Targeting different cities for my service - Geo landing pages

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Brian - Your instinct about this is correct. Spun pages tend to be of very low quality and largely duplicative. Ideally, if you have an important city/service combination, you should be investing the time it takes to create a unique page from scratch about it. If the term is worth it, the time is worth it.

[cbizzle]

How would you recommend optimizing the site for its physical location? Would the homepage Title, for example, be something like "Company Name | HVAC | New York City" if that's the physical location of the business or would it be better to go with "Company Name | HVAC" as not to nullify the attempts to rank well in Albany, New Brunswick, and other surrounding cities?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Chad,

Are you asking about a multi-location business? I believe so. If no city is more important than any other, then you would likely want to focus on the brand/keywords on the homepage and focus on the various cities on the city landing pages. If there are more details you'd like to share, feel free!

[cbizzle]

Thanks for getting back with me so quickly! I'm asking about a business that has only one physical location, but a broad service area. Should site pages be primarily optimized for the physical location or should I leave city names out of most page titles if I'd like to rank beyond the city of my physical location. Given that I have only one physical location, but a broad service area, which option is better (or is there a third):

Option #1: Optimize Most Pages for Physical Location

• Homepage: "Company Name | HVAC | New York City"
• About Page: "About Company Name | New York City"
• Service Page 1: "Service 1 | Company Name | New York City"
• Service Page 2: "Service 2 | Company Name | New York City"
• Service City Page 1: "New York City | Company Name"
• Service City Page 2: "Albany, NY | Company Name"
• Service City Page 3: "Philadelphia, PA | Company Name"

Option #2: Optimize Only City Pages for Physical Locations

• Homepage: "Company Name | HVAC"
• About Page: "About Company Name"
• Service Page 1: "Service 1 | Company Name"
• Service Page 2: "Service 2 | Company Name"
• Service City Page 1: "New York City | Company Name"
• Service City Page 2: "Albany, NY | Company Name"
• Service City Page 3: "Philadelphia, PA | Company Name"

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Chad!

I see. If you have just one physical location, I recommend the following structure:

1. Include your city of location on your main pages (home, about, contact and the landing page for that city).

2. Create a unique landing page for each service city. Be sure the content is of very high quality on these pages.

3. Create a set of services pages, describing each of your company's services. Optimize these for the service keywords.

#3 has some grey area. If it is most important for you to rank for your city of location, then include that city in the optimization of these pages. If the service cities are of equal importance to the city of location, then do not optimize these for the cities - just optimize them for the services.

And, of course, be sure you are not duplicating content on any page

[cbizzle]

Thank you, Miriam!

[MiriamEllis]

Sure thing, Chad!

[Mutatio_Digital]

Hello all, I have very recently taken on a local business to manage and quite new to all of this. Your posts on the subject of multi-location have been incredibly useful and your original blogpost on Local landing pages Miriam is in my reading list and I am sure will be revisited regularly.

I have another question on this obviously complex subject, what to do about tracking your keywords in MOZ Pro? I have subscribed and set up my main keywords and linked each to the 40 different service locations for our business, which looks like its a similar set up to Chads, however this now gives me 400 keywords to track, which seems way too much and unmanageable. Can you give me some advice on how to make this much more effective?

Many thanks,

Sarah

[cbizzle]

Miriam, as a follow-up, do your recommendations for city pages change if a company serves a large number number of cities across several states? In particular, which of the following link structures would you recommend:

1. mydomain.com/service-area/texas/dallas and mydomain.com/service-area/louisiana/shreveport
2. mydomain.com/service-area/dallas-tx and mydomain.com/service-area/shreveport-la

Seriously, Miriam, this is all so helpful. Thank you for spending your time this way!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Chad!

Getting to discuss these topics with the community is the highlight of my work day, every day!

In your examples, above, what is this meant to represent:

service-area

Are you saying the domains would actually say 'service-area' in them or is that filler text for something you are meaning to convey? Please clarify. Thanks!

[cbizzle]

My thought was to have a master service area page that would be at mydomain.com/service-area. That page would have a service area map or the like that would link to the service areas themselves, which would be located at /service-area/texas/dallas or /service-area/dallas-tx, and which of the two is preferable is the essence of my question. Thank you!

[MiriamEllis]

For the sake of convenience, I prefer this:

/service-area/dallas-tx

Hope that helps!