Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
-
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example.
One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com.
I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past.
What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
-
Hi KJ,
Agree with the consensus here that building mini sites is not the right approach. Take whatever energy you would have put into developing these and channel it into making the landing pages for your locations the best in their industry/towns. I was just watching a great little video by Darren Shaw in which this is one of the things he covers. Might be worth sharing with your team:
http://www.whitespark.ca/blog/post/70-website-optimization-basics-for-local-seo
And earlier this year, Phil Rozek penned some pretty fine tips on making your pages strong:
I am curious about one element of your original post. You mention, "We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations." I wasn't sure whether you were saying that you've never done well in them, were doing well in them until something changed (such as the universal rollout of Local Stacks) or something else. With the latter, I would guess that a huge number of businesses are now struggling to cope with the fact that there are only 3 spots to rank for any keyword, necessitating greater focus on lower volume keywords/categories, organic and paid results. Everybody but the top 3 businesses is now in this boat. Very tough.
-
Hi KJ,
First things first, do you have a physical address for each location and are these set up in Google My Business? I doubt you have premises in each location, so ranking for all the areas is going to be an uphill task.
Google is smart and knows if you have physical premises in the targeted location, after all it's all about delivering highly relevant results to its users. Lets say for example you're an electrician and a user searches for "Electrician in Sheffield" - realistically, if you only have premises in Leeds, it's going to be difficult to rank above the company who is actually located in Sheffield.
I would firstly target 2-3 of your primary locations and focus on building 10x content, I would aim to write 1000+ words for each page (completely unique content) whilst focusing on your set keywords, but be natural and don't keyword stuff. Put reviews from customers in that specific area on the landing page and build citations from local directories.
Again, you can't build citations unless you have physical premises in the location. Trust me, I've done it for years for a Roofing company and it's taken some time to see the results. He's #1 for the city he is located in, but for other cities it's a very difficult task. Writing about the same service for each location is a daunting task too, you should consider Great Content to outsource the content if you're stuck for ideas. It's a low budget solution and will save you mountains of time.
I would also use folders and not subdomains. Build a 'service areas' page, examples of urls for the roofing company below.
-
Hello KJ,
You absolutely don't want to begin creating subdomains for different locations. That will split your link flow across multiple domains (rather than consolidating it within a single domain).
It sounds like you are attempting a silo structure for your website (multiple locations targeting the same keyword) but this can be seen as stuffing if performed incorrectly. Using multiple pages to rank for a single keyword is problematic as it hits both Panda and Penguin red flags. What you want to do is begin ranking for different keywords or at least ensuring that your content for each of these locations pages is unique and sufficiently long (500 words+) to avoid arousing suspicion.
Your site structure sounds like it is okay. For example, a silo we put in place for one of our clients followed the following pattern:
domain.com/country/region/city/service
We hit about 15 cities using this tactic, and they have been sitting 1st page for the last year or so. We also built sufficient links to the home page and relevant pages and ensured that our technical SEO was spotless, so perhaps these are the areas you might engage your team to move forward on.
If you want to know more about our process, feel free to touch base and I will provide what advice I can.
Hope this helps and best of luck moving forward!
Rob
-
Right. You will not beat the other folks with the subdomain approach. You are getting beat because your competitors are taking the time to make better content in a niche. Find a way to get better content on those pages and mark them up with schema to make the info more readable to the search engines and possibly get an enhanced listing the SERPs.
We went through a site relaunch and the review schema on locations got messed up. Did not impact our rankings, but did impact click through from the search engines. None of the stars were showing up in the SERPs due to the schema goof up. Got the schema fixed and traffic was back up.
This link will point you toward the relevant Moz resources
https://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating
If you are happy with my response, please feel free to mark as a "Good Answer" thanks!
-
I agree with you. Some marketing people believe that we cannot beat out smaller companies is that we are too diverse in services. We do great with niche keywords and markets, but are being beat by companies who only focus on one of our key services. That is why they thought sub domains would do better, but I remember Rand posting something on sub domains vs sub folders, but cannot find the original source.
Thanks for your answer...
-
This is similar to the question on if a blog should be on a subdomain (blog.website.com) vs a folder (website.com/blog).
