, Daly City, as well as all SF Bay Area cities in Alameda County, Contra Costa County, San Mateo County and Napa County.
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Hi Eric,
You are right to be wary of this tactic. Not only would you be creating duplicate content by replicating this statement from page to page, but you would also be going against Google's webmaster guidelines which state:
Keyword stuffing
"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.
Examples of keyword stuffing include:
- Lists of phone numbers without substantial added value
- Blocks of text listing cities and states a webpage is trying to rank for
(Bolded emphasis mine) See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66358?hl=en
Unfortunately, if your client lacks the funding to develop unique content for each of his service cities, then he should not expect to rank for them. In days gone by, the client would have needed to pay for phone book ads that highlighted his service cities. Lacking funding, he would have been out of the running. These days, because of Google's bias towards unique, useful content, funding comes into play when it comes to content development.
Perhaps you can find a good solution for this client in the form of an on-going contract in which you develop 1-2 new pages or posts for him per month at a reasonable rate. By then end of 2014, he would have added 12-24 new pages of content to his website, covering his cities and many of his services. He needs to be convinced of the value of this investment, and if you start with just a few of the cities and he begins getting more phone calls, it's likely he will see that this is an essential investment that is going to pay for itself over time.
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Thanks Miriam for your detailed response. I passed along your ideas for ways to gradually create content rather than all at once. I imagine the slow method would also help this website by adding content continuously throughout the year, rather than a "set it and forget it" model. It is a heating and cooling business so there website is more of a description of services and who they are and less an SEO-driven portal for dynamic engagement.
With that said, I'll play devil's advocate for one second to get your take. The footer we are proposing, in my view, does serve a larger non-SEO related purpose. It is used to actually convey what areas the business represents. I recognize that adding this to the footer of every page can be seen as duplicate content, but it is intended as information for a prospective client. If we just put it on one page, it might get missed.
I don't expect the website to rank for those cities considering how competitive their industry is and because we are not mentioning the cities in the content or URL structure. We are not doing link building for those cities and the client does not want Local SEO services. The new website was conceived with modernization in mind, not SEO. The footer is merely a way to mention cities, not part of a larger strategy.
Thoughts?
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Hi Eric,
First, I need to make a small correction to my earlier statement. I meant to state that duplicating text across PAGES would = duplicate content. Footer content is excluded from this. Most websites have the same content in their footer from page to page. Sorry if what I wrote was misleading. So, duplicate content isn't the issue here, but...
While I agree that your devil's advocate argument contains horse sense in some ways, the footer is probably one of the most obvious places Google would look for spam. If Google goes out of their way to state that they don't want blocks of city names on a website, I think it's wise to take this at face value. And I think that, because footers are historic candidates for spamming, Google would be especially down on this type of content being placed there.
I may be a little bewildered by your client's goals. If they don't want to rank for their service cities, why include them anywhere on the website? And if the goal is to let visitors know the areas they serve, why not at least put that on the homepage of the website, shine a spotlight on it so it's totally clear? Make a custom map. Write a full description. Create unique pages and link to them from a top level menu.
Relegating this vital information to the footer, which many people won't even see, just doesn't make sense to me. The areas an SAB serves are critical data and should be highlighted in every way possible. When I develop websites for SABs, I create two main types of pages beyond the typical homepage, contact, about, etc.:
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Service description pages (one for each service)
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City landing pages (one for each major city served)
To me, these are the basics of any local business website, and I would be puzzled by a client who didn't 'get' this. I work primarily with small-to-medium local businesses, and I totally understand budget constraints, This is why creating a protracted timeline for getting all the necessary pages developed is often a good solution. To me, from what you've written, it sounds like your client may not have clear goals in mind in regards to how their website will serve them and their customers. Hopefully, as their marketer, you can help them create a plan that will take their website forward to becoming a true sales-generating asset. I hope these thoughts are helpful.
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So, I haven't looked this up, I thought I'd just ask here.
So if I create a services areas page, with links to landing pages for each county/city that is serviced. And then I create the pages for each area, and leave the content blank but then pursue filling out the content. Is the absence of the content considered duplicate content? Would you get penalized for the essentially blank pages.
If so could you keep the pages but mark them as no-follow so that you are telling google that you want the page but don't consider it something they should index (and penalize you for).
You could put a from on those pages, which I would assume isn't considered "content". Or shouldn't be. and have the form preloaded with the location information for that service area.
The other issue that I see here is with the concept of "core" services. If you are a law firm and you have many lawyers and lines of business. You would then logically want to have each service area / line of business to have its own landing page.
So without complaining about the unique content problem, which I get, you structural want to build all of this out so that acts as a placeholder and exists in non-competitive areas, where despite the uniqueness of your content you are the only person with a given keyphrase. But you don't want to be considered spam.
So I'm not sure what the right answer is. I doesn't seem right not optimize for an adjacent city/service combination just because there is only so many things to say about that service.
