Any insight on optimizing a single URL for locations in different states?
-
What good/bad experiences have people had trying to optimize a single URL for multiple locations in different states? eg optimizing a page of the site for "dentist atlanta", "dentist orlando", and "dentist miami" (the client has offices in all these locations).
Has anyone found that Google has an algorithm that get's suspicious if you try to optimize a given URL for either too many locations and/or for locations that are too far apart?
-
Hi Adam,
Excellent advice from Laura. While Google has never taken a stance that I know of against putting all of your locations on a single page (and you'd be doing so on the Contact Us page, of course), it's considered a better practice in Local SEO to develop a unique, high quality landing page for each physical location for the following reasons:
-
Ranking a page that's clearly focused on a single city is going to be easier that ranking it for three different cities. You'll be sending a clearer signal to both humans and bots that 'dentist orlando' is a primary topic for the business than you would be if you're diluting the focus of the page with multiple cities.
-
It's very likely that your competitors will be making use of the practice of developing these landing pages, and you want to be able to compete with that.
-
Establishing a unique page for each office will enable you to link from all of the citations you build to a dedicated page on the website for each. Historically, this has been viewed as helpful in preventing against accidental merges of your Google+ Local pages, though there seems to be fewer cases of this in recent times. Regardless, it's very clear to be able to link your Orlando Google+ Local page and other citations to your Orlando page on your website, where the first thing one encounters in the compete NAP for the business, identically matching the NAP on the citations. It lessens the potential for error.
The prerequisite for developing these types of landing pages will be the willingness of the business owner to invest the necessary time/funding to creating high quality pages with unique content on them. If this is lacking, then it's better to wait until the owner is ready to devote the necessary resources to the project so that the pages are an asset rather than a liability.
-
-
Yes, I have seen that work as well. I'm not saying that you can't do it. but those are highly competitive keywords in large metropolitan areas. It will take longer to see results. Local landing pages will work to build authority for the entire domain for those locations. I have seen this happen many times with our clients. Both the optimized local page and the site's home page can end up ranking well for geo-targeted keywords.
-
Thanks for the reply. Why do you say "You'll be fighting a steep uphill battle if you try to optimize one URL for all three."?
That's what I tend to think also, but to my knowledge Google hasn't ever discouraged this, and I've seen this approach work pretty well for two different websites.
-
You'll be fighting a steep uphill battle if you try to optimize one URL for all three. You should, of course, mention that you have offices in all three cities on your home page, but why not create local landing pages for each city?
I don't mean that you should create one page, copy it, and replace the city name. That would be bad.
Each city page should have unique content with a local focus. In addition to contact information and directions, there's probably plenty of ways to add unique content to each local page. Highlight key staff members for each location, add location photos (inside and out), add customer testimonials, etc.
More about location pages:
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
-
Client wants to remove mobile URLs from their sitemap to avoid indexing issues. However this will require SEVERAL billing hours. Is having both mobile/desktop URLs in a sitemap really that detrimental to search indexing?
We had an enterprise client ask to remove mobile URLs from their sitemaps. For their website both desktop & mobile URLs are combined into one sitemap. Their website has a mobile template (not a responsive website) and is configured properly via Google's "separate URL" guidelines. Our client is referencing a statement made from John Mueller that having both mobile & desktop sitemaps can be problematic for indexing. Here is the article https://www.seroundtable.com/google-mobile-sitemaps-20137.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
We would be happy to remove the mobile URLs from their sitemap. However this will unfortunately take several billing hours for our development team to implement and QA. This will end up costing our client a great deal of money when the task is completed. Is it worth it to remove the mobile URLs from their main website to be in adherence to John Mueller's advice? We don't believe these extra mobile URLs are harming their search indexing. However we can't find any sources to explain otherwise. Any advice would be appreciated. Thx.0 -
Is 1:1 301 redirect required on indexed URL when restructing URL even if the new URL is canonicalized?
Hello folks, We are restructuring some URLS which forms a fair chunk of the content of the domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB17
These content are auto generated rather than manually created unlike other parts of the website. The same content is currently accessible from two URLs: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn The URL 1 uses the URL 2 as the canonical url and it has worked allright since Moz does
not show the two as duplicate of each other. Google has also indexed the canonical URL although
there is still a few 'URL 1s' which were indexed before the canonical was implemented. The updated URL structure will look like something like this: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn It would be great to have just a single URL but a few business requirement prevents
us from having just the canonical URL only even with the new structure. Since we will still have two URLs to access the same content and we were wondering
whether we will need to do a 1:1 301 redirect on the current URLs or since there will be canonical URL
(/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn),
we won't need to worry about doing the 1:1 redirect on the the indexed content? Please note that the content will still be accessible from the OLD URL (unless 301ed of course). If it is advisable to do a 1:1 301 redirect this is what we intend to do: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn /autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn Any advice/suggestions would be greated appreciated. Thank you.0 -
Double hyphen in URL - bad?
Instead of a URL such as domain.com/double-dash/ programming wants to use domain.com/double--dash/ for some reason that makes things easier for them. Would a double dash in the URL have a negative effect on the page ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Video Optimization
I'm interested in marking up videos on a site, so we can get those videos ranking on Google as rich snippets. Anyway, i've been looking at Googles support on this - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2413309&topic=1088474&ctx=topic And they recommend scheme.org markup. I looked at Rands whiteboard friday videos - and it seems based on what i seen from the source code - that there is no scheme.org markup - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fixing-the-broken-culture-of-seo-metrics-whiteboard-friday Also for the life of me, i've been trying to find sites with videos with scheme.org markup, and can't find any! Its driving me nuts, i just want to see a real life example! -- Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mattcarter080 -
301 redirect with /? in URL
For a Wordpress site that has the ending / in the URL with a ? after it... how can you do a 301 redirect to strip off anything after the / For example how to take this URL domain.com/article-name/?utm_source=feedburner and 301 to this URL domain.com/article-name/ Thank you for the help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash?
Does having a trailing slash make a url different than the same url without the trailing slash? www.example.com/services Or www.example.com/services**/** Does Google consider these to be the same link or does Google treat them as different links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Duplicate content via dynamic URLs where difference is only parameter order?
I have a question about the order of parameters in an URL versus duplicate content issues. The URLs would be identical if the parameter order was the same. E.g.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anthematic
www.example.com/page.php?color=red&size=large&gender=male versus
www.example.com/page.php?gender=male&size=large&color=red How smart is Google at consolidating these, and do these consolidated pages incur any penalty (is their combined “weight” equal to their individual selves)? Does Google really see these two pages as DISTINCT, or does it recognize that they are the same because they have the exact same parameters? Is this worth fixing in or does it have a trivial impact? If we have to fix it and can't change our CMS, should we set a preferred, canonical order for these URLs or 301 redirect from one version to the other? Thanks a million!0 -
Is it safe to redirect multiple URLs to a single URL?
Hi, I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates. The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date. The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links. Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain. My intention is to: Shut down the old site Focus all attention on building up content on the new website Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...) Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage Sounds good, right? But there is one issue I need some advice on... The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site. I call these my "black sheep pages". So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death? OPTION A: oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndreVanKets
oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION B: oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION 😄 oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com -> newsite.com My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique. What would you do? Help 😐1