Local SEO: How to optimize for multiple cities on website
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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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Those are great suggestions. I just found out that the team has already started some geo pages way back I was unaware of, and I'm giving them a look. Since we do a lot of volunteering/charity in each community, that may be a good hook as well. We're talking something evergreen, correct? We wouldn't have the bandwidth to keep this regularly updated. I could do a refresh one a year at most.
Thanks!
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The local community involvement is an excellent jumping off point for this. Totally agree!
Regarding evergreen vs. fresh content ... as we know, Google does love frequently updated pages, so where possible, that's a great way to go, but having a static, unique page is definitely an excellent start! Go for it!
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So glad to come across this thread today - thank you for your help!
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"Why would you take the approach of creating blank pages to be filled out later?"
You would create "blank" pages, by which I mean templated pages that have calls to actions or forms, because if you are linking any pages into your site hierarchy they should make sense. So you wouldn't add a service areas page where you linked to some cities with good content but not others and left a broken index. Where you have a few cities that you embellish and others that you don't list or aren't links. I understand the seo caution, but if you create a site follow where your landing pages are actually linked in, the user that is wondering if you will services them would go to services areas, and then click their location if found and then fill out a request form, and/or read whatever local content you have drummed up to make that page good as a landing page.
So I suppose they wouldn't be blank page, but they would be duplicate in the sense that they would only server as request pages for a certain area. So if you do it this way, the question is if you can just no-follow the links so that you can have a site architecture that makes sense but still acknowledge to google that you don't have something unique for a given city/service combo (even though you really do want it listed).
I wasn't talking about local pack. What I'm talking about is location based organic. Where if you search for lawyer, you might get the local pack, but you might also get organic that is from high content sites that don't address your concern, and then put in a city + service to find what you are looking for in the organic results. In that case, location is completely relevant because the organic results will return pages optimized for a given city. Rather than a truly local service area result. So in those circumstances there is a bias towards the keyword as a word rather than a location / quality mix in organic that respects business type. For food you want food in a given city, for lawyers you want the closest lawyer to that city that is going to be expert in solving your problem. Not the guy who just happens have an address in that city. That is what the local pack is for (if I understand that properly). For when you want to find a business in a given location. Not when you want the best organic result around your location.
So I think that google isn't returning quality results based upon named keywords because they aren't parsing intent.
I have seen that in a few places where you analyze competitors and they have a lower page and domain authority, but still return before your site for the simple fact that they put the city name in the title or multiple times on the page. While that might be great seo, those are bad search results. As you get sites that are forced to be spammy by injecting geo targeted keywords. And you have the problem that everyone is addressing of making cruddy landing pages to get those searches rather than focusing on having high quality content.
My intuitive grasp of this is lacking. So maybe they are doing something I don't understand. But I would like to see results for a different city than the one I enter in some categories when those results have better content. This might further disenfranchise small town businesses, but it would also provide them with the opportunity to focus on quality content rather than geo-landing pages.
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Hi Sarah,
That's a good question. To my mind, a block of text would just be a big chunk of city names, zip codes or what have you. You see junk like this on homepages and in footers all the time on over-optimized websites. I would, personally, consider this to be different than something like:
Our painters are centrally located in San Jose and will come to you in Dublin, Berkeley and San Lorenzo, too. Check out our latest projects in Mountain House and Cupertino.
There's probably some grey area here. If you've got 30 service cities, I wouldn't try to list them anywhere but the nav menu. If you've got five, I can't imagine it would cause any problems to mention them in the text of a page.
This is, of course, my take - not necessary Google's.
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Hi Trevogre,
Thanks for the further details. My advice is not to create blank pages on your website, regardless of nofollow. Similarly, my advice is not to create pages with nothing more than a form and call to action on them. If I saw a website with 10 pages on it consisting of nothing but a form and a call to action, I would consider that to be of low quality, regardless of nofollow.
Regarding Google's search results, unfortunately, our personal beliefs about what makes a high quality result do not always match Google's beliefs. I get what you are saying about making queries with the hope of being returned the highest quality page, regardless of location. The problem is, if Google doesn't understand your intent, they will show you things you weren't looking for. There isn't really any way for you, on your own, to influence Google's take on quality and relevance, apart from the fact that Google may personalize results for you based on your past search habits. So, I do get where you're coming from on this. There just isn't really anything I know of that you can do about it. Hope this helps!
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... and if your 5-city example did become a duplicate content concern, wouldn't Moz Analytics highlight it?
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Hi SEOSarah,
Duplicate content on multiple pages is not the same as repetition of something within a single page, so I'm not sure if I'm understanding your question.
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[slaps forehead]
Nevermind. I was thinking Moz could detect if it was suspect, but that's just for duplicate content.
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Thanks for your helpful responses, Miriam! Would I be able to see a website or two where you implemented your two main types of pages( Service description and City Landing), so I have a little better picture of how it is done? Thanks again!
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Hi Llewellyn!
So sorry, but I'm not at liberty to share that. I do recommend you check out the major retailer REI.com to see how nicely they create their various city landing pages though. A fav example of mine.
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No problem! Thanks for the info!
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Thanks Miriam, you really shared valuable tips how the multiple location should be treated and serve the BEST
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With the recent update to Doorway pages would you consider changing your original post? Or still go with that?
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Hi There!
I just responded over on your other thread, but wanted to include think link for you to a thread I started when Google announced their doorway pages update:
http://moz.com/community/q/how-google-s-doorway-pages-update-affects-local-seo
I hope you'll find that helpful!
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