Should I Use City Name in URL?

[kylesuss]

Having a website designed for a car dealership and deciding what attributes to use in the URL. Should I include the city name in the URL? Or does that help for SEO purposes?

Other ideas of what to research or try are appreciated too.

Thanks

[dignan99]

If you are starting from scratch, I think it is extremely beneficial to have a keyword rich domain that includes the name of the city.  This of course depends what other words you have go with the rest of the domain name of course.

I do not believe you will win with a keyword rich domain name alone, but again...it's a fantastic place to begin.

[mosaicpro]

1. I don't think in the domain name you should use your city unless you want to improve rankings on specific keyword match

ex: you want to rank better for    car dealer chicago

If you buy cardealerchicago.com exactly it will help you a bit  but any other variation ex:   if someone searches car dealer in chicago you domain won't get sort of the boost it need because is not exact match....

SO unless what i mentioned 1st i suggest buy a domain that is easy to remember for the user so when he comes the 1st time straight away they remember the domain they landed. Great for further advertising, marketing etc.

2. Now by reading your question again seems like you have the domain name domain.com/ and you are wondering if you should use it in the url   /car-dealer-chicago

I think it depends on your on-page optimization if you can format you content to have these car dealer chicago everywhere then i think you can aviod using it in the url IF your website is showing ONLY 1 car dealer you should aviod that. If listing multiple car dealers in a specific city then yes definetly use it.

So response 2 in my opinion avoid using city name in url as google knows the cities etc if you mention it in your content unless you list multiple car dealers in a specific area.

Keep it short, clear and simple... everyone loves that including Google.

Hope it helps.

[DanHill]

Is it going to have dynamically created pages and URL's or are there going to be static pages? Personally I would include the city name in the URL (eg www.cars.co.uk/london-car-hire.html -> if it's going to be dynamic then you might do it like www.cars.co.uk/carhire/london)

You could seperate your content by city and then town or if the company leases cars too(or might do lease to own option or maybe even rentals in the future) then it's a good idea to think about the scope so that it will be easier in the future when expanding

edit : I realise my example is car hire and not sales but the same principal applies

[MBayes]

Matt Cutts has referred to "keyword" domain names being an issue they are looking at. ( Missing citation here of exact quotes)

We used city names for a long time, but have moved away from them, as we now have the same results without them. I should note that Bing seems to be highly sensitive to keywords in the domain, and I think the city in the domain is exactly that.

Our research is limited, so take this as my 2 cents only.

[dignan99]

While I have read that the importance of a business name matching the domain name exactly could be deemed extremely beneficial, having the city name in with the appropriate keyword, and proper optimization should make for an extremely strong listing.