Assigning Locations to Wordpress from SEO Perspective?

[SDSLaw]

I am looking for a way to split up and assign my 400 Wordpress posts to my business' four separate office locations.

The four offices are in four separate areas with distinct city names.

What way makes the most sense from an SEO perspective - assigning the city names as categories? adding the location as a tag, or some other way that I haven't considered?

Currently, all posts are categorized by content and have no mention of location.

Happy to answer any questions you might need in order to answer.

Thank you!

[ThompsonPaul]

What end result are you trying to accomplish, Scott?

Are any of the posts actually specifically about the individual cities?

[SDSLaw]

Thanks for answering.

End game is to attempt to gain equal coverage for all of our offices and to help each office show up better in SERP.

No posts are about the cities themselves, they are all varied and occupationally relevant to my offices.

[KaneJamison]

Hi Scott,

What you're suggesting - somehow assigning each blog post to a specific location - doesn't make sense to me for taxonomy purposes or for SEO purposes.

Assuming you assigned the posts to a specific taxonomy for locations, whether that looked like Tags or Categories, it provides little value aside from adding a small amount of text to the page.

Internal linking is one way to take advantage of the fact that you have that much unique content, but that really boils down to 2 tasks:

1. Ensure that each of the 4 locations has a dedicated location page (eg domain.com/locations/seattle-wa/) that is linked from your nav menu or sidebar in order to make sure every page on the site links there. Be mindful of the anchor text you use - it's hard to do an anchor text heavy with keywords for a location page without it looking spammy).
2. Add links within the body content of the page - when it's relevant to do so.

You can also begin to produce blog content that is geographically relevant as a way to directly build links to these location pages. For example, if your 4 locations were paint supply stores, and one location was in Seattle, you might create an article on "18 Seattle Homes With Crazy Paint Jobs" - this would be an effective piece of content to link directly to your Seattle location page. You'd want to do it in a natural way. Here's a good vs bad example:

• Good: "We sent out 2 paint consultants from our Seattle location to scout out the most off-the-wall paint jobs in the Emerald City."
• Bad: "Read more about our Seattle paint store."