Location Links in Footer

[Wizkids964]

Our business is in 10 cities.  We offer identical services in each city, there's absolutely nothing different about the services we offer based on location.  We have a contact page for each city with a bit of unique content (phone, address, photo of city, list of counties we service).  It really would be a grey area to create subsites for each city and try to rewrite the service description content 10 times.  However, we want to improve organic results.  We of course have Google Places listings for each city.

From an on-page SEO perspective, wouldn't it only have the possibility of benefiting, not hurting local SEO but add the city name linked to that city's contact page in the footer?  I've seen arguments against it, and could see maybe if you were in like 50 cities instead of 10, but is there really any observed downside to doing that in the footer for every page?  We can't title the difference service pages with the city name in the headings or page title, so at least we'd have anchor text in the footer.

[robk123]

I'm doing the same thing for 1 one of my clients who's a local glazier and it works. I have links in the footer to those places but also in the menu.

It's a '.nl' website.

[TheDahv]

Miriam Ellis has written on this subject a few times and perhaps her advice would be useful here. Check out these articles if you haven't seen them already:

• https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
• https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Regarding link structure from your main site, she suggests:

Do not bury your local landings pages somewhere deep within the architecture of the website.
Link to them from a high-level menu.

But she immediately follows that up with this point: "Finally, do not build an unreasonable number of landing pages."

It sounds like you're right within that recommended threshold.

Hope you're able to find something useful in those links. Good luck!