The reason I’m writing this little tutorial is because I’ve received quite a few questions via PM and in some threads over on the Warrior Forum and thought maybe I should put together something so you all can use this as a guide.
This is based on my experience in ranking a local business in a small city. The small city wasn’t going to get many searches so it was important to show an ROI and that wasn’t going to cut it. The only other option when it comes to SEO was to rank in other cities with a larger population.
What I was able to do, is rank in over 20 cities for over 60 different keywords. Here’s the kicker… it was with duplicate content and only on page optimization. Some of the rankings came from cities 50 miles apart!
Why am I REALLY Sharing This?
Like I said, I get a lot of questions but I guess the real reason I’m sharing this is because of all the Google guideline cheerleaders that are preaching original content, and using scare tactics getting people to believe you can’t have any duplicate content, that you must follow everything Google says 100%.
I’m not naive… I know Google is smarter than me. I find some useful stuff every now and then and usually it will work and not be affected by any algorithm change like Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, etc. Maybe this won’t work in the future, but I think it will last for a long time.
Getting Started
The first thing you have to realize is that you’re no longer trying to rank keywords. This really has been the case for a while now, but it is especially true when it comes to local SEO. You’re trying to rank keyword topics. So if you’re doing local SEO for a client that does Garage Door repair and installs then you want to rank for a variety of topics such as:
– Garage Door Repair
– Garage Door Spring Repair
– Overhead Door
– Garage Door Installation
– Garage Door Openers
– Garage Door Replacement
You want to rank for everything that is relevant, and rank it on the same page if possible.
It’s important to note that it is ALL about relevance. Keyword topic relevance and location relevance.
The First Step: Choosing Your Cities
The first step in ranking for multiple cities in Google My Business aka Google Places, aka Google + Local, and even regular organic SERPs is to choose the right cities. If the client is located outside of Houston, TX you don’t necessarily want to target Austin, or San Antonio do you? Your client likely won’t want to travel that much to a job site.
It isn’t just a matter of travel though, if you have your city matrix spread out in other areas that are not in close proximity to the actual city he is in, you’re not going to have success. Maybe that could be different in organic results but it’s not going to happen in local.
What I usually do is target smaller cities where there is less competition, and also usually more income. Most clients of mine get MORE business from ranking in many smaller cities than they would with a ranking in a larger city. If you have 20 cities within a 20-35 mile radius that’s very good to start targeting.
Step 2: Creating Your Content
Each city is going to have its’ own page. You should be thinking of these pages as a landing page but you need to have it beefed up with content while also setting it up to convert the visitors into leads for the business.
For the most part I stay between 500-700 words for the main content of the city specific landing page. The main content usually has 4 sections, split up in h tags, so I have my h1, h2, h3, h4 tags in the page all targeting different related words that will help us rank. I will explain this further in step 3.
Two section headings will have the city name in it, but it is very important for your content to read naturally.
I don’t spin the content for other landing pages, but I do sub out city names, of course, which are usually mentioned once in each section.
Step 3: On Page Optimization
This is very important, and always is. On page optimization is absolutely key when it comes to rankings especially when it is for Local SEO. The tricky thing is to not overdo it and to have a nice level of variance. This comes with practice and testing.
What we will worry about when it comes to on page optimization:
- Title Tags
- URL
- An Image
- H1-H4 Tags
- Outbound Link
First up is Title Tags
This is the browser title tag, if you’re doing any sort of SEO I expect you already know what title tags are and everything else listed, as these are very primitive things but many people overlook the importance.
The browser title tag is high impact. Just the other day I saw some clueless person saying that the Title is no longer important, Google inserts the title they feel is relevant, and while that is in some cases true, the title tag is still one of the most important aspects on on page optimization.
Let’s continue with the Garage door example, but we’re going to use a small city in texas as the target. I would optimize the title like this; “Overhead Door & Garage Door Repair Humble Tx” or “Garage Door Repair & Installation Service Humble TX”.
Be careful to not make the title too long, or else it will be less effective. Some would say that the title examples I gave above were too long, but they’re not, you still actually get full benefit from those titles.
What I do is switch the titles on a page to page basis. I don’t keep the exact structure for every single page. The content remains the same structure, but the titles and urls do not.
Next is the URL
Never miss an opportunity to grow your knowledge and skill set, join over 1,000 other people making money using this information by entering your email below
You know how people say you should have an exact match domain for fast ranking? While that is sometimes true, if you have an existing site you can still have an exact match url for your existing domain. For example if it is Bob’s Overhead Doors and the website is bobsdoors.com you would make the exact match for your landing page to be bobsdoors.com/locations/garage-door-repair-humble-tx
I will also change up the URL depending on what the title tag is. You do NOT want these to be the same, if the title tag targets garage door repair by itself, then you change your url to be something similar but not exact, like /overhead-door-humble-tx. This is very similar, it’s relevant, but different, so you will not be hurt by over optimization. It also boosts your relevance making it much easier for you to rank.
Let’s use another example using a different type of company, like roofing.
Title tag – Roofing Contractor in Humble, TX
URL – bobsroofing.com/residential-roofing-humble-tx
While roofing is an important keyword in both the title and the url, there is enough variance to not be penalized for over optimization and also receive a boost for the indicated relevance variation.
This is what you want to do when optimizing your pages now in 2015. Whether it is for local SEO, or national organic SEO you will find this strategy to be rather useful.
Optimizing an Image
This is one of the trickier parts of the on page optimization strategy that I use for Local SEO. We’re not simply optimizing a single image and changing the name on a page by page basis, we’re going to look for a unique image that already exists on another website.
What I like to do is go to a city website, or wikipedia if there is one for the city and look for some picture of the city you’re targeting. Some cities even very small cities have a picture of downtown, a court house, city hall, SOMETHING that you can use that would already be indexed by Google.
Many people think you can simply use the same image on each page, just changing the file name, or alt tag and this is very foolish to think that alone would trick Google into thinking it is unique or relevant. The reason we want an image from a site that Google already indexed is because we can change the file name to be city.jpg or whatever extension, but we also have the image that is associated with the city you’re targeting through meta data. Each image, whether it is yours or someone else, it has meta data attached to it, and Google is sophisticated to know this, and have that data used in their algorithm.
What about copyrights? Well, I can’t give you legal advice, I can only tell you what works and what doesn’t, and it works. That’s what I care about. For good measure you can add a caption to the picture and link to the original site you got the picture from, that would also boost your local relevance.
