Service Area Location Pages vs. User Experience

[Greenery]

I'm familiar with the SAB best practices outlined here.

Here's my issue: Doing local landing pages as described here might not be ideal from a user experience point of view. Having a "Cities We Serve" or "Service Areas" link in the main navigation isn't necessarily valuable to the user when the city-specific landing pages are all places within a 15-mile radius of the SAB's headquarters.

It would just look like the company did it for SEO. It wouldn't look natural.

Seriously, it feels like best practices are totally at odds with user experience here. If I absolutely must create location pages for 10 or so municipalities within my client's service area, I'd rather NOT put the service areas as a primary navigation item. It is not useful to the user. Anyone who sees that the company provides services in the [name of city] metropolitan area will already understand that the company can service their town that is 5 miles away. It is self-evident. For example**, who would wonder whether a plumbing company with a Los Angeles address also services Beverly Hills?** It's just... silly.

But the Moz guide says I've got to do those location pages! And that I've got to put them high up in the navigation!

This is a problem because we've got to do local SEO, but we also have to provide an ideal experience.

Thoughts?

[MiriamEllis]

No worries at all. Where you put the pages in the menu should not impact organic traffic in terms of people coming directly from the SERPs to one of these landing pages, but it could impact the flow of traffic through the website (someone entering on the home page and then not seeing that you have these landing pages underneath and about tab or someplace else). So, ostensibly, this could impact the depth of the visits your website receives.

The main point of giving these pages their own navigation heading is to increase on-site awareness that the pages exist. From my work with SABs over the years, I've noticed that it has become an expected standard practice to give these pages their own main menu tab, to be sure they're being found by users for whom specialized content has been created. I don't have any recent studies to prove this out, but it's always been a rule of human usability to stick with formats users are already comfortable with. I, personally, wouldn't be inclined to look for my city's landing page under an 'About' tab, but for an authoritative answer on this for your specific brand, you'd need to conduct a usability test in which you see exactly how users are interacting with your website. Sometimes, the results of those studies are extremely surprising.

So, end of the day, it's always up to the owner to decide how he wants to structure his website. What I've tried to offer here would be standard best practice advice. But, the only way to know whether having a unique tab for service city content or putting these pages somewhere else helps/harms usability and conversions is to do a formal study. If you don't want to invest in that right now, you could at least ask a few friends who aren't at all familiar with your site to use it while you watch over their shoulders. You might ask them a question like, "What would you do if you were trying to find out if we serve X city?" and then see how they try to find the answer. Things like that might lend some data to your decision about site navigation.

[Greenery]

Miriam,

Thanks again for the thoughtful response! I think we've just about talked this one to death (sorry!), but I do have one more question. Per your comment:

"Once you've got pages you're proud of, I don't think you'll have any qualms about giving them their own tab in the main menu. Putting them anyplace else (like in an unexpected place like the about tab) is going to risk that they're not being found, which would then negatively impact the conversions they might otherwise generate."

Are you suggesting that the only detrimental effect would be people not finding the local landing pages by browsing our site via the main navigation? The only reason we were planning to publish the local landing pages was for organic search traffic – not for people who arrived to the site via some other path (a blog? a service-specific landing page?) who happen to be noodling around in our menus. We have already designed an experience that we think best suits our users and feel that adding location pages to the main navigation would actually NOT serve them well, even if those pages are of an incredibly high quality. For our area, a single "Service Area" page with a brief outline of the area the company services is much simpler for the user, easier to understand, and cleaner.

I guess this is what I'm getting at: If adding local landing pages somewhere other than the main navigation is only detrimental in terms of people not finding the location pages in the menus, that's not a huge concern. HOWEVER, if putting them somewhere other than the main navigation is somehow detrimental for organic search traffic, that would be a concern.

I'm also not really seeing how something like "About > Service Areas > [name of city]" is unexpected or confusing to the user. I mean... I'm not hitting the streets doing user research or anything (the only way to really be sure what users want!), but this sort of content hierarchy actually seems super intuitive and natural to me. Is there any reason to think search engines would not like us if I organized local landing pages this way? Would they not want to display my local landing page to a searcher with a relevant query due to the overall organization/placement of the pages within the site architecture?

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Green Web!

So glad if my answer was helpful. You've asked some good follow-up questions here. I'll number my responses to match your queries.

1. Yes, a searcher in LA looking for "plumbers" will be shown plumbers in LA, but if he looks up "plumbers Beverly Hills", then Google will show him businesses in that city, instead.

2. Your business is at an important point-of-decision here. Your options are to:

a) Skip building landing pages and just put up a map, knowing that doing so means you are foregoing any rankings, traffic or conversions you might have achieved for your service cities

b) Put up weak landing pages - which is something too many SABs do, downgrading the overall quality of their website and appearing somewhat lazy to consumers and competitors

c) Put in the time to create strong landing pages and feature them proudly in your menu. This would be a standard Local SEO best practice (not silly) and a way for you to increase conversions and improve your analytical tracking of different customer bases. But, yes, this serious approach will require a dedication of resources on the part of your brand. It is easier to create really good landing pages in some industries than in others. For example, a house painter can showcase his different projects in different cities quite easily because of the appealing visual content of before-and-afters. For a plumber it requires more creativity, but he can still strive for unique, compelling pages via user-based content (reviews/testimonials/videos/stories hinging on customers served in the different cities). He can also showcase his expertise relative to the various cities. For example, city X might have lead pipes that need to be replaced, while city B may have high iron content in the water requiring filtering. The point is, any brand in your scenario needs to put in the creative time brainstorming what these landing pages could contain that will persuade the user of the trustworthiness of the company as a service provider in his city.