The suggestion. "Service description pages" and "City landing pages", Is (I guess) a place where you can start.
Ultimately, I think this is a bias that google is supporting that is wrong. It assumes that an urbanized world is a positive because larger cities, while potentially more competitive because of the larger traffic, are going to have a unfair advantage over business is outlying areas. And non-location sensitive business (anything knowledge related) are going to be penalized for not being in urban areas. Ultimately I think this leads to poor organic search results, because the ability to determine the quality of a small business has nothing to do with its location. I suppose that it helps by allowing local business to be listed at all against stronger competitors, but I think it would be better to use a combination of signals. So that you show as local to the nears n people. So in a city like Seattle you might have an audience of a million, but in city of 50000 that runs into other cities of 50000 with 20 miles the definition of local should change.
I think when you break it down, geographic terms should always be parsed out so that cars seattle doesn't actually look for Seattle, but looks for cars (+ locations withing x miles of seattle) that also have high domain or page authority. I think that would lead to better results and would solve the problem of location based optimization so that we can stop wasting time on it.
It could start with a default service area size, but then calculate a services area based upon result density. So a search for a given business type would automatically return for three states away if the next closest business was 5 states away.
I'm sure some of this is already around, I'm just sharing my thoughts because this is a massively irritating and time consuming issue. But I suppose it just serves to push us further in the direction of content and link building. Equally unnatural pursuits for your average small business. Sometimes I feel like google should reward business that don't create content and somehow work on the less is more principle.
Is the best search result the one from a business paying crazy rents in a large city, or one in an adjacent city that is more affordable but equally qualified and doesn't show because they aren't in city limits.
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Hi Trevogre,
So glad to have you here in the forum. I'm not 100% sure I'm understand your initial question. You write:
So if I create a services areas page, with links to landing pages for each county/city that is serviced. And then I create the pages for each area, and leave the content blank but then pursue filling out the content. Is the absence of the content considered duplicate content? Would you get penalized for the essentially blank pages.
Why would you take the approach of creating blank pages to be filled out later? There is no benefit I can see in publishing blank pages. Don't create a page until you've got something to put on it. While I don't believe Google would see blank pages a duplicate content (simply because there would be no content on them), I do not recommend creating links in your navigation or pages to pages that don't yet exist. That could look spammy - like you're just putting up blank pages so that they can have service/city URLs/titles, but haven't bothered to put anything on them. So, I don't see why one would do this. Have I misunderstood what you're asking?
Regarding this:
Ultimately I think this leads to poor organic search results, because the ability to determine the quality of a small business has nothing to do with its location
It's important to understand that the local and organic algorithms are separate. Local rankings are those that appear in the local packs of results. They are determined by a combination of factors including geography and authority. Location, as a ranking factor, is only relevant to local businesses...not virtual businesses. I totally agree with you that location has nothing to do with quality, but this should only concern true local business models - not businesses that aren't physically based.
I feel like I may be failing to comprehend your exact concerns here ... do you feel that local businesses located outside the borders of neighboring cities are being dealt an unfair hand? Or is it something else? Please, feel free to provide further clarification!
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Hi Miriam,
I hear this suggestion a lot for my company's website (dedicated page for each geographical location), and I'm having a really hard wrapping my brain around it, but I do want to try it out. For the city landing pages, what is the nature of the content? In my case, I work for a credit union with 70 branches in 3 states. Would it be something like "Hey Salt Lake City, we're here for you [insert local references, etc.] to provide [products, services, etc.]
My concern would be, if this is the case (and I could be totally off-base), what is the value of those pages to the user? It brings them in, but would the page seem disingenuous? And, the concern of the user above, that there could be duplication in discussing products and services (and if you're not talking about products and services, what do you talk about?)
In there an example you can direct us to?
Great thread - thanks for your insight!
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... and this concerns me because it seems non-manipulative and useful to the customer to see a list of service areas. Sure, there may be an SEO benefit, but I think in this example it shouldn't be penalty-worthy (although the verbiage clearly states this is the case).
Is it a distinction between a line of text and a block of text?
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Hi SEOSarah,
Therein lies the major challenge of this type of content development. You've got to define something unique about each service city in order to have something important and legitimate to write about. This is easier for some business models than others. For example, a house painter could show his beautiful work in San Jose on one page and his beautiful work in Santa Cruz on another, along with writeups of his projects. He could also do city-specific special offers, interviews, tips, etc.
A large company that is doing a good job of this is REI.com. Search for a location there and you'll see how they are putting different content on their different landing pages. Pretty good example.
But, as I've said, this can be harder for some companies than others if every branch of their business is an exact duplicate of all others. Something to consider for an industry like the one you've mentioned might be interviews with key staff members at the branch - people that the local customers could then meet in person to talk to about their finances. Putting a personal face on a "bland" business might help differentiate this company from competitors, and would simultaneously give you unique content for city landing pages.
Hope this helps!
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