Question about landing pages

[Spartan22]

I currently have a service based website with landing pages for surrounding towns. For example the keywords targeting and url for the town are "service+town+state". I recently noticed that I am not showing up at all for "service+zip" even though I have the zips included in all the landing pages. I was told if I made more landing pages dedicated to zip I would risk killing the rank on other landing pages.

Would it be advisable to make another totally different website that focuses on just the "service+zip" landing pages. The name of the page would be the same the company obviously but the phone numbers and content would be different along with domain url.

Any advice or suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

[Dezzign]

Hello Spartan22, yes Google seems to be cracking down harder on this as time goes on and making it more and more difficult to rank for suburbs and areas where your business isn't physically located.

I definitely wouldn't build a whole new site unless you can associate that site with a business address that can be validated using Google (+) places and have a completely different phone number on the site, and also brand it differently using a different business name. Building a new site without disguising it as a completely new stand-alone business is exactly what Google don't want you to do.

It's much better just to build landing pages as you're already doing. Just take a closer look at your landing pages on-site Seo elements and make sure they're up to scratch. Make sure your keyword density is quite low and all of the heading tags are relevant to the keyword you're trying to rank for.

Recently I've also found that a site's standalone orphan pages that aren't connected to your main menu can really have a negative effect. It's not always optimal to have a menu item called service areas with all of the areas you service as a drop-down menu. When you cut your service area landing pages off from the rest of the website because they're not linked into the main menu or they don't have any other contextual links pointing the to them throughout the site you'll really notice that those pages will struggle to rank. Each area landing page still needs its own inbound links pointing to it too.

I've been noticing exactly the same thing lately. I have created some of the best pages in that niche for that area and continue to see these service area landing pages floundering around at the bottom of page 1 and even on page 2, despite them being twice as good as any other landing page in the niche, and despite them being on an established website with half decent authority.

The major difference I've noticed is that the sites that have all of the area landing pages incorporated into the menu always perform much better than the sites that only have these landing pages in the site's sitemap. It'd be interesting to know whether I can access your site's area service pages via your main menu? Hope that helps a little.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!
I am in complete agreement with Richard that building a new website to optimize for zip codes would be overkill - and could actually lead to ranking issues for your business if your complete or partial NAP is appearing on more than one website.

For SABs, including zip codes in optimization can be challenging. You want to avoid ever adding big blocks of zip codes to the site, as Google has explicitly stated in their webmaster guidelines that they consider this to be a spammy practice. How naturally you can talk about zip codes may depend somewhat on the business model. For example, if you do landscaping in Monterey, CA., a quick lookup shows me that you could be working in 4 different zip codes. So, let's say you have a landing page on the site for Monterey. You could write project descriptions (with photos, videos, testimonials, etc.) on this page, and the text could include something like, "Here's a zen garden we created in the 93940 zip code area of Monterey." Or, "Here's a butterfly garden we created for the beautiful monarchs that pass through the 93499 zip code area of town every year." If your services are on the creative side, you can be creative in showcasing your work, too, but if you are a plumber, it just may not seem very natural to write, "Here's a sink we unclogged in the 93940 zip code neighborhood." Seems like a bit of a stretch.

[Spartan22]

would it be safe to keep the nap off the radar and different. The only thing that would be the same is literally the name of the business.

[Dezzign]

If you keep the name address and phone number off the radar then you're also retarding the new websites ability to rank in that new area. When it comes to rankings for geo-targeted services the NAP details are a huge piece of the ranking puzzle. Even a very weak website with a legitimate localised address that has been verified has a much better chance of ranking for those 'area service keywords' than a strong website with no locality credentials.

With regards to keeping the business name the same, I'm quite positive that won't work either. If anything, that will cause inconsistency with your main website's NAP listings, and could potentially hurt the rankings of your real website. Starting a new website also puts at least another 60 days of waiting before you're able to achieve strong solid rankings for that area. Within the next 60 days you could build some brilliant links and perform a ton of on-site optimisation to your current site.

Getting those other service area pages to rank from your real website also has the added bonus of increasing the overall authority of your real website. Yes it's tough to rank those new suburb pages, but it'll be even harder to do it from a new website that isn't even real.

[Spartan22]

thanks for the info guys. I decided to just open another business lol. Happy Easter.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi There! Not quite sure I'm following your thought here. What would you be keeping the NAP off of? I understood that your original idea was to build out separate landing pages for zip codes or build a separate website. I'm recommending against either approach. Having 2 authoritative websites (with the same business name) would potentially be confusing to both humans and bots, and building out landing pages on your original site just for zip codes sounds like it might lead to thin or duplicate content, and could even fall under Google's new doorway pages update.

If you want to optimize for zip codes, my best recommendation is to find an way to work this into your existing site and existing city landing pages (as in my Monterey example). I can't think of any other approach I'd be comfortable recommending.

Hope this helps!