What Are Your Thoughts On Location Targeted Pages?
-
I have a client that wants to rank for a bunch of locations around his primary location. Say 30 minutes away. So we created a bunch of pages for cities around his location. So far it seems to be working pretty well. That said, I heard from someone else that Google really doesn't like these type of pages anymore and that we are better off with just one location page and list the areas we server on it.
What are your thoughts and experiences?
-
Thanks for the responses guys. Sounds like you both think using location pages is still a good way to go as long as you are not trying to fake having a location where you do not.
-
"I would first offer a simple suggestion whenever someone says, Google doesn't or Google does... Ask them where they read it or saw it."
I agree with Robert here. Chances are the person you heard it from tried it and did not implement it correctly, and therefore because it didnt work for them, means it wont work for you. Lol.
"City" pages are one of the most effective ways to drive traffic for additional service areas. We have used these multiple times with great success. Having individual location pages with a exclusive URL, page title, content, meta description and links can help you rank in areas outside your major competitive areas. For example:
Lawn care guy serves St Louis. We set up pages for surrounding areas. Focus on St Louis for main site content, while mentioning the other areas. For the city pages, we only focus on that one area. All content is unique for each page (important) and we see how we can include certain details that are specific to that one area. Images, links, alt text are all named appropriately to that location. You can always include wiki info, maps, images or other media to help a user (and search engine) immediately understand what the page is about. Set up a variety of tracking methods as Robert stated to further help users decide that the service provider is "local". People will be more likely to call a local number for service showing their area code than a 800 or 855. Tossible digits has them for cheap, or you can use Google voice. As stated before DO NOT USE VIRTUAL ADDRESSES, or a UPS suite. You want to add to the value of your site, not hurt it.
-
Netviper
I would first offer a simple suggestion whenever someone says, Google doesn't or Google does... Ask them where they read it or saw it. (Obviously, hearing it is not very beneficial.) That said, I politely disagree with whomever said that.
We have clients that are service area businesses and they have a need to be present when someone looks for example for a plumber. So, Houston Plumber and neighborhood A, B, C, D.... What you must do, is be careful regarding local and how you set it up. Do not go out and get UPS addresses, virtual addresses, etc. for these communities. You should have one location for each real address that is a business address that your client has. If they only have one in the city, that is it. Make sure that Name, Address, and Phone is always the same. IF you are going to want to use a different phone number for a given community (typically for tracking purposes), make sure you do it as an image on the web page, no HTML and no alt text with number, etc. Forever (or until things change) you will have the same NAP for the entire city unless it is a tracking number that is not crawled.
For every page you create for a community I suggest the following. Go shoot some photos or have them shot, etc. using a camera or phone with GPS and use one or two of those on your page. Talk about that area and the business and as best possible, try not to make every page the same. Find ways to add a paragraph or two that are real differentiators for that locale.
Doing this, you should have some success with meeting the needs of your client.
Best
Robert
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
-
Sale Pages On An eCommerce Website
I have a client who sells 50 brands of shoes. At the moment the developer has a noindex/nofollow tag on all sale pages which is wrong as around 10% of site activity revolves around those pages. The structure looks like this: 1. For Cats/Sub Cats site/sale
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nigel_Carr
site/womens/sale
site/womens/shoe/sale
site/womens/shoes/ballerinas/sale For every cat/subcat - there are 10 cats and average 5 subcats per cat so 50 pages of sale. 2. For Brands site/brand
site/brand/womens
site/sale/brand
site/sale/womens/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/subcat/brand So each brand can have four sale pages on top of its own brand page. 50 brands x 54 = around 2700. Now no one is going to start writing 2700 pieces of additional on page content (although Meta is OK! ) and we risk further diluting the brand pages we need to show highly for, so we need to do something. Should we Category Pages: 1. Allow all sale cat and subcat pages to proliferate through Google? or
2. Canonicalise all sale sub category pages back to category
3. Caonicalise all category and Subcategory pages back to sale/womens Brand Pages: 1. Allow all sale brand pages to proliferate through Google ?
