Will having a big list of cities for areas a client services help or damage SEO on a page?
-
We have a client we inherited that has flat text list of all the cities and counties they service on their contact page.
They service the entire southeast so the list just looks crazy ridiculous.
--------- Example: ----
South Carolina:
Abbeville, Aiken, Allendale, Anderson, Bamberg, Barnwell, Beaufort, Berkeley, Calhoun, Charleston, Cherokee, etc etc
------ end example ------
The question is, will this help or hinder their seo for their very specific niche industry? Is this key word spamming? It has an end-user purpose so it technically isn't spam, but perhaps the engines may look at it otherwise. I couldn't find a definitive answer to the question, any help would be appreciated.
-
Right on! It worked for the tortoise.
-
Excellent suggestion. Slow and steady wins the race.
-
Scott,
Curious if the business in question has a blog? Could he blog about 'an engine I fixed for a client in Abbeville, SC', and put a content strategy in place to start blogging about his projects in his major cities? Maybe just start with the top 10 cities from which he gets orders for engine repair? Craft writeups of each project he accomplishes for a unique client in each city and make it a blog post. Then, move onto the 10 next-most-important cities. So, maybe he would be starting with the capitols of South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and then moving on to other busy cities.
Eventually, you could have a page on the site (or a menu area) designated Successful Project Showcase that would link permanently to these posts.
My goal here would be to find an authentic and natural approach for showcasing his work in a way that adds great content to the site and doesn't simply list every city in the South East. This strategy, in combination with his service area map, could work well, I believe.
-
That certainly solves the design problem, but would not help someone in in Abbeville, South Carolina find the business (and the business certainly won't have a unique landing page for such a small city). Decisions, decisions. Thanks for the suggestions.
-
While I can't say this would results in an actual penalty, as you say, it looks spammy, so anything like that is kind of shaky ground.
Have you considered making a service area map instead, showing all of the client's service states/cities?
If he services every city in every state of the South East, I simply cannot find a logical justification for listing them all. A map would send the same message, but in a logical, visual manner.
-
Good answers. They do some seriously technical stuff with broken engines. They only have one location, but because it's so niche and there are so few competitors they have clients all over the country that ship their engines to the client in Florida for repairs.
It certainly looks spammy design wise (and we'll find ways to rectify that with some jquery drops), but I'm more concerned with any potential penalty this might cause, if any.
-
Hi Christopher,
Yes, I'd say that would end up looking pretty spammy if they've got a list like this for every state in the South East on their contact page. For the same reason that an e-commerce website wouldn't list all 1000 items they carry on a single page, this is not something I'd recommend.
What's the business model? Virtual or Local? If local, a more natural approach to this would be to have unique pages for each of their physical offices. I very much doubt they have an office in every one of those cities in South Carolina, right? But, perhaps they have 10 offices throughout the South East and could have a unique page for each of them?
Maybe you could share a few more details about the type of business this is?
-
I would create a page called "Service Area" and put an unordered list (ul) may look nicer, and is less spammy. Without knowing the product or service, I'm not sure if that will work for you.
Ex:
South Carolina
- Abbeville
- Aiken
- Allendale
- Anderson
- etc.
Georgia
- Atlanta
- Blah
- Clah
- Dlah
Most importantly - DO NOT post that list in the footer or sidebar of every page. It will significantly dilute the effectiveness. Containing this information on a single page, and peppering the rest of the site with some of your larger markets will be likely most effective for you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Will subpages performance affects the overall SEO performance of the entire site?
I have site issues on certain subpages which I am not focusing for SEO, e.g. "News". I was wondering does the issues of these subpages affect my overall SEO performance (those pages which I will like it to be rank, e.g. "Products" page)?
Technical SEO | | erica.lee0 -
Local SEO: Spain - having trouble getting to first page
Dear, Moz community We are an online advertising website / direcotry. Lately we discovered that our website due to technical error was in English rather than Spanish and was not ranking in the local Spanish google.es at all. After changing the main language we quickly climbed to 2nd page with rankings in google.es . **My question is on top of regular SEO (Link building, content, blog) what could we do to help us rank quicker in local google.es. ** The same keyword ranks in google.com as #3 but not in Spain. Should we put in the effort to work with local directories? Google MyBusiness is not an option as we are not a bricks and mortar business.
Technical SEO | | advertisingcloud0 -
Improving SEO Structure of a Page
Our site is an online Marketplace for Services. Naturally, we have a lot of unique content in the form of :
Technical SEO | | Ideas2life
a) Job Posts
b) Profiles of Service Providers We also have 2 very important pages:
a) The Job Listing Page
b) The Service Provider Page The Listing pages have very valuable H1 Titles, but everything else is duplicate content. To capture those keywords currently in H1, we have created a different landing page for each category page, and we`ll optimize around that, so these H1s are not that big of a deal any more. These landing pages are the key to our SEO strategy and we are building new content every day to help them rank I want to make the Listing Pages No Index Follow. This way they pass Juice to Jobs, and Profiles which have unique contents, but are not indexed themselves. Is this a bad idea? I have been thinking about doing this for over a year but it never felt important enough to be worth the risk of accidentally screwing up We `ll soon do a new on page flow optimization and that's why I am considering this again. Thank you so much in advance Argyris0 -
Detail page popup questions for real estate client
My client, discoverstl.com, recently changed their site structure so that the detail page for individual property opens as a popup within the main page they are visiting, see http://d.pr/i/e8ik after clicking view details on the featured property on the home page. While the url links out to a properly formatting detail page, such as VIEW DETAILS, the developer says this doesn't affect google as its a javascript tweak that pulls it into the existing page. I'm still not convinced and am looking if this is bad for our SEO campaign. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | insitegoogle0 -
Will Moving to a Different Country Hosting Affect my SEO?
Hello Mozzers, I have a website with the country specific TLD. It's very new (less than a month old) and already started ranking for the main target term (It's #5 as I write this). It's a somewhat exact match domain. Right now I am on shared hosting and the way in which the site is growing, I think I might need to move to a VPS soon. Right now, I pay extra and chose a shared hosting in my own country. But VPS in my country is very costly. I'd get twice the features if I go with a US hosting provider for the same price. If I move to a new VPS outside of my country, would it affect my rankings? What do you think? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | jombay0 -
According to 1 of my PRO campaigns - I have 250+ pages with Duplicate Content - Could my empty 'tag' pages be to blame?
Like I said, my one of my moz reports is showing 250+ pages with duplicate content. should I just delete the tag pages? Is that worth my time? how do I alert SEOmoz that the changes have been made, so that they show up in my next report?
Technical SEO | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Duplicate Page Content Lists the same page twice?
When checking my crawl diagnostics this morning I see that I have the error Duplicate page content. It lists the exact same url twice though and I don't understand how to fix this. It's also listed under duplicate page title. Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Does this have anything to do with a 301 redirect here? Why does it have http;// twice? Thanks all! | http://www.charlottepersonalassistant.com/ | http://http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/ |
Technical SEO | | eidna220 -
Website Page Structuring and URL re writing - need helpful resources
Hello, I am not technically very sound and I need some good articles that teach me how to think about and go about website pages structuring and url rewriting that is seo friendly. I will be most obliged if some of you great seomoz-ers can pitch in with help. Regards, Talha ZigZag Solutions
Technical SEO | | TopGearMedia0