undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. SEO Tactics
  3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
  4. Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
5
7
3.3k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • KJ-Rodgers
    KJ-Rodgers last edited by Sep 3, 2015, 3:35 PM

    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.

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • MiriamEllis
      MiriamEllis Subject Expert last edited by Sep 4, 2015, 3:06 PM Sep 4, 2015, 3:06 PM

      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:

      http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/2015/04/06/25-principles-of-building-effective-city-pages-for-local-seo/

      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.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Jseddon92
        Jseddon92 last edited by Sep 3, 2015, 5:18 PM Sep 3, 2015, 5:14 PM

        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.

        example.com/service-areas/leeds/roofing

        example.com/service-areas/sheffield/roofing

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Toddfoster
          Toddfoster last edited by Sep 3, 2015, 4:27 PM Sep 3, 2015, 4:21 PM

          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

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • CleverPhD
            CleverPhD @KJ-Rodgers last edited by Sep 3, 2015, 4:28 PM Sep 3, 2015, 4:20 PM

            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!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
            • KJ-Rodgers
              KJ-Rodgers @CleverPhD last edited by Sep 3, 2015, 4:15 PM Sep 3, 2015, 4:15 PM

              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...

              CleverPhD 1 Reply Last reply Sep 3, 2015, 4:20 PM Reply Quote 1
              • CleverPhD
                CleverPhD last edited by Sep 3, 2015, 3:56 PM Sep 3, 2015, 3:56 PM

                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!

                KJ-Rodgers 1 Reply Last reply Sep 3, 2015, 4:15 PM Reply Quote 1
                • 1 / 1
                1 out of 7
                • First post
                  1/7
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • Bankable

                  How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?

                  Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Aug 4, 2017, 5:28 PM | Bankable
                  1
                • vtmoz

                  Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links

                  Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Feb 2, 2017, 2:13 AM | vtmoz
                  0
                • Inevo

                  Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?

                  Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | May 20, 2016, 3:10 PM | Inevo
                  0
                • nodiffrei

                  Using subdomains for related landing pages?

                  Seeking subdomain usage and related SEO advice...  I'd like to use multiple subdomains for multiple landing pages all with content related to the main root domain. Why?...Cost: so I only have to register one domain. One root domain for better 'branding'. Multiple subdomains that each focus on one specific reason & set of specific keywords people would search a solution to their reason to hire us (or our competition).

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Mar 18, 2014, 5:03 PM | nodiffrei
                  0
                • browndoginteractive

                  Avoiding Duplicate Content with Used Car Listings Database: Robots.txt vs Noindex vs Hash URLs (Help!)

