Localize Homepage, or service pages?

[asbchris]

Hi so I am curious if a homepage may carry the most link juice, then if you service an entire state, do you include the state name as a keyword in your homepage title to get noticed, or the company brand, resulting in adding service area pages to cater to unique each city that you service?

I am just not sure if Google is smart enough to know you service a state? I have my local page with a service area, but is this all I need? So I would not need to add a state name.

Like I build horse barns, pole barns, metal buildings, and indoor riding arenas.

So I am curious if you would do a title tag like

Colorado Builders - Barns, Buildings, and Arenas

Or maybe Colorado at the end?

Or not at all

Thanks for any tips.

[jbbattag]

I have started a new website for sub zero refrigerator repair after years of using other website with funky permalink structures. I really wanted to make this one perfect using all the keyword data i have compiled from adwords, chatting with customers and the google search box.

I found that sub-zero repair was my most popular search term by a long shot. No location info given. So my url is.

http://subzerorepair.com/

Now, people also searched service maybe 1 out of ten times.

so... next was to specify my service

http://subzerorepair.com/service

Now, states. we service multiple states, and a lot of times people specify which state they are in while searching.

http://subzerorepair.com/service/new-jersey

Now, even more rare, but allows me to specify more specific areas we work in and write nice content, ideally tying each page in with google local accounts listings, is counties.

http://subzerorepair.com/service/new-jersey/bergen-county-nj

I am not a professional, but years of looking at search results led me to try to organize my permalinks into this specific path. This is my two cents, I think this is the best structure I could have.  iI anyone can give me a critique it would be much appreciated !

Now, I also own a home. A home with a hundred year old barn I am having completely restored and modernized. When looking for a builder I really scoured the internet hard. I have narrowed it down between two or three companies who specialize in this type of work as it is more of an investment as lets say, refrigerator repair. So, my point is that while your permalink structure is important, you want to come up when people specify an area, your content, quality of workmanship, pictures, information given and general awesomeness of website is going to matter more than coming up first. I mean, who goes with the first builder they click on on google?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Chris,

It's really important to understand that Local Search is city-based, not state-based. Local SEO revolves around optimizing core pages of the website and the footer with your complete NAP (name, address, phone number) of your physical location, building a Google+ Local page for that city of location, building citations on various directories for that city of location and earning reviews on them, plus any links and social mentions you can earn.

For any city in which you serve but are not physically located, it's a best practice to build city landing pages on the website with totally unique content on them. These will not typically achieve local pack rankings, because there is no physical address tied to them, but they can achieve organic rankings for searches pertaining to these other cities.

So, if you are taking a Local SEO approach to your marketing, and let's say you're physically located in Denver, then your core pages and NAP and citations and reviews will all need to reflect the Denver location. Your title tags and content on these pages will be most geared toward Denver. Your city landings pages for cities where you aren't physically located can then reflect other cities like Boulder, Aspen, Colorado Springs, etc.

Typically, even if you serve statewide, you're not going to build a landing page for every single city in the state. I mean ... technically, you could do this, but it would be vast project. So, in general, what you'd want to do is to identify maybe 10 major cities in which you serve and build a unique landing page for each.

Then, I would recommend setting up a blog on your website and when you build a barn in another city, writing a blog post about this. If you build 50 barns a year, that's 50 blog posts and 50 chances for Google to see that you've got unique content on the website featuring your work in this variety of cities. You can add to the static city landing pages over time, too, and you can be sure that the homepage and contact page of the website reflects that you will travel anywhere within the state of Colorado to serve, but tackling the whole state at once is likely to be too big of an SEO project for any business. Taking the work in steps and stages will enable you to build great content that is highly relevant to people searching from the various cities in Colorado for the services you provide.

Hope this helps!