Once you've got pages you're proud of, I don't think you'll have any qualms about giving them their own tab in the main menu. Putting them anyplace else (like in an unexpected place like the about tab) is going to risk that they're not being found, which would then negatively impact the conversions they might otherwise generate.

Of course, at the end of the day, the decision of how to market your brand is going to be totally up to you. If you don't feel you can create good landing pages, then you may decide to skip creating them altogether, with the understanding that you'll be foregoing the revenue they could generate for your business. But, best practice advice you're going to hear from pretty much any Local Search marketer is going to hinge on putting in the effort to find a compelling strategy for these pages, so that they are sending you good leads.

Hope these thoughts are helpful!

[Greenery]

Miriam,

Thank you for the thorough and thoughtful response! It is gratifying to receive guidance from the person who actually wrote the closest thing I can find to a definitive guide on local landing pages.

For what it's worth, I used Beverly Hills/Los Angeles as a stand-in for my client's actual metropolitan area because I figured the example would be something more participants/respondents/lurkers would be familiar with. The point still stands, though. The client has a 15 to 20-mile service area, and pretty much anybody in a nearby municipality – and yes, they're actual cities distinct from the primary one in which my client is based (so the West Hollywood vs. Los Angeles analogy is comparable) – will know that the company serves their area without landing pages, paid ads, city-specific blogging, or city-specific social media outreach.

Even so, I totally get that it's the "right" thing to do from an SEO standpoint to include these local landing pages. With that in mind, let me narrow down this discussion to two questions:

1. Your response states that...

Google sees these as totally distinct user bases, and if a searcher located in Beverly Hills or Los Angeles just searches for "plumber", they are going to see these totally different results, localized to their location at the time they search.

The real-world effect of this, therefore, is that someone in Beverly Hills will first see plumbers with: a). Beverly Hills addresses and b). Beverly Hills-specific content (like a landing page) before they see the LA plumber _if they don't happen to be searching for "los angeles plumbers" themselves. _If they search for "los angeles plumbers," they'll be more likely to see the L.A. results even though they are physically located in Beverly Hills, right?

This matters to my situation because it's highly unlikely that all of the people in my client's service area will be using the name of their actual city when they search. Some will. Some won't. I suppose only keyword research can confirm this to be true for sure, but that's my feeling given my knowledge of this area. (bracing for commentary along the lines of, "do the research, don't assume")

2. How horrible would it be to make the "Cities we serve" or "Service area" section of the site not be a top-level navigation item? What if it was nested within, say... the "About Us" dropdown? I think this would be better from a UX perspective because it will help us avoid looking goofy for putting a list of city-level pages at the very top of the site. I'm just not confident we can make these city-level pages super duper compelling and interesting and valuable. The region I'm in has several different distinct cities, but they all bleed into one another and don't really have any identity.

Honestly, from a pure UX perspective, it seems much simpler and better to just throw a map up there with the service areas colored a different color from the rest of the map. Done. No noodling around on our website required.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There, Green Web!

Thanks for reading my article. It's a bit of an old one, but in the main, is still pretty accurate advice. This one is 2 years fresher, in case it helps: https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages

All that being said, there are horses for courses, and a blog post like the one you've linked to is offering general best practices rather than one-on-one consulting about what you, personally, should do for your specific business model. You're totally right that that post (though long!) didn't cover every possible scenario.

From your description, it sounds like you have a service area business that serves within a tight radius (as opposed to having a restaurant chain with 30 locations across the state of California). Please, correct me on anything I'm not quite getting right about your model. If you have a single physical location, you are only able to create a single Google My Business listing and citation set for your business. This often frustrates SABs, because they may serve multiple cities from a single location, and can't rank in the local packs for them, because Google will only rank their physical location within a single town. So, a plumber in Oakland might be annoyed that he can't also rank for San Jose and San Francisco, because he lacks physical locations there.

It's from this dilemma, and from the desire to target content to specific user groups that the practice of creating local landing pages evolved. If you can't rank in the local packs for your service cities, you can go after organic rankings with landing pages. If you don't do anything, you have little or no chance of ever seeing rankings of any kind for these service cities.

Beverly Hills is considered a separate city from Los Angeles, as is another city like West Hollywood. These are not merely neighborhoods of Los Angeles, but actually considered separate cities. If you do a search for "plumber Los Angeles" you will get completely different local and organic results than for a search for "plumber Beverly Hills". So, clearly, Google sees these as totally distinct user bases, and if a searcher located in Beverly Hills or Los Angeles just searches for "plumber", they are going to see these totally different results, localized to their location at the time they search.

Because of this, it's not really safe to go with your assumption that people know a plumber in LA serves Beverly Hills, despite the short driving distance between them. Whether this is good common sense or not, it's not the way Google works, and relying on Google to show your LA-based plumbing company to Beverly Hills searchers will not work unless you give Google some additional reason to do so (that being content on your website showcasing your services in Beverly Hills, which may give you some hope of ranking organically for these searches).

Upshot: If you need customers from Beverly Hills to find you on the web, you must build something for them to find. Your options for this would include:

• A Beverly Hills landing page

• Ongoing blogging showcasing your work in Beverly Hills

• Paid advertising targeted to Beverly Hills

• Social media outreach targeting Beverly Hills

In a competitive market, you'll likely need to do all of this to build brand awareness in any city where you serve but aren't physically located.

I completely get your UX concerns. You are rightly perceiving that there's a real danger of putting up a bunch of weak, silly content for every city your company serves, and that this would downgrade user experience and the overall quality of your website. So, you can't take that route. Rather, you'd want to come up with a plan for making those landing pages incredibly useful and persuasive, so that they truly do serve users, while also signalling to search engines that you have relevance to this target community. Hopefully, that newer article I've linked to will provide some inspiration, but if you need further ideas, please feel free to ask here.