Local SEO for service industry - one landing page for every town...in every county...in every state?
-
Starting a second local based service site. Initially going to target a couple counties and move on from there as the business grows.
The first site of mine I set up a page for each town [service] + [town] + [state] + [zip]. I am afraid this could get out of control though if I don't have unique content on each page. For the last site I simply copied the page and replace the town name in each as well as the picture, picture title, and image name to make it look more unique for users but not necessarily Google. I had pretty good results but I want this next site to be done properly.
Should I only target a few of the major markets to begin with? What about long tail searches for smaller towns that currently bring in a good amount of business? I am concerned about having "too many" long tail pages for each town which would essentially become a listing of every town and county in the state if I was to maintain the pace I want to.
Also I would need a good amount of backlinks to each specific town page url if I wanted to do well in each of those specific markets right? Is this where the fine line between niche term and broad search is? Is there any happy medium?
-
Local SEO like this is tough. In general, I like to add local information about the city when building out the content for local sites with multiple cities. I work with a carpet cleaning company who wants to rank for each city in three counties. We had to create roughly 20 unique content pages and one of the ways we added new, relevant content is to add local city data to the page. We used wikipedia to search for the county and got the city data for all the cities in that county. It gives 2010 census data and what year the city was founded. We then found the cities homepage and set up google alerts for information regarding each particular city (make sure you set it up for once a day or your inbox will be crazy). We then created blog posts with the city being the category and linked back to the page with the carpet cleaning targeted for that particular city. It seems to have worked well but I'm sure there are other ways to do it too.
Hope this helps!
-
In the early 2000's you could grab the GNIS database, make a site like this, toss it up and make a lot of money as long as you had enough links to get it indexed and hold it there.... but by about 2005, sites like this would not stick in the SERPs if they were nothing but....
yada yada yada Bugtussle, West Virginia yada yada yada yada yada yada
yada yada yada Burgoo, West Virginia yada yada yada yada yada yada
Today, you need unique and substantive content on every page of the site to have it stick in the SERPs (assuming that you have enough pagerank to get it indexed and respidered on a regular basis).
I've thought about making sites like this but didn't have a $X00,000 budget to scratch the surface of the content requirement.
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
-
I want to move some pages of my website to a folder and nav menu in those pages should only show inner page links, will it hurt SEO?
Hi, My website has a few SaaS products, to make my website simple i want to move my website some pages to its specific folder structure , so eg website.com/product1/features
Technical SEO | | webbeemoz
website.com/product1/pricing
website.com/product1/information and same for product2 and so on, the website.com/product1/.. menu will only show the links of product1 and only one link to homepage (possibly in footer). Please share your opinion will it be a good idea, from UI perspective it will be simple , but i am not sure about SEO perspective, please help thanks0 -
How to Remove Web Cache snapshot page & other language SEO Title in Google Search Engine?
Hi... Please tell me how to remove web cache link given below. I have changed my SEO title but it can't be changed...Any other methods for without using webmaster tools. Kw3arat
Technical SEO | | Thilak_geo040 -
Does adding subcategory pages to an commerce site limit the link juice to the product pages?
I have a client who has an online outdoor gear company. He mostly sells high end outdoor gear (like ski jackets, vests, boots, etc) at a deep discount. His store currently only resides on Ebay. So we're building him an online store from scratch. I'm trying to determine the best site architecture and wonder if we should include subcategory pages. My issue is that I think the subcategory pages might be good from a user experience, but it'll add an additional layer between the homepage and the product pages. The problem is that I think a lot of user's might be searching for the product name to see if they can find a better deal, and my client's site would be perfect for them. So I really want to rank well for the product pages, but I'm nervous that the subcategory pages will limit the link juice of the product pages. Home --> SubCategory --> Product List --> Product Detail Home --> Men's Ski Clothing --> Men's Ski Jack --> North Face Mt Everest Jacket Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability? On a separate note, the SubCategory pages would have some head keyword terms, but I don't think that he could rank well for these terms anytime soon. However, they would be great pages / terms to rank for in the long term. Should this influence the decision?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Landing Page URL Structure
We are finally setting up landing pages to support our PPC campaigns. There has been some debate internally about the URL structure. Originally we were planning on URL's like: domain.com /california /florida /ny I would prefer to have the URL's for each state inside a "state" folder like: domain.com /state /california /florida /ny I like having the folders and pages for each state under a parent folder to keep the root folder as clean as possible. Having a folder or file for each state in the root will be very messy. Before you scream URL rewriting :-). Our current site is still running under Classic ASP which doesn't support URL rewriting. We have tried to use HeliconTech's ISAPI rewrite module for IIS but had to remove it because of too many configuration issues. Next year when our coding to MVC is complete we will use URL rewriting. So the question for now: Is there any advantage or disadvantage to one URL structure over the other?
Technical SEO | | briankb0 -
132 pages reported as having Duplicate Page Content but I'm not sure where to go to fix the problems?
I am seeing “Duplicate Page Content” coming up in our
Technical SEO | | danatanseo
reports on SEOMOZ.org Here’s an example: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/williams-sound-ppa-r35-e http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/aphex-230-master-voice-channel-processor http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/AT-AE4100.prod These three pages are for completely unrelated products.
They are returning “200” status codes, but are being identified as having
duplicate page content. It appears these are all going to the home page, but it’s
an odd version of the home page because there’s no title. I would understand if these pages 301-redirected to the home page if they were obsolete products, but it's not a 301-redirect. The referring page is
listed as: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/cd-duplicators None of the 3 links in question appear anywhere on that page. It's puzzling. We have 132 of these. Can anyone help me figure out
why this is happening and how best to fix it? Thanks!0 -
2 links on home page to each category page ..... is page rank being watered down?
I am working on a site that has a home page containing 2 links to each category page. One of the links is a text link and one link is an image link. I think I'm right in thinking that Google will only pay attention to the anchor text/alt text of the first link that it spiders with the anchor text/alt text of the second being ignored. This is not my question however. My question is about the page rank that is passed to each category page..... Because of the double links on the home page, my reckoning is that PR is being divided up twice as many times as necessary. Am I also right in thinking that if Google ignore the 2nd identical link on a page only one lot of this divided up PR will be passed to each category page rather than 2 lots ..... hence horribly watering down the 'link juice' that is being passed to each category page?? Please help me win this argument with a developer and improve the ranking potential of the category pages on the site 🙂
Technical SEO | | QubaSEO0 -
When Is It Good To Redirect Pages on Your Site to Another Page?
Suppose you have a page on your site that discusses a topic that is similar to another page but targets a different keyword phrase. The page has medium quality content, no inbound links, and the attracts little traffic. Should you 301 redirect the page to a stronger page?
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
Why do I have one page showing as two url's?
My SEOMoz stats show that I have duplicate titles for the following two url's: http://www.rmtracking.com/products.php and http://www.rmtracking.com/products I have checked my server files, and I don't see a live page without the php. A while back, we converted our site from html to php, but the html pages have 301's and as you can see the page without the php is properly redirecting to the php page. Any ideas why this would show as two separate url's?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0