2. Canonicalise Sub Cat brand pages back to sale/category/brand
3. Canonicalise Sub Cat and Cat back to sale/brand Note the lower pages never do well in search. If you search a brand + Sale in Google it is always the site/brand page that comes up, never the sale version (This is from research on other similar sites and my own analysis) Same with Sub Cats - eg, Brand + Subcat - it's always site/brand that comes up first wand has the highest PA. Also we can't analyse any of these sale pages in MOZ or anywhere else as they are not in search at all having been no indexed. That's my conundrum for today, Any thoughts would be appreciated!0 -
Multiple pages for a Profile
Hi All, We have a Biography website in which we have Celebrity News, Videos, Images etc. We have a main page which shows the biography and sides we show 5 blocks of News, Videos, Images etc and have a More option when clicked the page goes to a page where it shows 100's of news of that celeb or Videos etc This is the main page : sitename.com/celebrityname news: sitename.com/celebrityname/news Videos: sitename.com/celebrityname/videos Images: sitename.com/celebrityname/Images Now these 3 pages have no content in them and when we scan via SEMRUSH it shows as "with duplicate title tags". We have 20K such bio's so 20K * 3 such pages is 60K duplicate title tags How can we deal with such pages? Any help please. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leengsro870 -
What is the benefit of directory pages?
I recently started at a new job running ecommerce websites. We sell yoga equipment and on 2 of our sites we built directory pages for yoga studios to list their calendars and whatnot. They are pretty old and out of date, but my question is, is there any benefit to these types of directories? If they do, we need to look at refreshing them. But if not, then they need to go. One of them is here. http://www.everythingyoga.com/studios.aspx Like I said, it is out of date.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShockoeCommerce0 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0 -
Wrong page getting ranked
Hi all, we have product category pages on our ecommerce web site and we also produce blog content (such as buyers guides, setup guides etc) to help with ranking and give our site some good quality, unique content. However we are sometimes finding that the buyers guide / blog content gets ranked by Google over our product category page. I'm hoping, if I give an example or two, some one smart out there may be able to point me in the right direction as to how we can avoid this and get the product category page ranked instead? You will see from my examples we are linking internally using the keywords from the buyers guides to the product category pages in order to show the most important page to Google for these keywords and are trying to structure the product category pages as well as possible to make it the most optimized page for the term. Example: Keyword "twin dvd player"... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/ ... blog page actually getting ranked for this keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/dual-screen-and-twin-dvd-player-explained/ Keyword "site radio".... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/audio/radio/site-radio/ .... blog buyer guide page actually getting ranked for keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/Site-radio-buying-guide/ Any help / pointers appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasef0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Landing Page - Home Page redesign SEO factor question - Serious concern.
Hi Folks, I'm considering making a big change to our website and really need some expert advise. Will we lose ranking if we do what I propose? Our site www.meninkilts.com, needs to split users/clients by "Commercial" and "Residential" so we can message/market completely differently to each client. We are considering doing this structure: Landing Page | | Commercial Homepage Residential Homepage Right now we rank well, for our keywords like "Window Cleaning cityname" but are worried that adding a landing page, and splitting our site to two homepages will effect seo (ie: a landing page would only have two buttons: one for commercial and one for residential). What would be the best way to handle this. Looking forward to your insights! Cheers Brent
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MenInKilts0 -
How to Target Multiple Keywords in Single Page
Hey There, We're planning to target multiple keywords in a single page.. they keywords are definitely related and to an extent could be considered as synonyms.. We have a few questions as to how to optimize the page for on page and off page. On Page Do we mention all the targeted keywords on the page? At a maximum we could mention the keywords once..of course want to give out relevant and quality content and do not want to focus on keyword density How do we optimize the URL structure? For ex... We have keywords aa, ab and ac, where a is the base keyword Is it a good option to to have a URL structure like http://www.example.com/a-b-c.html? How do we go about mentioning the targeted keywords in meta description.. We've read the articles at SEOMoz.. but would want opinions What about HI, H2 and H3 Tags? how do we go about optimizing these Off Page While using off page we will of course vary our anchor text with the multiple keywords... this will make it look natural. Will we manage to rank for the multiple keywords (if we vary anchor text) that we're targeting if our backlinking method are strong? Thank you all for your inputs and responses...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elagaan0