SEO strategy local service area business

[bruteboxmoving]

Hello,

I run a service area business that rents and delivers moving boxes in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Our service area spans 75 cities and many millions of people, and several major metropolitan areas, including San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, but there are also numerous smaller cities that collectively represent a large number of monthly searches.  I would like to rank well for the higher level search terms, like “moving boxes” and “moving supplies”, but also city-specific searches like “Moving Boxes San Francisco.”

What’s unclear to me is the best strategy for organically ranking on the specific cities in our service area.

As I see it, it seems there are several approaches. Is the best approach to either to:

A.)   Create clean “universal” web pages for pricing, products and landing pages and use blogs to build up content keywords for each of the cities

B.)    Create 10-15 city-specific web pages with the hope they'll each rank well (e.g. Moving San Jose, Moving in Cupertino)

C.)    Other?

Thanks for your comments.

[RyanPurkey]

I think the work that you'd spend on getting to the point where your site views are being dramatically increased by ranking for the very generic "moving boxes" and "moving supplies" would be better focused on advertising in the areas where you're specifically running your business. Otherwise you're going to be competing with national / international brands like Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot, U-Haul, etc.

Option A seems best if you have one main office from which your boxes are shipped and returned. Option B should probably be avoided, even if you have satellite offices in those cities and could optimize around those addresses locally because it'd be better to host those separate offices as different pages on your one domain.  That way you're getting an increase in the domain strength overall from any link into the individual locations.  Option C could be to target regularly moving demographics, like students going in and out of school.  And you could always do combinations of all three. If you run some searches on out of area competitors you'll get some more ideas. Best of luck!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Adam,

You will find a discussion on this same topic going on here:

http://moz.com/community/q/targeting-different-cities-for-my-service-geo-landing-pages

Think it will give you some good pointers.

[bruteboxmoving]

Thank you both.  After posting this question, I did stumble on some of these great prior posts (which my initial searching didn't find).

A few that stood out:

http://moz.com/blog/scaling-geo-targeted-local-landing-pages-that-really-rank-and-convert-whiteboard-friday

http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide