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
-
Content very similar on different websites
Hello, I am in the travel industry and I am currently building the same website (different domain names), one for the US and one for the UK (same website design). They will both features the same content (itinerary, activities) on the page with 2 exception, the 1 st one is that I will use different hotels for my uk clientele and for my US clientele and on the UK page I will use the word "holiday" in the UK and the word "vacation" in the US. Can the fact that I do the same "itineraries" and use the same text on 95 % of the page hurt my ranking in one country or another ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How and When Should I use Canonical Url Tags?
Pretty new to the SEO universe. But I have not used any canonical tags, just because there is not definitive source explaining exactly when and why you should use them??? Am I the only one who feels this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenrushdaily0 -
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
URL Structure Question
Am starting to work with a new site that has a domain name contrived to help it with a certain kind of long tail search. Just for fictional example sake, let's call it WhatAreTheBestRestaurantsIn.com. The idea is that people might do searches for "what are the best restaurants in seattle" and over time they would make some organic search progress. Again, fictional top level domain example, but the real thing is just like that and designed to be cities in all states. Here's the question, if you were targeting searches like the above and had that domain to work with, would you go with... whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/seattle-washington whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/washington/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/what-are-the-best-restaurants-in-seattle-wa ... or what and why? Separate question (still need the above answered), would you rather go with a super short (4 letter), but meaningless domain name, and stick the longtail part after that? I doubt I can win the argument the new domain name, so still need the first question answered. The good news is it's pretty good content. Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Should we show(to google) different city pages on our website which look like home page as one page or different? If yes then how?
On our website, we show events from different cities. We have made different URL's for each city like www.townscript.com/mumbai, www.townscript.com/delhi. But the page of all the cities looks similar, only the events change on those different city pages. Even our home URL www.townscript.com, shows the visitor the city which he visited last time on our website(initially we show everyone Mumbai, visitor needs to choose his city then) For every page visit, we save the last visited page of a particular IP address and next time when he visits our website www.townscript.com, we show him that city only which he visited last time. Now, we feel as the content of home page, and city pages is similar. Should we show these pages as one page i.e. Townscript.com to Google? Can we do that by rel="canonical" ? Please help me! As I think all of these pages are competing with each other.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchitmalik0 -
Location.href vs href?
I just got off a Google Hangout with John Mueller and was left a little confused about his response to my question. If I have an internal link in a div like widgetwill it have the same SEO impact as widget John said that as you are unable to attribute a nofollow in an onclick event it would be treated as a naked link and would not pass pagerank but still be crawled. Can anyone confirm that I understood it correctly? If so should all my links that have such an onclickevent also have an html ahref in the too? Such as widget Many times it is more useful for the customer to click on any area of a large div and not just the link to get to the destination intended? Clarification on this subject would be very useful, there is nothing easily found online to confirm this. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gazzerman10 -
What is the best URL structure for categories?
A client's site currently uses the URL structure: www.website.com/�tegory%/%postname% Which I think is optimised fairly well, as the categories are keywords being targeted. However, as they are using a category hierarchy, often times the URL looks like this: www.website.com/parent-category/child-category/some-post-titles-are-quite-long-as-they-are-long-tail-terms Best practise often dictates (such as point 3 in this Moz article) that shorter URLs are better for several reasons. So I'm left with a few options: Remove the category from the URL Flatten the category hierarchy Shorten post titles two a word or two - which would hurt my long tail search term traffic. Leave it as it is What do we think is the best route to take? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Need Perfect URLs
I'm redesigning a site's structure from the ground up, and am having issues with the URLs. I'd love to have them be perfect, but kept finding conflicting advice online. 1. For my services blog, is it best to have it set up like www.example.com/services/keyword or
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stryde
www.example.com/keyword There seems to be conflicting advice as to keep it short and keep the keyword as far to the left as possible, but also that including the word services would help with long tail phrases and site organization. 2. For my blog section, is it best to have it set up like
www.example.com/blog/keyword or
www.example.com/keyword or
www.example.com/blog-post-title-with**-keyword**-in-it It's similar to the first question, but also adds the question of including the entire post title in the URL or just the keyword. Your help would be greatly appreciated!1