                  Hi Guys, We have developed a plugin that allows us to display used vehicle listings from a centralized, third-party database. The functionality works similar to autotrader.com or cargurus.com, and there are two primary components: 1. Vehicle Listings Pages: this is the page where the user can use various filters to narrow the vehicle listings to find the vehicle they want.
                  2. Vehicle Details Pages: this is the page where the user actually views the details about said vehicle. It is served up via Ajax, in a dialog box on the Vehicle Listings Pages. Example functionality:  http://screencast.com/t/kArKm4tBo The Vehicle Listings pages (#1), we do want indexed and to rank. These pages have additional content besides the vehicle listings themselves, and those results are randomized or sliced/diced in different and unique ways. They're also updated twice per day. We do not want to index #2, the Vehicle Details pages, as these pages appear and disappear all of the time, based on dealer inventory, and don't have much value in the SERPs. Additionally, other sites such as autotrader.com, Yahoo Autos, and others draw from this same database, so we're worried about duplicate content. For instance, entering a snippet of dealer-provided content for one specific listing that Google indexed yielded 8,200+ results:  Example Google query. We did not originally think that Google would even be able to index these pages, as they are served up via Ajax. However, it seems we were wrong, as Google has already begun indexing them. Not only is duplicate content an issue, but these pages are not meant for visitors to navigate to directly! If a user were to navigate to the url directly, from the SERPs, they would see a page that isn't styled right. Now we have to determine the right solution to keep these pages out of the index:  robots.txt, noindex meta tags, or hash (#) internal links. Robots.txt Advantages: Super easy to implement Conserves crawl budget for large sites Ensures crawler doesn't get stuck. After all, if our website only has 500 pages that we really want indexed and ranked, and vehicle details pages constitute another 1,000,000,000 pages, it doesn't seem to make sense to make Googlebot crawl all of those pages. Robots.txt Disadvantages: Doesn't prevent pages from being indexed, as we've seen, probably because there are internal links to these pages. We could nofollow these internal links, thereby minimizing indexation, but this would lead to each 10-25 noindex internal links on each Vehicle Listings page (will Google think we're pagerank sculpting?) Noindex Advantages: Does prevent vehicle details pages from being indexed Allows ALL pages to be crawled (advantage?) Noindex Disadvantages: Difficult to implement (vehicle details pages are served using ajax, so they have no tag. Solution would have to involve X-Robots-Tag HTTP header and Apache, sending a noindex tag based on querystring variables, similar to this stackoverflow solution. This means the plugin functionality is no longer self-contained, and some hosts may not allow these types of Apache rewrites (as I understand it) Forces (or rather allows) Googlebot to crawl hundreds of thousands of noindex pages.  I say "force" because of the crawl budget required.  Crawler could get stuck/lost in so many pages, and my not like crawling a site with 1,000,000,000 pages, 99.9% of which are noindexed. Cannot be used in conjunction with robots.txt. After all, crawler never reads noindex meta tag if blocked by robots.txt Hash (#) URL Advantages: By using for links on Vehicle Listing pages to Vehicle Details pages (such as "Contact Seller" buttons), coupled with Javascript, crawler won't be able to follow/crawl these links.  Best of both worlds:  crawl budget isn't overtaxed by thousands of noindex pages, and internal links used to index robots.txt-disallowed pages are gone. Accomplishes same thing as "nofollowing" these links, but without looking like pagerank sculpting (?) Does not require complex Apache stuff Hash (#) URL Disdvantages: Is Google suspicious of sites with (some) internal links structured like this, since they can't crawl/follow them? Initially, we implemented robots.txt--the "sledgehammer solution." We figured that we'd have a happier crawler this way, as it wouldn't have to crawl zillions of partially duplicate vehicle details pages, and we wanted it to be like these pages didn't even exist. However, Google seems to be indexing many of these pages anyway, probably based on internal links pointing to them. We could nofollow the links pointing to these pages, but we don't want it to look like we're pagerank sculpting or something like that. If we implement noindex on these pages (and doing so is a difficult task itself), then we will be certain these pages aren't indexed. However, to do so we will have to remove the robots.txt disallowal, in order to let the crawler read the noindex tag on these pages. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense to me to make googlebot crawl zillions of vehicle details pages, all of which are noindexed, and it could easily get stuck/lost/etc. It seems like a waste of resources, and in some shadowy way bad for SEO. My developers are pushing for the third solution:  using the hash URLs. This works on all hosts and keeps all functionality in the plugin self-contained (unlike noindex), and conserves crawl budget while keeping vehicle details page out of the index (unlike robots.txt). But I don't want Google to slap us 6-12 months from now because it doesn't like links like these (). Any thoughts or advice you guys have would be hugely appreciated, as I've been going in circles, circles, circles on this for a couple of days now. Also, I can provide a test site URL if you'd like to see the functionality in action.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jan 30, 2014, 8:19 PM | browndoginteractive
                  0
                • MarshallThompson

                  Would it be better to Start Over vs doing a Website Migration?

                  Hey guys /gals I have a question please.  I have a computer repair business that does extremely well in search and is on the front page of google for anything computer repair related. However, I am currently re-branding my company and have completely redesigned every aspect of the UI and the SEO Site structure as well as the fact that I have completely written vastly different content and different title tag lines and meta descriptions for each page. So basically when doing a migration we know that we want to keep our content, titles, headlines and meta descriptions the same as to not lose our page rank. Seeing that I have completely went against the grain in all directions on a much needed company re-branding and everything is completely different from the old site is it even worthwhile 301 redirecting my old urls to the new ones that would (best) correspond with the new? In the plainest English, would I do better at Ranking the New Website QUICKER without doing 301 redirects from the OLD to the NEW? In an EXTREME instance like what I have done, would the Domain Migration IMPEDED me ranking the new site seeing how nothing is the same? I have build a Rock solid SILO Site Architecture on the New site which is WordPress using the Thesis Framework and the old domain is built on JOOMLA 1.5 Thank fellas Marshall

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jun 26, 2013, 1:36 AM | MarshallThompson
                  0
                • Bio-RadAbs

                  Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages

                  Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Nov 9, 2012, 5:30 PM | Bio-RadAbs
                  0
                • Townpages

                  Culling 99% of a website's pages. Will this cause irreparable damage?

                  I have a large travel site that has over 140,000 pages. The problem I have is that the majority of pages are filled with dupe content. When Panda came in, our rankings were obliterated, so I am trying to isolate the unique content on the site and go forward with that. The problem is, the site has been going for over 10 years, with every man and his dog copying content from it. It seems that our travel guides have been largely left untouched and are the only unique content that I can find. We have 1000 travel guides in total. My first question is, would reducing 140,000 pages to just 1,000 ruin the site's authority in any way? The site does use internal linking within these pages, so culling them will remove thousands of internal links throughout the site. Also, am I right in saying that the link juice should now move to the more important pages with unique content, if redirects are set up correctly? And finally, how would you go about redirecting all theses pages? I will be culling a huge amount of hotel pages, would you consider redirecting all of these to the generic hotels page of the site? Thanks for your time, I know this is quite a long one, Nick

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | Jul 13, 2011, 10:38 PM | Townpages
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.