How you structure your image optimization:
Lets use the same roofing example earlier assuming the url and title are like this
Title tag – Roofing Contractor in Humble, TX
URL – bobsroofing.com/residential-roofing-humble-tx
We would then make the image file:
humbletx.jpg
Perhaps add an alt tag Alt=”City Hall of Humble Tx” or “Downtown Humble Tx” or “Main Street Humble Tx” or “Landmark Humble Tx”
So just with the title tag, url, and image… we have roofing mentioned twice but with variance and we also have high indicators of local relevance using this structure.
Tip – Using landmarks is extremely beneficial in ranking city specific pages.
Variance + relevance = Good rankings!
Now Your h1-h4 tags.
You will want to pay special attention to this area because if you followed my instructions carefully with the title, URL and image you do NOT want to overdo it here or else it will not have the results you need.
You want to continue showing not only Google, not your visitors that this page is relevant to them.
These are your section headings for your content.
Using the roofing example we already have:
Title tag – Roofing Contractor in Humble, TX
URL – bobsroofing.com/residential-roofing-humble-tx
image file: humbletx.jpg
h1 – Best Service in Humble Tx
h2 – Your Roof Is In Good Handsh3 – Emergency Service Available
h4 – Our Guarantee for Your Humble, Tx Home
Notice we don’t overdo it but we have the city mentioned a couple times. Roof is only mentioned once but since the Google machine already knows a lot of roofers have emergency service throughout the country, and many have some sort of guarantee or talk about warranty you benefit from the mass data Google already has. You’re allowing them to associate your pages with things it already assumes and looks for when it comes to relevance.
Outbound linking is important.
When you’re changing your content, or changing the cities in your landing pages, you will want to like OUT from your site. Usually you only want to do this once or twice. If you have an image and you’re linking out to the original site to give credit, that is usually good enough. But… if you’re wanting to go the extra mile there’s two strategies I use when determining where to link out to show relevance.
1.) I like to link to the city website or wikipedia if they have one. City website is always my preference, but if I’m unable to have a city website then wikipedia or another source would be just fine.
2.) Inside your content if your client has any kind of certification or uses some sort of manufacturer then you want to link out to that site. For example, roofers have the NRCA, GAF, Certainteed, etc. you can link to those websites to show keyword topic relevance. This is a link you wouldn’t have to change page to page, but if you use this extra measure, you also want to link out to the city.
Step 4: Linking To Your City Pages
This is actually really easy to do. Either in your footer or side bar you want to have a section to display “locations served” and list the cities that you have pages built for and directly link to them.
Without this, or having it on some secondary page somewhere in your site, will not have the results you likely need. I’ve seen some cases where it has worked a little bit but not the magnitude that you probably want to get for yourself or your client.
It’s important to have this on the home page at least, and if you can, on every page on your website.
Step 5: Overkill
You should wait a couple weeks before doing any of this, but these are some extra things you can do to increase your rank.
1.) List the zip codes of the city at the end of the content.
For example, Zip Codes in City name served: 90210, 90213, 90124
This is another signal that your page is relevant.
2.) Create and embed a Youtube Video.
There’s people out there that go all out for youtube videos, but I don’t. I don’t have time to learn that crap and I’m too cheap to outsource that to someone else and cut into my profits. Instead, Hello Animoto. Cheap to use, easy to use and create a slideshow video, and optimize the youtube listing for relevant keywords, then embed into the website.
This helps in multiple ways. It allows you to take up another place in the search results with the video. It shows increased relevance for the location and keyword topics. It creates a backlink from youtube to the city specific page and it creates additional variance to the duplicate content used on each page.
3.) Linking to other businesses
This is a technique I really don’t like to use but it is effective in some situations. Picking out a couple places in the city, of non competing businesses and having a recommended business section. So if you have a roofing client, you would recommend maybe an electrician, garage door repair company, and landscaper. List their website and addresses.
Usually if you’re not already ranking well, then maybe it’s time for some backlinks and citations before trying this method.
However, this method by itself has ended up bringing a lot of referral business using a website affiliate structure.
The affiliate structure I’m talking about is a lot like backlink outreach. You will want to get a hold of 3 businesses in your client’s area, tell them you’re putting together a cross promotion of different businesses in the area, and its 100% free. This is what they need to do, they put links to the 3 other businesses, and the 3 other businesses link and recommend them.
Very effective when used properly.
That about sums it all up
Using this strategy will allow you to be much more effective when it comes to local SEO, and spending a lot less time building backlinks and citations.
You’re giving Google exactly what she wants.
Do you have any tips you would like to share? Questions to ask? Comment below
Good stuff! Step-by-step and detailed.
2 thumbs up!
Thank you.
Good job, Nathan. This “tutorial” provides more value and details than many WSO’s.
Thanks Alan! That’s what I was going for 🙂
Thank you for the easy to follow map to creating great on page SEO for a local business.
One question I have for you is about the Overkill section. Do you create a slideshow video for each of the cities you are targeting or is it the same video on each city page?
Hey Michael, if you’re doing city specific landing pages and you still need a slight boost the slideshow videos should be created for each city. It’s not too difficult to do, you just replicate the video, add a few changes to make it slightly different and there ya go.
Do you have any sites you can share showing where you did this?
So your essentially using the same content and switching out keywords, cities, tags, title, images, outbound links etc?
Hey John. I don’t think it would be very wise to share the client’s site, sorry about that. But yes, essentially that is all I’m doing. Not even spinning the content.
Thanks for this Nathan. I’m dying to try this out. BTW I am using the Craigslist tips you included as a bonus and it’s improved my CL lead gen. Thanks again.
Good to hear! Let me know your results Lex.
Nathan, just curious about Number 4. I would think that the linking should go the other way around, ie., link to the Home Page from the City pages. Don’t you want the link juices to flow that way as in a pseudo silo structure? Thanks.
Hey David,
You could test it out and see what works best for you. My reasoning is that you want the PR flow to be cultivated to the city specific landing pages. Your home page is only going to rank for so many keywords, that’s why I distribute it that way. In my opinion it also increases site wide relevance.
Thanks for the detailed tutorial. I registered a new domain, followed your instructions up to step 4, and got several of my keywords on page 1, page 2, and page 3. This works and I appreciate you sharing it with us!
Caroline,
Awesome news! They should continue improving as well. Great job on the action taking side of things.
Great write-up, thank you
Question, Step 2, each city has it’s own page – do you link all these pages from the homepage?
I usually do in the footer area or somewhere low on the sidebar. I usually have it universal too, assuming it’s not a massive amount of pages. So even on your city pages you will have that in the sidebar and footer.
Okay, thank you. I’m glad you clarified that because I misunderstood what I read thinking the cities (I list them in the footer) are the OUTBOUND links, linking to the city website.
So the outbound link would be the link on the city image, right?
