Best Approach to Rank For Multiple Locations With Similar Targeted Keywords
-
I'm trying to determine the best way to set up a website to rank for a similar set of keyword phrases in three different cities. The keyword phrases I want to rank for are all pretty much the same with the only difference being the city associated with the keyword phrase. For example, "Austin water restoration" vs "San Antonio water restoration" vs "Houston water restoration". Each city needs about 7 or 8 pages of unique content to accurately target the group of keywords I'm trying to rank for.
My initial thought was to write up unique content for each city and have each city act a site within the main site. For example, the main navigation for xyz.com/austin would be Austin specific, so when you land on xyz.com/austin and go to Services - Water Restoration, it would be all Austin specific content. The same would be true for San Antonio and Houston.
The only problem with this approach is that I have to build up the page authority for a lot of different pages. It would be much easier to build up the page authority for one Water Restoration page and just insert a little "Areas we serve" on the page that includes "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" and maybe work the coverage area in again at the bottom of the page somewhere. However, it would be much more difficult to work "Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" into the title tags and H1s though, and I couldn't logically work the cities into the content as much either. That would be a downside to this approach.
Any thoughts on this? Wondering how large companies with hundreds of locations typically approach this? I'd really appreciate your input.
-
Hi Shaycw,
Sounds good to me...just make sure the font is a regular size (not too small!). So glad to have helped.
-
I really like this approach Miriam. Thanks so much for the suggestion. I think maybe on the services pages I will include a "serving Austin, San Antonio, and Houston" in a small font just below the main page heading. The heading would be "Water Restoration" for example, and I can get my cities just below the main keyword phrase so that they are associated with it. That's what I'm thinking anyways.
I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts and insights on this Miriam. Very nice of you
-
Hi Shaycw,
Thanks for the further clarification. With a client like this, I like to group my page types into 3 different categories:
-
City pages
-
Service pages
-
Future pages
To start with, I create the first two sets of pages. So, in your case, you would be building an Austin page, a San Antonio page and a Houston page. These pages would open with the complete NAP of the business at the top, encoded in Schema and would feature unique content about the unique locations. These pages would be optimized for the respective city and the MAIN service term. The second set of pages would be the service pages. You would build one for each unique service, and while the content of the page could reflect the three cities, your main optimization would center on the service, itself.
At this point, once I've got the basic pages created, I like to develop a blog for the client so that he can begin writing up his projects in the various cities. His blog posts will be titled things like 'A Tough Water Restoration Job In Houston, TX - Before And After'. When you've got 8 different services in 3 different cities to cover, the combination of possibilities really adds up, and I've found that a blog is the best way to begin tacking content development for all possible keyword combinations, while also accomplishing the task of adding fresh content to the site on a regular basis.
This is the method I've found works best. You may come up with some other way that works best for your clients, but I hope my explanation of how I do this makes good sense.
Remember, too, that because the client has 3 legit physical locations and phone numbers, a big part of your marketing will revolve around building unique citations for each location in a number of places. Coupled with a good content development strategy, you should be able to earn a lot of visibility for the client.
-
-
Hi Miriam,
Thanks for the response back. We do have 3 actual physical locations with a unique address and phone number in each city.
I really appreciate your willingness to provide your input on this question!
-
Hi Shaycw,
Does your business have three physical locations or one physical location from which you serve three cities? Please, describe as fully as you can. I'll be happy to come back and read your answer.
-
Your answer doesn't make too much sense here. At one point you talk about pages on a domain, and another point you refer to the same thing as sites. Please make sure that you have knowledge of the topic before responding, and that you leave a logical answer. Thanks!
-
I read and understand it, for your solution you must register a domain and make just three pages like
- site.com/Austin-water-restoration
- site.com/San-Antonio-water-restoration
- site.com/Houston-water-restoration
Then next you are asking for internal city 7 to 8 pages, then i suggest you to make total of 10 pages and link them to all of these 3 sites, You pages looks like to cover the all three cities.
Now you have to only make authority and powerful links to only 3 pages of above that i ask, just list the title of homepage website, like Water Restoration Services - Sitename and once you got good quality of these pages link your internal cities pages to them and they also rank once they connected to better authority pages.
If you want to increase your business to many cities, then you have to make individual pages for every city, its little bit tough but not impossible. ...
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
-
Can a cloud based firewall affect my search ranking?
Hi, I recently implemented a firewall on my website to prevent hacking attacks. We were getting a crazy amount of people per day trying to brute force our website. I used the sucuri cloud proxy firewall service which they claim because of the super fast caching actually helps SEO. I was just wondering is this true? Because we're slowly falling further and further down the SERPS and i really don't know why. If not, is there any major google update recently I don't know about? Thanks, Robert
Web Design | | BearPaw880 -
Using Multiple links/names for the same product?
