URL Importance In Search
-
This may have been addressed before. If it is, please link me to the thread. I'm trying to SEO for local surrounding cities my client services. It was suggested I purchase domains relevant to those cities and create separate pages optimized for those local keywords. Wondering if this is a good tactic.
For example my client's business is located in Chicago, but services the surrounding suburbs of Chicago. Whats the current, best way to SEO?
-
One website with cities n url's for other pages is strongest I would think.
-
Hi Russel,
If you were my client, I would advise you to stick with your one website and then work on building out awesome content for your surrounding cities. Why would I advise this:
-
Everything you build on your one website serves to strengthen your overall presence. Rather than dividing things up onto a bunch of different domains, you're building a big, powerful website.
-
I seldom find it warranted for a single business to have more than one website. For example, a San Francisco-based plumber is offering identical services, whether within San Francisco, or traveling to serve clients in San Jose, Oakland and Mill Valley. I'm not convinced of the genuine need for him to have millvalleyplumbing.com, sanjoseplumbing.com, etc. To me, it looks like an obvious attempted grab for rankings rather than a client-focused decision.
-
Tied into that is the fact that few plumbers have the time to develop enough truly unique and helpful content to flesh out multiple websites. This puts the client in danger of suffering EMD or duplicate content penalties for publishing a bunch of thin content (or worse, duplicate content) websites. From my experience working with local business owners, I've found that an attainable goal is creating a really strong, unique page for each of their service cities...not creating whole websites for each of their service cities. There could, of course, be exceptions to this, but this is what I've found to be the case most of the time.
-
It's so much easier for the client (and you) to manage a single website than a bunch of different mini sites.
So, those are some reasons I'd advise going with a single website and creating city landing pages on that site for the client's service cities. Do not create duplicate pages. Create fantastic, unique pages. This is a must. Hope these make sense. And yes, write good URLs, for the city landing pages when you create them.
-
-
how does duplicate content affect this strategy?
-
One website, one URL with internal pages dedicated to regions.
The only reason for separate sites would be if you were trying to get exact match domain names.
-
Hi Russell,
You can either purchse separate domains for each location or create separate pages for each city under the same domain. Both way works. But I would prefer using the same domain and create different pages for each location. This way, you will have all the backlinks/link juice to one website instead of having to build differetn backlinks for each website.
For each location, you can create a page and insert the location name in the URL so that Search Engines and visitors will know that that page is for that location. For example: www.sample.com/locationA/services/folder, www.sample.comlocationB/services/folder
Hope this helps. .
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
-
301 redirect to URL plus anchor tag???
Hi - my company has just had a site redesign completed, and our "old" site we have landing pages for a full product line. The new design has taken the content from those landing pages and placed them into one long scrolling page. We currently rank well on the "old" landing pages but now all that content is contained in a single page with anchor tags throughout attached to the headings. Can you set up 301's to anchor tags? Example: old site www.mysite.com/products/automotive/auto-parts.html new site: www.mysite.com/products/automotive#auto-parts
Algorithm Updates | | Jenny10 -
How Additional Characters and Numbers in URL affect SEO
Hi fellow SEOmozers, I noticed that a lot of websites have additional characters and words at the end of the URL in addition keyword optimized URL. Mostly for E-Commerce sites For example: www.yoursite.com/category/keyword?id=12345&Keyword--Category--cm_jdkfls_dklj or wwww.yoursite.com/category/keyword#83939=-37292 My question is how does the additional characters or parameters(not necessarily tracking parameters) affect SEO? Does it matter if i have additional keywords in the additional stuff in the URL (1st url example)? If you can provide more information, that would be helpful. Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | TommyTan0 -
Why are organic search results vastly different on Bing, Google and Yahoo Search
We searched two words for a client so see how/where their site returned results. Depending on both the browser we used and the search engine, the results were so vastly different we were shocked. The site returned #2 or 3 on Bing and YahooSearch and not until the 3rd page for Google! And it also returned much worse on Chrome than any other browser, a Google product. I know this topic must be covered somewhere, or perhaps someone would be kind enough to chime in and shed some light? We have been working hard to optimize for Google and failing, but doing very well everywhere else. What gives?
Algorithm Updates | | jimmyzig1 -
How to keep damage low on Google after the change of URL's
Hi Peeps, Hope someone can shed a light on this and show a guidance if possible. We are going to move our sites to shopify and shopify's URL's cannot be customized to match exactly like our current URLs. What steps do I need to take so google knows the URL's are changed. Domain will be the same. Thank you in advanced.
Algorithm Updates | | cemalcebi0 -
What is the importance of listing score at Getlisted.org regarding higher local 7 pack rankings ?
What is the importance of listing score at Getlisted.org regarding higher local 7 pack rankings ? My listing score is 60% and i am trying to improve it. I am on 2nd page on local map results. So maximum score will help to get place in 7 pack ?
Algorithm Updates | | mnkpso0 -
Organic Traffic dropped 50%. Anyone want to have a stab at why? (URL listed)
Just curious what the pro's on here think is the reason why our site got hammered recently. The URL is www.jobshadow.com. We've got gobs of quality content that had been ranking for quite a few keywords. Even one from Rand himself http://www.jobshadow.com/interview-with-seo-and-seomoz-founder-rand-fishkin/ Rankings for even the exact match domain keyword 'Job Shadow' have been pummeled. Anyway, we've got a pretty solid link profile I would think. We also have a very high user time on the site, thus suggesting the organic traffic was engaged when Google ranked us for those keywords. We have lots of unsolicited inbound links and even recent ones from PBS. I'm not really sure what it takes to please the "machine" at this point. Curious as to what everyone here thinks.
Algorithm Updates | | arkana0 -
Canonical URl
Hello, All the pages of my site contained canonical url it shows me in the source, but on seomoz site it shows error that some the pages not containing canonical urls, anyone will help me ??
Algorithm Updates | | KLLC0 -
With Google's Location Based Searches, Should I Include a City Name with My Keywords?
What I mean is when you search on Google it seems to pull information by your location so would it be helpful including the city name + keyword still for SEO or would it be just as helpful using just the keyword? For example, a client is in Alexandria, VA and has a computer repair shop so would "Alexandria computer repair" be as good or better than "computer repair"? Just a little curious. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | CodyOelker-AMICreativeStudio2