Sorry, it’s late, I’m tired. lol
It doesn’t have to be on the image, it could be the first time you mention the city in the paragraph, linking to the city website or whatever you decide to link to. The footer links will be the internal linking for the other city landing pages within your site.
Hey, amazing tutorial. Not one of those “general tutorials” where they don’t actually tell you the steps involved but only give a general direction. However, what to do for high competition keywords. Any tutorial on getting ranked for high competition or getting backlinks ? Thanks again for this resource!
Hey Raj,
Maybe I can put together an advanced tutorial that includes more than just the on page optimization. Glad you liked it!
That would be amazing! I am already waiting for that tutorial .
Nathan, great info. I’m thinking of setting a little network of sites like this for a neighbor who is just starting his roofing business. I going to commit my self and start this as a project #1 for February just as you will be doing the same. Quick question, is this the same type of information found in your WSO? If you’re targeting different cities, do you mess with anything related to google plus/google local at all during the SEO process?
Hey Ivan, thank you for your comment. Good luck to you in February! The information in my WSO is a bit different than you see here. Here in this post and blog in general there will be in depth fulfillment posts as well as more in depth tactics for SEO, web design, other services along with sales and marketing. The WSO is more of a blueprint to getting started, covering different forms of client acquisition, marketing yourself, standing out from your competitors, etc. It does cover a little bit about fulfillment, but not as much as you will see here.
Excellent Tutorial, thank you!
I think I now need to sign up to your list and buy your ebook.
Quick question regarding location specific pages. You mentioned that to get an exact match domain you could do an extension of your main domain. The example you gave was:
bobsdoors.com/locations/garage-door-repair-humble-tx
You then gave a roofing example as follows:
bobsroofing.com/residential-roofing-humble-tx
The second example misses the word ‘locations’ which I assumed from your tutorial was the important part.
Would be great if you could shed some light on this confusion for me.
Thanks in advance 🙂
Stephen, good catch there but having the /locations/keyword-city isn’t really the main focus in the tutorial when it comes to the URL. The most important thing is to have the keyword with location, or location + keyword. It doesn’t have to be /locations. You can name it what you want, it could be /service-area/residential-roofing-humble-tx. Does that make sense? Thanks for the comment!
Hey Mate,
Excellent tutorial. It’s great you are sharing the information back with the community to help others.
2 thumbs up !
Cheers
Dean
Thanks Dean! I appreciate the comment.
Nathan, you’re putting out great content! Thanks. Was the income you made from selling your information product driven via WSO ads (WSO Forum) or some other traffic source(s)?
It’s $700 for a rotating banner ad on Warrior Forum, but I think the traffic would be well worth, could be worth a test. Cheers.
Michael
Hey Michael thanks for the comment. Income made from the WSO was just all natural WF traffic and clicks on the link in my signature. Last time I looked at the banner ads it was a daily fee, has that changed?
Hey Nathan,
Couple of quick questions, if I may….
1. Wouldn’t it help to put a relevant image on the page. For example, BobsRoofing.com/Humble-Shingle-Repair/ having a picture of a guy fixing a roof. Not for SEO, but for the user. In addition, wouldn’t it help SEO to host the image on something like Flickr or Photobucket first, and then put it on your site? This way the SEO juice flows through to your site?
2. Can you duplicate the efforts for each city? Or do you have to alternate everything on each location specific page? For example….
Using the roofing example we already have:
Title tag – Roofing Contractor in Humble, TX
Title tag – Roofing Contractor in Dallas, TX
Title tag – Roofing Contractor in Houston, TX
URL – bobsroofing.com/residential-roofing-humble-tx
URL – bobsroofing.com/residential-roofing-dallas-tx
URL – bobsroofing.com/residential-roofing-houston-tx
I realize these cities aren’t close enough to be anyone’s service area, just using them as an example. I don’t have a lot of knowledge on the cities in Texas.
Jon,
Thanks for the question and comment. I’m not answering in order here, I’m going to address the consistency of the example you just used with title tags and URL’s. I don’t have any real testing or statistics to support my belief, so your idea may very well work. I like to alternate, and I don’t know if it’s a big deal or not but my theory is that Google can identify dynamically generated content so if I alternate the structure they wouldn’t mistakenly identify these pages as dynamically generated, or identify it as low quality.
Your idea using the image from Flickr is a good one and should certainly help overall.
Nathan,
Do you think this would work for a local lead gen website where you sell phone calls? I guess my question is this. Do you think it would be better to use a site like this for a local lead gen website, or to create a separate website for different burbs? If you think one is better over the other, then why?
Thanks
Hey Lou, the answer is…. it depends. It depends on the radius of those suburbs. If they’re too far it’s hard to say it’s location relevant but if they’re in the same metro area or within a 30-40 mile radius you can keep it on one site. For example, it would be much harder to rank a lead gen site trying to go for Chicago, NYC, LA, Miami, etc. than it would be to just create a site per city and work on the metro area. Make sense?
Ive been doing almost the same since this time last year, looks like we test the same stuff. I expect it’s about to get hit in some way, but it is part of the game!
I don’t think we have much to worry about in most updates as long as things are done properly. I guess only time will tell though, right?
Right now it sounds like BlogEngine is the top blogging
platform out there right now. (from what I’ve read) Is that what you’re using on your blog?
No, I’m a joomla fan but this blog is on WordPress.
read…read again…reread. Other locksmiths in austin use this exact technique and given a few months, I should be able to write the articles out lol
Yeah, come back and let me know how it’s working for you Rich.
What changes in your pattern(s) above if I were to make my main domain for each city (eg, bobsroofinghumbletx.com), ranking content pages for that location. Do you think a similar pattern would work by generating and ranking content pages for the keyword phrases related to roofing in Humble, Tx?
What internal linking structure would be best (dispersed, silo, etc..)?
Excellent question. Instead of using one main site, you would have multiple EMD sites targeting keywords? The problem I see with that is that you’re no longer able to go for local SEO in the pack listings but targeting organic searches instead, which is a different game entirely and won’t be able to benefit from the separate local algorithm. You would still want to focus on relevance but probably add more pages targeting longer tailed keywords and a little of internal linking inside the content. As for url structure, I’m not a big believer in silos the way a lot of people use them, I think it’s unnecessary in many cases for local sites and not a benefit of user experience.
Got it. Thanks for the reply, Nathan. But according to local ranking factors (https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors) and specifically to the top 50 pack/carousel factors, #1 was a physical address! Do you still see success with your NAP that may not be inside a specific locale?
I’ve got a current EMD localized site that I’ve been seeing a steady rise in rankings (made it to 16th) by similar On-Page work but I’ve been adding content that I try to rank quickly and pass along that juice to the EMD I “really” want to rank in a local market / city.
