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
-
Hi anyone please help I use this code but now getting 404 error. please help.
#index redirect
Technical SEO | | roynguyen
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L] hi anyone please help I use this code but now getting 404 error. please help. homepage and service.html page is working, but the rest pages like about.html, servicearea.html, and contact.html is not working showing 404 error. and also when you type this URL. generalapplianceserice.ca/about.html generalapplianceserice.ca/contact.html generalapplianceserice.ca/servicearea.html it automatically remove the .HTML extension and shows 404 error, the pages name in root directory is same. these pages work like generalapplianceservice.ca and generalapplianceservice.ca/services why? i also remove this code again but still same issue.0 -
Our protected pages 302 redirect to a login page if not a member. Is that a problem for SEO?
We have a membership site that has links out in our unprotected pages. If a non-member clicks on these links it sends a 302 redirect to the login / join page. Is this an issue for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | rimix1 -
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
SEO Content Audits Questions (Removing pages from website, extracting data, organizing data).
Hi everyone! I have a few questions - we are running an SEO content audit on our entire website and I am wondering the best FREE way to extract a list of all indexed pages. Would I need to use a mix of Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, AND our XML sitemap or could I just use Webmaster Tools to pull the full list? Just want to make sure I am not missing anything. As well, once the data is pulled and organized (helpful to know the best way to pull detailed info about the pages as well!) I am wondering if it would be a best practice to sort by high trafficked pages in order to rank them for prioritization (ie: pages with most visits will be edited and optimized first). Lastly, I am wondering what constitutes a 'removable' page. For example, when it is appropriate to fully remove a page from our website? I understand that it is best, if you need to remove a page, to redirect the person to another similar page OR the homepage. Is this the best practice? Thank you for the help! If you say it is best to organize by trafficked pages first in order to optimize them - I am wondering if it would be an easier process to use MOZ tools like Keyword Explorer, Page Optimization, and Page Authority to rank pages and find ways to optimize them for best top relevant keywords. Let me know if this option makes MORE sense than going through the entire data extraction process.
Technical SEO | | PowerhouseMarketing0 -
Is site: a reliable method for getting full list of indexed pages?
The site:domain.com search seems to show less pages than it used to (Google and Bing). It doesn't relate to a specific site but all sites. For example, I will get "page 1 of about 3,000 results" but by the time I've paged through the results it will end and change to "page 24 of 201 results". In that example If I look in GSC it shows 1,932 indexed. Should I now accept the "pages" listed in site: is an unreliable metric?
Technical SEO | | bjalc20112 -
If the order of products on a page changes each time the page is loaded, does this have a negative effect on the SEO of those pages?
Hello, a client of mine has a number of category pages that each have a list of products. Each time the page is reloaded the order of those products changes. Does this have a negative effect on the pages' rankings? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Kerry_Jones2 -
Pageing page and seo meta tag questions
Hi if i am using paging in my website there is lots of product in my website now in paging total paging is 1000 pages now what title tag i need to add for every paging page or is there any good way we can tell search engine all page or same ?
Technical SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1