Most people agree that the use of the folder is the better option as with every blog post that you get links to etc, you are building your domain authority and generally speaking, rising tides raise all ships.
You would run into the same issue with your option to setup subdomains for each location. You would also end up having to deal with separate webmaster accounts for each etc. I don't think the subdomain is the solution. I run a site with thousands of locations and using a folder structure the business pages rank well for a given location, if you search on the name of the location, so I know it works and I manage it at scale.
I would get back to looking at any technical issues you have and your on page options for the pages. Anything you can further do to make these pages 10x better than any other page on the net for those locations?
Good luck!
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
-
May integrating my main category page in the index page improve my ranking of main category keyword?
90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword. Any thoughts?1 -
How does Googlebot evaluate performance/page speed on Isomorphic/Single Page Applications?
I'm curious how Google evaluates pagespeed for SPAs. Initial payloads are inherently large (resulting in 5+ second load times), but subsequent requests are lightning fast, as these requests are handled by JS fetching data from the backend. Does Google evaluate pages on a URL-by-URL basis, looking at the initial payload (and "slow"-ish load time) for each? Or do they load the initial JS+HTML and then continue to crawl from there? Another way of putting it: is Googlebot essentially "refreshing" for each page and therefore associating each URL with a higher load time? Or will pages that are crawled after the initial payload benefit from the speedier load time? Any insight (or speculation) would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner1 -
Desktop vs. Mobile Website - ranking impact
Working on develop mobile pages using dynamic serving method, we are planing on only develop number of important pages (not the whole site) to be mobile friendly. To keep the consistency of the user experience, the new mobile site will only have internal links to pages that are mobile friend. Questions: If an existing non-mobile page ranking #1 on mobile SERP today, this page will not have a mobile friendly version, and will not link in the mobilefriendly site. will there be any impact to the ranking. Assuming: When Google mobile/Smartphone bots will not see a link to this page. The page will still accessible to Google desktop bots.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomchu0 -
Duplicate Content Errors new website. How do you know which page to put the rel canonical tag on?
I am having problems with duplicate content. This is a new website and all the pages have the same page and domain rank, the following is an example of the homepage. How do you know which page to use the canonical tag on? http://medresourcesupply.com/index.php http://medresourcesupply.com/ Would this be the correct way to use this? Here is another example where Moz says these are duplicates. I can't figure out why because they have different url's and content. http://medresourcesupply.com/clutching_at_the_throat http://medresourcesupply.com/index.php?src=gendocs&ref=detailed_specfications &category=Main
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artscube.biz0 -
Duplicate Pages #!
Hi guys, Currently have duplicate pages accross a website e.g. https://archierose.com.au/shop/cart**#!** https://archierose.com.au/shop/cart The only difference is the URL 1 has a hashtag and exclamation tag. Everything else is the same. We were thinking of adding rel canonical tags on the #! versions of the page to the correct URLs. But Google doens't seem to be indexing the #! versions anyway. Does anyone know why this is the case? If Google is not indexing them, is there any point adding rel canonical tags? Cheers, Chris https://archierose.com.au/shop/cart#!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Any issue? Redirect 100's of domains into one website's internal pages
Hi all, Imagine if you will I was the owner of many domains, say 100 demographically rich kwd domains & my plan was to redirect these into one website - each into a different relevant subfolder. e.g. www.dewsburytilers..com > www.brandname.com/dewsbury/tilers.html www.hammersmith-tilers.com > www.brandname.com/hammersmith/tilers.html www.tilers-horsforth.com > www.brandname.com/horsforth/tilers.html another hundred or so 301 redirects...the backlinks to these domains were slim but relevant (the majority of the domains do not have any backlinks at all - can anyone see a problem with this practice? If so, what would your recommendations be?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fergclaw0 -
ECommerce keyword targeting: Blog post vs Category page
I'm targeting short head and chunky middle keywords for generating traffic to an ecommerce website. I guess I have two options both with great content: blog posts category pages with content (essentially the blog post). On the basis that it is great content that gets links, I would hope that I could garner links into the heart of the eCommerce website by doing this through option 2: category pages. Any thoughts on blog vs ecommerce category pages for tageting keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BruceMcG0 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0