I think for my next project I may switch it up a bit to reflect your commentary above.
Thanks again!
This may make me a little more unpopular but the moz ranking factors are a joke. Domain authority was listed as the #1 difference maker but there’s NO correlation between rankings on page 1 and page 5. LOL. And even though they said #1 was physical address, they also collectively said it was the factor that decreased the most. Well, they said proximity of address to centroid was the 2nd most important increase, while proximity of address to centroid was the biggest decrease. Doesn’t make sense. It’s just a collective group of people that do SEO and give their opinions. Not that their opinions are entirely invalid, but I’ve found that the majority of people DOING SEO, don’t know what works and what doesn’t lol.
I have the same complaints every single year they release it.
In short, yes, I still see success with it… even with other cities as far as 40 miles away from the physical address, both organic and in local.
yep… heh. Always like getting alternative perspectives on the resources that are out there. Thanks!
There’s some knowledgeable people that contribute, but lets say 4 of the people know whats really happening, and the rest are split on different things not really understanding what is going on, the 4 people are completely outweighed. What they contribute in a poll, is statistically useless. If I were to share my views in the local round up once a year, it would go completely unnoticed because of how different they are in comparison to the majority.
Got to agree with the bully here. there ARE advantages to Domain Authority ( DA ) but I would not consider rank value to be one of them. ( time in listing would be #1 on my list ) The proximity value is another one of those shoulder shrugs! LOL
I think the issue we run into when developing non located business sites ( no actual physical address – or in my case to many sites at the same address ) is you are left with the inability to list with Google Business. BUT, I personally think that where schema tags start to play a major role in the ability to compete. – I find in way more than many cases that I can compete outside of the pack listings very very well with this type of tagging.
Designers /developers and programmers just are not using this stuff in the manor they should. If there was a legit Google hack to be found right now… Schema tags would be it.
is this to get in the local pack for seo or organic SERP..
it seems this is for organic SERP. NAP and citations plus the post card verification are the keys to the local pack am i right?
Hey Alan, it’s for both. NAP and citations actually have a considerably reduced value than what most people are saying. Citations have lost significant value for at least a year now. It’s all about relevance. Location relevance and keyword/category/industry topic relevance.
When I create landing pages for different cities, I try to make the content a little different for each one. Then I use a “similar page” checker to determine how closely the pages match each other in terms of text content. I’ve read that Google will not post pages with duplicate content, although I do see it from time to time and wonder how they do it.
Duplicate pages with duplicate content will only not be indexed if you’re not varying up the titles, heading tags, and of course changing the city + state location. Obviously, original content is the best, the point of this post was just to show the power of on page optimization.
…And how do you think pages with duplicate content will be affected by the Panda 4.2 update which is being rolled out? Panda targets duplicate content.
Google and the SEO community have you believing it is about duplicate content but it’s not. It’s about thin content. One of the things rarely talked about with Panda is the fact that the biggest change with panda is the reduction in PR flow throughout a domain and all its’ pages. Thanks for the comment Teri!
Hey Nathan, it’s been almost 3 years now and my website for my contracting company just isn’t getting anywhere. I get calls, but just not enough. In the last 30 days Analytics show that I got over 500 visitors, but most are from other countries. I only got 28 visitors from my state and 5 of those are towns outside of my service area that I don’t advertise to.
I’ve done a lot of what you said from the start, reading warrior forum and other forums for years now. For example, I had all of the city landing pages listed in the footer of every page on the website for the first year and a half. But then someone recommended I put them all on a single “Service Area’ page. I didn’t notice a change after doing that. I also had the same content on every landing page for almost 2 years, but someone recommended I change it all to make it unique, which was hard and now the content is pretty poor since it’s hard to write the same thing over and over 35 times.
I’m at a stand still here, I just want more calls, 5 more calls a week and I would be happy as could be. I would like to talk privately about your services if they are still available.
Andrew, assuming that your website is the one you entered in the field right here there’s a few things you can be doing.
1.) I think you need a better website to capitalize on the existing traffic you have and increase conversions.
2.) Your on page optimization needs a lot of work, you’re basically just using the same template for each page, url, titles, etc instead of varying the information for relevance.
3.) What are you doing for off page? Citations? How is your Google listing?
Have you tried other methods to generate calls? Sometimes maybe local SEO just isn’t enough… but I think you could have a lot of improvements with your site before writing it off as a failure.
Thanks for the (super fast) reply. Yes, that’s the website in question.
For off-page stuff I have setup Google+ and Local and do well in my own town and the neighboring town (I come up in the 3 pack in both). The problem is that these are very small towns. I have registered for a lot of citations. I need more backlinks, that’s something I don’t have.
I am using the same template for each page for the header, sidebar, and footer. However, I have made the title, description, and body of each page different.
I do get business from other methods: local ads, yard signs up in local businesses, word of mouth referrals. But I know that I should be able to get more calls from the website.
I just spent 8 hours making the website responsive because all 50 pages failed Google’s mobile test, now it all passes. But still no difference in calls. It pretty much drained everything I have in me, I really think it’s time to let a pro handle it.
At this point I’m not sure backlinks are really going to help you, your problem from what I see is overall relevance to the location and industry. As for the website, I think you probably need something a bit better in terms of converting traffic to leads. Have you considered a total redesign?
How many calls are you generating on a monthly basis?
I am getting an average of 2 calls from the website per week. (I’m getting additional calls from the 3-pack, Yelp, and other sites that Google sends the customer to).
I am only getting 25-40 visitors from my service area per month.
I am all for a complete re-design.
Here’s my problem, I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on the website and reading into SEO. If I just paid a pro from the beginning instead of DIYing the website I would have much better results today, years later.
So that is where I am right now, thinking it might be best to cut my losses and let a pro do what he feels is best.
One of the downfalls about learning SEO, reading and trying to examine what’s working and what isn’t, is that even most professionals have different ideas on what works and what doesn’t and many times they struggle with some projects. LOL.
Who have you talked to so far when it comes to providers?
I dealt with 2 different small SEO firms. The first just took advantage of me with spammy links and horrible on-page SEO advice. The second gave me some links from his PBN and had odd SEO advice as well. I noticed a slight bump, but then it tapered off so I stopped using him.
Other than that I have just been trying to wade thru all the information posted on forums.
That sucks… let me know if there’s anything I can do to help or if you would like me to look over any proposals from someone. You have my email right?
No I don’t have your email.
Do you still do this type of work? If so, I’d like to have you do it.
You can email me at Nathan (at) incomebully.com
I did sell my company a few months ago but deal with a few clients that haven’t transitioned over. I think you can find cheaper options though that can get the job done!
