Best strategy to follow for a single service site

[Marketing_Today]

Can anyone share what they feel is the best strategy to follow for a single service site?

Would you optimise and target the homepage for the primary service they offer or target a page one level lower and leave the homepage to target the Brand name?

Links to any references or case studies would also be greatly appreciated, thank you!

[Bob_van_Biezen]

Hi OLLI_M,

I would definitely focus your homepage on the keywords / search intents for your primary keyword. This page is your best change of scoring in your own city and has the possiblility to score in city’s close by.

You don’t have to worry about scoring on your brand because:

1. When people search for your brand name they want you. So from an search engines perspective you’re the 100% match with this search intent and you will have a great dwell time and CTR which work in your favor.
2. You will probably get enough inbound links with your brand name in it. That’s very natural.

There are probably a lot more reasons why you will score on your own brand name but I hope these make it clear you don’t have to worry about it.

When you determine your website structure you will probably need some insights in the following:

1. Are people adding local modifiers like “Car service [city name]”
2. What is the search volume on those keywords? Based on this, are there any more city’s in your service area you intent to rank on besides the city you’re located?
3. What is the competition on the keywords you intent to rank on?

In a normal situation where you have one physical location and you serve a couple more nearby city’s I would advise you to focus your homepage on the city you’re based in and add level one pages for the city’s in your service area you intent to rank for. Make sure these pages are added to your normal navigation and are interesting for visitors who do either enter your website through your homepage as directly through the local landings pages.

Miriam wrote a great guide for creating those service area’s on Moz. You might want to check it out:  http://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

You can also check out this project we have been working on some time ago: www.skaya.nl (Dutch website).

When you click on “Waar rijden wij” you will find a list of the city’s they give driving lessons. Every page has some unique tips and information about driving lessons in those specific city’s. In this case we also added the city we’re based in as a level one page. So either our homepage as the local landings page can score on the city were based in.

Two more great resources when you want to start local SEO I would love to share with you:

1. http://moz.com/blog/40-important-local-search-questions-answered
2. http://moz.com/blog/11-ways-local-businesses-can-get-links

I hope this helps!

PS. When you look at the example there are two improvements for this website. The tabbed content should be shown immediately and there should be less duplicated content like the prices for example. Just so you don’t copy the wrong parts of this tactic

[TheWebMastercom]

As a word of caution to this, Google is updating its doorway page algorithm.  I am not sure if this will affect a well implemented example of this strategy, although I would be surprised if it did (i.e. very unique content with text relevant to each location), but I think it will be designed if you use identical pages with just different location names then there is a real risk.

See: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html

Ultimately it won't be fully known until it is implemented, if it hasn't already.

[Bob_van_Biezen]

Great addition of Jonathan! I also think a well implemented example will not get affected by this update but identical pages won't do you much good in the future. So if you start with this strategy, make sure you do it good!