Location based landing pages best practices

[RyanMeighan]

Hello,

I am looking for the communities thoughts on location-based landing pages. That is,  writing out dozens, sometimes hundreds of landing pages in the format of domain.com/[keyword]-[location] and recycling the same content over and over to localize organic search engine results.

i have done it with multiple websites and seen tremendous success, however, i am considering getting rid of these pages and having all of the spammy location based pages 301 redirect to my main page domain.com/[keyword]

I am considering this because the above practice seems to be a bit black-hat / spammy and those pages do not offer any unique or valuable content. While i have seen great results from this practice, i feel like Google will eventually penalize this or may already be penalizing me without me knowing it. At the same time, i am hesitant to because these pages are ranking. i.e. domain.com/[keyword-houston] is ranking but domain.com/[keyword] is not ranking

Thoughts?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Ryan,

I'm so sorry your good question didn't receive a reply yet. May I ask, are the pages you've published representing actual physical locations of the business (like a Taco Bell with thousands of locations) where the business meets face-to-face with its customers? Or, are they just areas of the country you are targeting without having physical locations and in-person interactions? A few details on the business model in question should help you receive some good replies here.

[TheOMG]

I use city-specific landing pages all of the time to facilitate local SEO for my service area clients.  The key to make enough of the content on the pages unique so that they pass muster when checked for duplicate content.  Typically, I'll create a blog-style article with 750 - 1000 words or more included within the content to boost the "unique-ness" of the content and then have my team right multiple versions of the topic from scratch for however many pages I need.  Its a bit labor intensive, but it works great.

And then if a particular landing page isn't ranking well enough - I know for what pages to build links.

In some instances, if a business has multiple services I'll create entire content silos that consist of a series of unique pages for each service/city combination.  For instance, a paint contractor offers interior painting, exterior painting and deck staining.  For City A, I build a page for City A + Paint Contractor and have it link to the three sub-pages:  City A + Interior, City A + Exterior and  City A + Decks.  Using internal linking and targeted back linking along with sufficient unique content on each page, we'll often see first page boosts within a few days once they are indexed.