Great tips you shared here. Sorry if I may have missed it but could you tell me how you would organize the pages in your example.
– Garage Door Repair
– Garage Door Spring Repair
– Overhead Door
– Garage Door Installation
– Garage Door Openers
– Garage Door Replacement
1. Do you create a city specific landing page like /garage-doors-humble-tx then create multiple supporting pages like /garage-door-repair-humble-tx and
/garage-door-replacement-humble-tx then link it back to the city specific landing page, /garage-door-humble-tx. Then just replicate that for the different cities?
or
2. Do you create separate landing pages for each keyword + city and link each back to the home page?
Good questions Eric.
1.) You can do both and I suggest you test it out for yourself. I believe one city specific landing page covering multiple supporting keywords is just as effective as multiple pages supporting the main landing page. In fact, if you don’t have plenty of content for multiple supporting pages you should without a doubt stick with the city specific landing page.
2.) The only home page link is in the menu. I don’t use anchor text linking back to the home page. You’re simply wanting to create additional relevance, that’s all, you’re not trying to mass anchor the home page.
Hope that clears it up a bit. Thanks for the comment!
Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me. I think I understand what you are saying. I created a diagram on how I’m thinking of organizing the pages. Does this look right to you?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/e0666z0o9dum7e2/multiple-keyword-city-silo.jpg?dl=0
Eric, as long as you have the content for that then go for it. However, if content is thin, then you may want to stick with the simpler route. It would be much easier to have your landing page, followed by a few h2’s and h3’s for installation, repair, etc. At that point, if what you’re doing isn’t enough then I would do the more complex approach you outlined.
What about industries that have too many variations on keywords. One industry I can think of is HVAC. Too many variations of the same keyword.
e.g.
air conditioning repair city name
air conditioner repair city name
hvac repair city name
ac repair city name
And that is just for one service. Then you add service, maintenance, installation, etc.
It could easily add up to a least 16 pages per city just for those services. Do you recommend writing a page for each of those? how would you go by organizing something like this?
Eric, you certainly structure your pages in a nested way and it may have been necessary years ago but with the example you gave, I don’t think it’s a big issue.
When you think about HVAC in particular, you will likely do well with supporting keywords just by having one “overview” page. Focus on optimizing for the city itself and the rest will come together.
I’d recommend having a city specific landing page with an overview of services offered. If you’re optimized for HVAC, you should probably do well with AC repair too. If it doesn’t work as well as you want, then you can easily start adding independent pages. Does that clear it up at all? Not sure it does, lol.
Nathan: I’ve really enjoyed the conversation here. I have a newbie question. If you are including specific landing pages for surrounding cities and trying to make it to the 1st page of Google, would each city page need its own citations and G+ page?
Hey Audie, no I wouldn’t recommend that. You will have a certain radius that you can still pull up in local but if for some reason you go past that radius then your only chance would be organic.
Nathan, I’m having trouble figuring out the menu nav or site structure for a site like this. I’m not looking for how to silo it, but how do you organize the site to map it out.
Taking this example:
bobsroofing.com/residential-roofing-humble-tx
bobsroofing.com/commercial-roofing-humble-tx
bobsroofing.com/residential-roofing-spring-tx
bobsroofing.com/commercial-roofing-spring-tx
bobsroofing.com/residential-roofing-atascocita-tx
bobsroofing.com/commercial-roofing-atascocita-tx
How would you handle this to link to the menu nav?
Hey Lou, what you can do is either have a service area page with links to all the cities, or you can include those in the footer menu of a website. There’s lots of ways to do it.
In this instance in particular where there is a clear cut 2 options “Commercial” and “Residential” I personally would have a base page roofing-humble-tx and then have links accordingly to the 2 variations.
A minor SEO consideration is link depth onsite. So with this format, you could have home, service area, city specific, roofing specific, and then the residential /commercial split. Your navigation tree is then 5 layers deep.
As your site then propagates within a search engine you are looking at 5th layer pages as inbound traffic sources, which stars to get you into the realm of a Authority site, and the site listing associated with that.
Good point Paul. I have always split commercial and residential services as separate main menu items. For the purpose of landing pages, I don’t think you need to have separate commercial and residential pages since Google for the most part will rank a residential company for commercial service related keywords. Roofing in particular you are more likely to want to optimize for “flat roofing” instead of commercial roofing.
My advice in general would be to not go overboard early on. If you start out simple and adjust or add additional pages it is much easier and better in the eyes of Google than if you added a ton of pages then ended up removing what you determined to be redundant content.
@Paul, I think everyone is ready and waiting for a new guest post!
Hey IB – just to be clear. the content is the exact same on each page except for the city and/or specifics of the key phrases describing the service(s). is that correct?
also, is this still ranking for you? I have a medium size city with micro areas and then some surrounding smaller cities.
Of course you need to vary your headings and include the specific city. You want to be as relevant to the city as possible while also remaining relevant to your industry. It still works… If you’re in a very competitive industry or city for that matter, it will require additional work.
Thanks Nathan..appreciate the reply
The main reason why this idea was intriguing to me was that I could have a lot of city landing pages without the hassle or expense of having different content on each. I have 35 pages setup now, as you know.
My question is this: Would it be advantageous to start making each landing page unique? This would be a long and slow process, but having all the landing pages ranking as duplicates right now means that I could take my time changing them into unique pages.
My assumption is that making them unique would give them a bump in ranking. And also I was thinking it would also help if Google was to ever change the way they look at city based landing pages and start requiring them to be unique in the future.
Any validity to this line of thinking?
Making them unique wouldn’t necessarily give them a bump in the rankings directly, but having the “freshness” factor on your side you could end up seeing a bump but that doesn’t have anything to do with being unique.
Your line of thinking is certainly valid. You never know what Google is going to do in the future, and sometimes I think they don’t know either, especially with the integration of machine learning.
If you were to change anything, a slow process would be ideal… if you change 2 cities at a time, you usually would want to wait a few weeks to see how the results are, as long as there is no negative impact then you would move to the next 2 cities and so on.
Great post Nathan. !
I have a a lil stuff that need to ask it with you.
One quick question.
As you stated in the URL like this
“bobsdoors.com/locations/garage-door-repair-humble-tx”
What if I am targeting Katy, TX and my landing page is katyplumbing247.com and my keyword are like this ” katy plumbing” , ” plumbing katy”
So my URL are :
“katyplumbing247.com/location/katy-plumbing-katy-tx”
“katyplumbing247.com/location/plumbing-katy-katy-tx”
Is that correct?
