Should Multi Location Businesses "Local Content Silo" Their Services Pages?

[formandfunctionagency]

I manage a site for a medical practice that has two locations. We already have a location page for each office location and we have the NAP for both locations in the footer of every page.

I'm considering making a change to the structure of the site to help it rank better for individual services at each of the two locations, which I think will help pages rank in their specific locales by having the city name in the URL. However, I'm concerned about diluting the domain authority that gets passed to the pages by moving them deeper in the site's structure.

For instance, the services URLs are currently structured like this:

www.domain.com/services/teeth-whitening (where the service is offered in each of the two locations)

Would it make sense to move to a structure more like

www.domain.com/city1name/teeth-whitening

www.domain.com/city2name/teeth-whitening

Does anyone have insight from dealing with multi-location brands on the best way to go about this?

[MiriamEllis]

Hello There!

Good questions you've asked here. My standard advice for multi-location business models is that you have:

1. A page for every location

2. A page for every service or product you offer

3. Links from #1 to #2

What you're describing here, of creating a whole set of city-optimized versions of each service you offer even though the service is identical across all locations, is an option I don't particularly advocate. You could go this route, but here are some problems I see with this approach:

1. I have 10 services and my business expands to 100 locations. What a mess it would be to have to create unique content for 1,000 city-optimized service pages that are all actually saying the same thing. It's just not going to be sustainable for most businesses to do this.

2. I can't really say to myself that I'm creating these page for people. I'd feel I was doing it all for search engines, and (like Google) I don't really feel comfortable with that approach to marketing. My customer can be served just fine if my landing page for city 1 links to my page for service 1. If the service is the same for all customers at all locations, the only reason I'd create thousands of iterations of combinations of service+city would be for search engines.

So, rather than take this approach, I'd invest the time/money in something else. I'd go with a page for every city and a page for every service and put my budget towards content development and link building for these pages. I'd focus on building the overall authority of my brand in relationship to my topics, because I feel this would result in better ROI than creating a sort of octopus of near-duplicate pages solely in hopes of rankings.

Hope these thoughts are helpful in creating strategy!

[formandfunctionagency]

Hey Miriam, thanks for the great answer!

I don't anticipate the business to add any additional locations and 1-2 services aren't offered in both locations, but either way, very solid advice, I'll be taking it.

While reading over your response and researching around, I also dug up one of Phil Rozek's posts about city pages. He recommends linking from each service page back to each location page. You recommended linking from each location page to each service. I think both make sense from an ease of use standpoint. Do you advocate doing one over the other or do you feel linking both ways makes sense/matters?

[MiriamEllis]

Good morning and Happy New Year!

Either way or both, with the internal links, is fine