Business has multiple locations, but want to rank for commutable cities, geographies

[lfrazer123]

Hello,

The business I am working for has multiple locations, but the service they provide is one that you would commute for. At present, they have 20 or so pages with yucky geographical keyword stuffed content (think "New York computer services" and they are based out of a suburb (maybe 40 miles away). For some ridiculous reason, some of these pages are ranking for exact match search terms? We are in the process of revamping the whole site-taking approx five sites and integrating into one mega site.

I want to first, figure out the best strategy for ranking for the region that each is in and serve, without being spammy like the previous SEO. I want to eliminate the spammy pages without losing the rank and link juice. What is the most appropriate and above-board strategy? These are my thoughts. Should I:

1. Keep the pages, but tweak them enough to make the content quality? If I do, should they be geo pages? Should they be "locations served", statistics of the area, etc?

2. Group the pages according to region (one page per region) that are location-oriented and tweaked to still include the terms they were ranking for (without the spammy look and stuffing), along with a map, etc?

And then, I have to figure out how to redirect so not to lose the value we have now for some of them. The company deals with treatment for addiction, so in recommending and tips-remember that our audience will commute by car, and eventually (hopefully) by plane.

Thank you so so much for any and all help you can provide! Sorry for such a long description!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi There,

I'm not quite understanding the concept of "commute" here. My image of an addiction treatment center would be a physical location that patients come to, the same way a doctor's office is a physical location that patients come to. Please, correct any misunderstanding I may be having in visualizing the business model.

If, indeed, your client has multiple physical treatment centers that patients come to, then standard best practice would be to have a unique page for each of these physical facilities. Likely, you could edit your existing pages to fit this approach, unless they have very odd URLs, in which case, you might want to create new pages and 301 redirect the old ones to them.

If, however, the client has built a bunch of pages represent their patients' possible locations instead of the locations of the treatment facilities, that can verge on a spammy approach. For example, if you have a treatment center located in Mill Valley, California, but you've created a page for San Francisco saying something like "customers come to us from San Francisco", that's just not a very useful practice, as far as patients are concerned, and the whole point of it is clearly to earn search engine rankings for places the business doesn't exist. Just not a good approach.

Please, feel free to provide more detail if I've misunderstood any of the nuances here. Thank you!

[lfrazer123]

Thanks so much for this response. The business model of an addiction treatment company is that at least for the rehab aspect, patients will come to live at the center for a few months to get well, so the commutable distance would be different than, for instance, a clothing shop.

That said, people are willing to travel from a few hours away, so we would like to be able to target that group, without resorting to keeping the spammy pages that are already on the site (implemented before I was here). Moreover, some of these pages are actually ranking as relevant, so I am thinking that I should take these pages and tweak them to be more qualitative as less geographically-oriented pages, so to pass the ranking weight when we redirect to a new site.

[MiriamEllis]

Thanks for the further details! The business may need to mainly rely on PPC and social outreach to reach demographics outside of their city of location. Perhaps you can do something on the website to support this goal, but, the usefulness of saying "people come to us from another city" just typically isn't strong.

[lfrazer123]

Thanks Miriam! That was my thinking as well. It feels inauthentic.