Well, You would probably want to be more careful with optimizing if that is your domain name. You don’t want to go too overboard. In your specific situation, I would probably leave the city out of the URL, but make sure to optimize the Title tags of your pages. You also don’t need “locations” in the URL for Katy TX if that is the main city you’re targeting and located in.
Thanks for the reply Nathan. It is an honor for me.
Can you give me a little favor if you don’t mind?
Can you give me URL example if I leave the city out in my domain name with those keywords?
If the city was out of the domain name.. lets say the domain is 247plumbing.com
Your city specific landing page would have a URL similar to 247plumbing.com/katy-tx-plumbing-contractor or /plumber-katy-tx
If you have a good keyword domain though, I would choose that instead of focusing as much on the URLs.
Great !
Thank You So Much Nathan 😀
this is fucking amazing! thank you for posting this. I’ve just got a question though.
Can I keep the same structure for every different locations?
e.g for one page I have:
Title: Home Cleaning in Bondi NSW: Domestic Services
URL: /house-cleaning-bondi
Can i use that same url & title structure and just change the location name?
Hey Huy,
Yeah, you CAN keep the same URL structure, but I never do. I like to vary it up a bit, for example… if you have house-cleaning-chicago, I would rotate certain pages so you would have /cityname-house-cleaning and other variations.
If you keep the same exact structure for all of them, it definitely appears to be spammy.
cheers man, this shit is gold. one of my keywords just jumped to #3 organically and my map on the 7 pack.
Is there a way I can get into the 3 pack maps listing with a service area GMB?
Congrats! If you want to try to get in the 3 pack with other cities, just setup the landing pages, and see what sticks. In higher competition cities and niches, this won’t be likely, but that’s what you can do. If you have a way to get addresses in those other cities then that sure could help a ton.
Ranking in first page for 6 of my landing pages!! info on this page is amazing. I can’t seem to penetrate the 3 pack though. the kw’s are just smaller suburbs within my main city, getting an address in the suburbs would be difficult. Do you think I can rank in the 3 pack by adding links to the landing pages from the GMB listing? I could add a paragraph saying “We service the following locations x,x,x,x,x” and link out to the relevant landing pages.
What do you think?
Huy, that probably wouldn’t be enough to get you in there, might not be a bad idea to include that though. What might be necessary is to evaluate your competitors, see how strong their location association is, if it’s very strong then you’re going to need a lot of strong links, maybe a PBN. Every case is different though.
SEO is like a chess match with multiple players. You’re going against ALL of your competitors, and you’re going against Google. Lots of angles that need to be played, a lot of different things to look for in any given situation.
Gotcha! so sending links to those landing pages would help with the 3 pack?
I just had another look at my landing page rankings. 2-3 of them are ranking in top 3 in organic serps, but nowhere to be found in the map listing. Would links help getting listed in maps in this scenario?
Maybe, it’s tough to say without seeing the competition. If there are a lot of listings in the specific city, it’s going to be tough. Organic may be the only way you’re going to pull from them. If you want, shoot me an email with the info and I’ll take a look.
that would be awesome. whats your email? i’ll shoot you over some deets
it’s just Nathan(at) this domain.
Hi Nathan
I came into seo learning this strategy, and it has always worked for me until now. Today, a site that had over 800k pages indexed is down to 400k pages and is being deindexed slowly everyday. Something has happened since august 2015, and now Im holding back making any more sites like this because Im losing all of the effort I put into them with pbn posts, links, etc. How is it possible to make unique content for every city fast to see similar results as using duplicate content system? And, are you seeing the same thing with the deindexing? Do you have any tips for how to fix the deindexing issue?
Similar has happened to me, only on a smaller scale. 71 total pages, WMT’s shows 71 pages listed in the sitemap but says only 53 are indexed. With my older website all pages were indexed.
But when using Google if I do a search of my website with “site:www.website.com” it shows 71 pages.
Do you feel qualified enough to help or give assistance to large sites? Like 500k page sites. The content on the sites are good, using almost everything you described. But there’s obviously something wrong because half of the site is deindexed now and dropping fast. And thats using any method of checking you want site:, webmaster tools, semrush etc. Checkout this windows site we run.
Sam, you show 574K indexed for me. 500k page sites are not a problem, but I think you went a bit overboard on the content lol. Some pages are probably seen as a duplicate in the eyes of google since there are so many, so they are associating certain pages with certain topics, and it’s going to be difficult to get that going again unless you vary up your content and add variance to your URL and Title formats. Are you internal linking at all?
I see your site incomebully gets awesome traffic. I remember what that was like. I think any advise you have for seo on city pages would be worth listening to.
Im thinking about spinning content for all of the pages we have to see if that would help.
Don’t spin the whole page, if you’re going to test that out, estimate what 10% of your total word count is on the page, and then add 10% of content on top of that and spin the new content. Probably best to do it in 2 different sections of each page.
Yeah that’s just a WMT glitch as far as I know. There’s a lot of people reporting that.
Are you talking about the Webmaster Tools glitch? If so, it’s just a glitch, it’s actually been happening for about a year lol.
Obviously, if you can have unique content on each page, you should do it. At the very least, you can add a unique sentence or two and likely fly under the radar.
I don’t know if its that glitch, but yeah the count of urls Im seeing is in webmaster tools, also showing in seoquake toolbar and google. The most we had indexed were 900k for this site, and now its down to 574k and dropping fast.
If you’re talking about the traffic from your site incomebully, I looked on similarweb.
I want to internal link, but I don’t know to what. Im trying to figure out how. Thanks for all of this help man, you’re the deal. Point me to your book or something that you think might help, and Ill be sure to cop it.
Sam, when I say internal link, I just mean other pages on your site that could be relevant. For example, if you have pages for windows/state/county/city I would switch between linking to the state, and county pages, and sometimes linking to nearby cities as well. I think the biggest win you can have right now is going to be varying up your content, adding a few sentences and spinning that. You have a lot of freakin pages lol, so it definitely requires more work than a small local site that goes after 100 cities.
I’ve heard about the wmt glitch by the way, but the count has never gone back up. In the index its also showing much less than before.
Hey dude, this thing works 🙂 At least so far, I started creating my brand new local website 2 days ago, finished it yesterday. It has a home page, 4 city pages and contact page. All pages are already indexed and showing on 1st and 2nd page of Google for selected terms. City pages have duplicated content, I just changed the city image, outbound link, title and url. Each city page has about 1400 words (I went for 700, but I like to write and was caught up in the moment and BAM, 1400 words:))
Btw is it possible that those rankings will fluctuate in the next few days or weeks and go up or down?
So anyway, my question here is, what to do to push those city pages up to Nr.1 position on Google? I’m looking for some fast SEO results. I already researched to see if there are some blogs, forums etc where I could plant the links but no luck.