I am being asked to change these product links on the home page: Home/Condo
Web Design | | RoxBrock
Watercraft/Boat to Home
Condo
Watercraft
Boat (Along with several other product links) How does this affect the customer experience/usability, and SEO? Is it a good idea or is it confusing? Thank you.0 -
Correlation of PageSpeed Insights and YSLow scores to high rankings in SERPs
I'm pretty well rounded when it comes to SEO, but I'm just frazzled when it comes to YSlow and PageSpeed Insights. Of course, individual factors are important to site performance, but it has become increasingly difficult to recommend open-source and hosted platforms that don't pass muster on many of the performance standards being tested. For example, entity tags, expires headers, and cookie-free domains are nearly impossible to set with hosted platforms, and none of the major open-source CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Odoo, etc., consistently put javascript at the bottom or make "fewer" HTTP requests. Mobile is now king, so quite a few people (including myself) need to "mobilize" their website by late April or risk dropping in mobile search rankings. Nearly all my clients run multi-lingual e-commerce websites, so that really limits options but makes it that much more important to keep current with Google's SEO recommendations. What platforms perform best taking into account any correlation with YSlow scores/PageSpeed Insights to high floating sites on SERPs? Would one spend the money to "fix" their current platform that has worked very well to date or switch to a mobile-ready platform?
Web Design | | kwoolf0 -
Best SEO practice - Umbrella brand with several domains
Hi, we have several blogs and comparison sites on specific topics. All the domains rank on top positions in very competitive niche markets. We think that we can get more profit out of the domains when we put them under an umbrella brand. Customers that visit domain A can then also find products easily on domain B. We see this for example on health.com, with several brands in the top. To maintain or improve our rankings i'm looking for specific information for the link structure. For example, is it better to have the 'about us'/rel=author on each domain, with contributors on that specific domain or is it better to have them all in the (umbrella) brand domain. At the moment we have the structure like this: domainA.com, domainA.com/blog, domainA.com/about-us and domainB.com, domainB.com/blog, domainB.com/about-us. I think to maintain the rankings it is best to keep specific content (like blog/ about us) on the domain. So is it the best to just do side wide links with a logo (like health.com) and what about hosting? We work with wordpress, so all domains will be hosted on one ip? when we use the multiple site option of WP? All information on this topic is more than welcome 🙂
Web Design | | remkoallertz0 -
Rankings Tanked After Redesign
This is my first Q & A, so thank you for your extended patience. Long story short, we moved platforms from Volusion to Big Commerce. We had a highly recommended company do our new redesign along with all applicable 301 redirects. They told us to expect a slight dip in traffic, but that it should bounce back before long.... especially with a cleaner, better organized site and better URL structure. Our new site went live on 2/8/13 and as of today, 4/17/13 our rankings are not getting any better. We've went from page 1 position 5 or so to midway down page 2 and even on to 3 for the same terms. I had stressed, and even paid extra for an extensive 301 redirect add-on, to ensure our rankings took as little of a beating as possible. Now I have no idea where to even begin. Since the launch, our Organic Google traffic has decreased by a whopping 82%! Any insight is very, very much appreciated.
Web Design | | josh3300 -
What pluggin translator is the newest and the best to install on wordpress. Thank you very much
What pluggin translator is the newest and the best to install on wordpress. Thank you very much
Web Design | | maestrosonrisas0 -
How can we improve our e-commerce site architecture to help best preserve Page Authority?
Today I installed the SEOMoz toolbar for Firefox (very cool, highly recommended). I was comparing our site http://www.ccisolutions.com to this competitor: http://www.uniquesquared.com For the most part, the deeper I go in our site the more the page authority drops. We have a few exceptions where the page authority of a subcategory page is actually better than the cat. page one level up. In comparison, when I was looking at http://www.uniquesquared.com I noticed that their page authority stays at "21" on every single category page I visit. Are you seeing what I'm seeing? Is this potentially a problem with the tool bar or, is there something significantly different about their site architecture that allows them to maintain that PA across all category and sub category pages? Is there something fundamentally wrong with our (http://www.ccisolutions.com) site architecture? I understand that we have longer URLs, but this is an old store with a lot of SKUs, so we have decided not to remove the /category/ and /product/ from the URLs because the 301 redirects that would result wouldn't pass all of the authority they've built up over the years. Interested to know viewpoints on the site architecture and how it might be improved. Thanks!
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Hi Everybody. I have a large site that is made up of the main site then a large support site. The support site has a lot of overlapping content and similar titles. Would it be beneficial to separate the two? Thank you. All answers appreciated.
Hi Everybody. I have a large site that is made up of the main site then a large support site. The support site has a lot of overlapping content and similar titles. Would it be beneficial to separate the two? Thank you. All answers appreciated.
Web Design | | arithon0