Should I try with social signals and build Fb, Twitter, YT accounts? Keep in mind the website is not in English language.
Thanks for this great method, if it works I’ll try and rent the website and make some quick recurring income out of it.
And thanks ahead if you find the time to answer my questions above.
Update 10 days later: Out of 4 city pages two of them already got de-indexed. Also, a contact page which was unique has been de-indexed as well. So, this doesn’t work as before ha?
You sure they’re deindexed? Sounds to me like a general indexing issue. Are you linking to the inner city pages through a sidebar or footer? If not, make sure to do that. Longer pages if duplicate content, will actually be a bigger flag than something around 500-700 words, so cut out the fluff if you can. It should work just fine, the only real issue is that it isn’t as effective as it used to be when it comes to map rankings.
Yep, Google doesn’t show them when I search through site:www.mywebsite.com and my ranking tracking tool also is showing just one city page ranking for 2 other cities.
I am linking to city pages from both footer and from sidebar.
Should I rewrite some of those page, make some of them shorter? In any case, how do you index them again? With Google Webmaster Tools and maybe XML sitemaps?
Thanks for your answer.
You mentioned that it was in another language right? What country is it? Not all google sites index the same, or are as fast. Yeah, maybe add a sitemap if you haven’t, make sure it’s submitted.
Other than that, maybe go in and spin a couple sentences here and there. Cut out some of the filler on some of the other pages and try to switch it up and see what happens.
Fluctuations are normal for the first month or so. Like I said in response to your other comment, make sure to tie these pages together, sidebar or footer sections linking to each city works the best, but you can also use another sub menu for “areas served” or “Service area”. As far as pushing them up to #1 organic, it all depends on the competition. Might want to look into setting up a PBN if you want super fast results in more competitive areas.
You have made it simple in this article anyone can understand and implement it to rank better and reach better.
Hello there Nathan
I came into SEO taking in this technique, and it has dependably worked for me as of not long ago. Today, a site that had more than 800k pages filed is down to 400k pages and is being deindexed gradually consistently. Something has happened since august 2015, and now I’m keeping down making any more locales like this since I’m losing the greater part of the endeavors I put into them with stick posts, joins, and so on. How is it conceivable to make remarkable substance for each city quick to see comparable comes about as utilizing a copy content framework? What’s more, would you say you are seeing a similar thing with the deindexing? Do you have any tips for how to alter the deindexing issue?
This blog post wasn’t really an example for extremely large sites like that. LOL. 1,000 pages…yes. 800k.. not so much.
My guess is that the problem you’re having is related to indexing as a whole, and how easy it is to crawl your site. What are you using for sitemaps? You should definitely be utilizing a number of sitemaps to ensure your pages remain indexed. Are you linking internally?
How exact, is the content on all these pages? Are they static pages, or populated dynamically?
Nathan-
I have several topics and Questions regarding URL structure.
I’ve read this post multiple times along with many other hours of research on other sites yet I seem to find conflicting ways for website URL structure.
I’m working on ranking a garage door company organically for multiple cities. I”m also spinning the content of every page, uploading individual geo tagged images, using geo specific alt tags, geo specific h tags, embedding maps and back linking geo specific blogs to the landing page,…. basically everything under the sun when it comes to sending off local signals.
Topic A. With regard to the urls I see many different formats which I will list below: These formats are accompanied by main nav pages for garage door repair, garage door spring repair, garage door openers…etc: My root url is “garagedoorprosmi” however I will use example in my list.
1. http://www.example.com/locations/canton-mi/ (Location directory/ location) hierarchy
2. http://www.example.com/garage-door-repair-canton-mi/ (no hierarchy)
3. http://www.example.com/garage-door-repair/canton-mi/ (service/location/) hierarchy
4. http://www.example.com/garage-door-repair/locations/canton-mi/ (service/location directory/location/) hierarchy
5. http://www.example.com/locations/michigan/canton-mi/ (directory/state/city) hierarchy
6. http://www.example.com/locations/garage-door-repair-canton-mi/ (directory/service-location/) hierarchy
While most recommend having a hierarchy to the URL’s I’ve found that #2 seems to perform the best… if thats the case then why do so many recommend hierarchy. I don’t want get flagged for being to spammy or having doorway pages.
Also I use yoast SEO tool and if if have any forward slash between my key term it doesn’t recognize it as being optimized. Which makes me question any hierarchy that doesn’t involve the total key term in a section. For example: /garage-door-repair-canton-mi/ ( yoast says Good) /garage-door-repair/locations/canton-mi/ (yoast says bad)
Topic B. Maybe if i want deeper relevance i could do silo like this.
http://www.example.com/garage-door-repair-canton-mi/spring-repair/
http://www.example.com/garage-door-repair-canton-mi/door-rollers/
http://www.example.com/garage-door-repair-canton-mi/opener-repair/
Topic C. Or…. what are your thoughts on this. I make all the main service page URL geo specific to the state so it would be something like this:
http://www.example.com/michigan-garage-door-repair-company
http://www.example.com/michigan-garage-door-spring-repair-service/
Then I make all the city pages which are linked to from each Michigan based service page like this, with no hierarchy:
So http://www.example.com/michigan-garage-door-repair-company/ would link to:
http://www.example.com/garage-door-repair-canton-mi/
I would also through in a service area directory that links to the city pages but still use no hierarchy.
Topic D. Or… use the state specific services pages with a silo
http://www.example.com/michigan-garage-door-repair-company/door-rollers/
Then optimize the locations pages out with all the terms on a single page.
Do you think having the main site optimized for the entire state then having individual city specific pages is a good idea?
There are just so many variants, I’m not sure which one to stick with. I’v adjusted my clients pages multiple times. I may not be giving enough patients to the hierarchy model. IDK
Can you provide any insight on the Topics ABCor D?
Any one have any suggestions or experience with using hierarchy compared to not?
Well, thanks for the comment and questions… lots of stuff here so I’ll try to be concise.
Topic A, you’re correct, no hierarchy actually performs the best. I stopped trying to figure out why people recommend certain things. Forget about all the pros and experts out there, and go with what your data suggests. Your 2nd example is exactly what I use and continue to recommend, especially for local search. Perhaps a broader organic site would be different, like the directories you see, but you want as much location relevance as possible with local.
Topic B..That’s an interesting idea and one worth testing. I think the regular URLs you displayed in the 2nd example under topic A would still out perform the rest, including the topic b example. However, I can’t say that with certainty because I haven’t done much testing in regards to that. The only testing I’ve done with similar structure under topic b, was low enough competition I don’t think it really made much difference.
Topic C – I don’t think it’s necessary. Some would argue that’s a doorway page itself, but you’re essentially using it as a natural page acting as a sitemap. I’ve done it, segmenting by counties as well. It works, but like I said, not necessary.
Topic D – Once again I don’t believe that would be necessary. You’re adding length to the url, better to keep it shorter in my opinion.
Overall, I think you were on the right track in the beginning. You’ve already noticed that no hierarchy performs better, despite all the malarkey out there.
The best advice I can give you, is to not second guess yourself with the results you’ve seen first hand. No matter what anybody out there says, or what someone suggests, it is your own data that is the most important. Most of the people giving SEO advice, struggle ranking client sites. There’s a difference between what you read and what the facts show. There’s a difference between you, and the people giving advice… you’re actually doing the work, putting things into practice, instead of just theorizing what will give the best results. Don’t second guess yourself!
Hey! Sorry for the delayed follow-up.
Thanks for the thorough response. It is much appreciated.
To provide feedback.
Topic A is still performing best. Applying that with silo architecture, my client’s site is going to the top spots on service based geo-specific search queries.
Nice! Thanks for the update.
Hi, good article,
However I can’t help but think there are some issues that proponents of the “don’t focus on ranking #1” crowd keep missing.
1) Given a system where the public conducts a search query that results in a list of links pointing to pages on sites that are ranked according to relevancy, it’s only natural that the searchers focus on those top search results. (it is an organic search after all)
2) Given that, “the top listing in Google’s organic search results receives 33% of the traffic, compared to 18% for the second position, and the traffic only degrades from there.” http://searchenginewatch.com/a…
3) Given that the “I just want people to know that if the only goal and KPI is rankings, then they’re setting themselves up for failure” can be said about any other metric (be it bounce, CTR, conversion, etc.) however we never see same argument for not focusing on those other KPIs.
4) Something that nobody else seems to cover, which is opportunity cost with respect to organic traffic market share. If we are not in that #1 slot, then our competition will be. Not a pleasant thought, especially for ecommerce.
It just seems like a strawman to keep bringing up the “don’t focus on #1 spot” argument. Yes, if it were THE only metric, sure, but with all of these SEO sites, articles, posts, blogs, etc., I’m not seeing that as THE only focus. A major focus, yes, but not the only focus. Do we obsess? Yes. But we obsess on all of the metrics . Heck, I’ve spent days focusing on just title, H1 and meta description alone and now we have Social (all umpteen) along with LSI (not_provided) to worry about as well.
From what I gather, the trick is to make them all work, for if you let any one of the metricses (metricki?) fall, then you’re still not optimizing results.
Keep in mind when we’re discussing local SEO, it’s the map results that matter, whether you’re #1 or #3, the traffic difference is not substantial like it is in organic search.
You make a lot of valid observations though and I agree.
Hello Nathan,
Thank you for sharing this information, I’ve used it successfully locally through the years, mostly ignoring what was put out against dup content for local rankings.
Long ago I even saw a WP Page Flood Tool that would allow you to set targeted locations. It creates one page and then floods all pages based on the pre-selected city and state structure, thereby duplicating hundreds of pages instantly. I kept away from those plug-ins when they fail to be updated with WP changes. I also felt it would trigger google in a wrong manner.
Your strong idea with linking the city image to a wiki or city.org page example helped make an even greater impact. Thank you for these tips I’ve implemented last year that is working out nicely for local clients.
One question, have you attempted national rankings in all 50 states?
The process would be targeting not only major cities but doing the full, State / City / Known Suburb / KW – URL Structure.
From a citation standpoint, there isn’t a physical location that is in every state, paying for USPS Drop locations or virtual office not viable, and changes in Google’s recent update is definitely something not recommended, even though I witness my colleagues still successful with workarounds.
Value any feedback on a national approach.
When taking a national approach you either need to be extremely good at spinning content, having unique content for landing pages, or have a site for each state.
There’s been a lot of national directories created in nearly every niche that tries to harvest rankings basically. In order to beat that, you need more relevance. Whether that’s unique or well spun content, or a new site for each state.
Glad the other tips are working out so far!
Hello Nathan,
Thanks for the super useful info!
Hoping you may be able to help me clarify a keyword question?
Im setting up a rubbish removal business which will be targeting approx 20 nearby locations with dedicated landing pages.
My keywords will be:
house clearance
rubbish clearance
garden clearance
office clearance
rubbish removal
I have decided to go for a brand domain something similar to “bigjunk.com”
ive now noticed that most of the businesses ranking in the local packs have at least a partial match business name.
And I will mainly be targeting “house clearance” and “rubbish clearance”
So is it a good idea to name my business “big junk clearance” on my website and GMB to get a partial match name ?
I would like to keep my short memorable domain but also need to rank in the local pack.
Thanks
Jeff
Manipulating GMB business names/titles is only one tactic. Same with using EMDs. Yes, you will have an advantage in the local pack but it isn’t necessary at all. Do what you think would be best for your business online and offline. Granted, you could use a keyword domain then 301 it to your main for the local effect.
A bit more info and question…
I live in a smallish city with lots smaller surrounding towns within 20 miles. And I am targeting nearby towns as well as my own city. if I create a page for each town:
bigjunkstuff.com/townB
bigjunkstuff.com/townC
and a service page for each town:
bigjunkstuff.com/house-clearance-townB
bigjunkstuff.com/rubbish-clearance-townB
bigjunkstuff.com/garden-clearance-townB
etc
What would be the best way to structure content across the pages ref location signals as you described. Do I put them on every town page or just the main town page and not the town + service pages ? (worried about over optimisation)
Also how does this fit in with the fact that my main location(and GMB address is CityA(biggest population by far) and my main priority is to rank for all my target keywords in my own city. Do I just treat my own city the same as surrounding towns by having a location page and location+service pages ? I dont want to mess up ranking in my own local pack.
PS> I.m just starting a new business so want to get this right at the beginning so I can maybe scale it in the future.
Thanks again
Jeff
I think landing pages for each city + city specific service pages may be overkill and potentially harmful if there are a lot of them. The best tactic, is to just use one landing page, and have an overview of the services which each keyword being in an h2/h3 structure.
Keep it simple, then go from there. I’m sure the competition is low enough to where you just need one city specific landing pages, without sub pages for that city.
Just to clarify… when you use the duplicate content and just sub in city changes.
do you keep same structure on the headings? or change it up like the titles?
“h1 – Best Service in Humble Tx
h2 – Your Roof Is In Good Handsh3 – Emergency Service Available
h4 – Our Guarantee for Your Humble, Tx Home”
Does it still work?