Should I mention locations in service-specific landing pages?
-
I'm writing new landing page copy for a client in the HVAC industry. The client has one office, but its service area includes several cities in a metropolitan area.
I'm writing two types of pages:
- Service-specific landing pages (e.g. "Air Conditioner Repair," "Furnace Inspections")
- Location-specific pages (e.g. "Dallas Heating & Air Services," "Plano Heating & Air Services")
My question is whether I should also include specific locations within the service-specific pages if I'm already doing the location-specific pages as well. For example, would it make sense to do a page on AC repair with title/H1 elements like "Dallas Air Conditioner Repair Service" or "Air Conditioner Repair in Plano and Dallas" in light of the fact that there will already be 10-12 location-specific pages?
My preference is to NOT include location-specific stuff in the service landing pages except for maybe a passing reference to something like "...need HVAC services for your Dallas-area home" or similar. It just seems more natural that way. Thoughts?
-
Hey James,
Just want to offer a proviso here: the fact that Google localizes results automatically for queries they feel have a local intent does not mean that the optimization of the local business website can simply overlook local keywords. In fact, it's fundamentally important that each page you create targeting a specific city/neighborhood includes those city terms. Not only does this optimization signal to Google what your page is attempting to be relevant to, but it's also so important that human users know that your Sugarland page is for them in Sugarland, or that your Dallas page is for them in Dallas.
I can see why Google's automatic localization of results might cause people to think they can overlook geographic optimization of the website, but to do so would be to fail to send the clearest possible signals of relevance to specific geographic intents or users-as-centroids.
-
Hey There!
Yes, the strategy you're mentioning is a good one. In your scenario, I recommend:
-
A set of city landing pages
-
A set of service pages
It just gets too confusing if you try to mix the two up. *Just be sure each page you get is of very high quality and non-dupicative. This article might help:
https://moz.com/blog/overcoming-your-fear-of-local-landing-pages
As might this one, though it's 3 years old now:
https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide
Good luck with the project. The more you can involve the owner/expert staff at the business in this phase of content development, the better
-
-
So I'm glad you mentioned this because I'm also curious as to whether it makes sense to do the location-specific pages at all.
What is the general consensus in the SEO world these days about location-specific landing pages to cover various parts of a business's service area? If it's clear that the business is in, say... Dallas or Phoenix or wherever, do we no longer have to worry about not appearing in search results for nearby cities and towns that have a different name than the city in which the biz's office is located but are still within the biz's service area?
-
Thanks, Sally. I think I'll just stick to doing service landing pages and location landing pages and keep it at that. It makes the most sense to me and makes for more natural-sounding copy.
If I included the locations in the service pages, I wasn't planning to do a location-specific page for every service. With 10-12 locations and 20ish services, this would make for an untenable experience for visitors!
-
Hi Green Web,
I tend to agree with you of not putting the location in the header of the service page. I do recommend linking to your location-specific pages somewhere either in the menu or in the content if it is relevant. Good internal linking is going to be a good bet.
If you were to include locations in each service page would you be creating a page specific for each service and location? If so this could end up with an issue of having competing content across the site. Especially because it would be difficult to create really different content.
If you want to further target specific services and a location. Something that works well for me is to set up a blog that covers case studys. This allows them to provide a honest experience that includes your select long tail keywords.
Hope that helps a little
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
-
Local Search Location Keyword Use
Hello. Whats the best way to approach the use of location phrases within the page content itself? Say your based in a large city but also work in smaller surrounding areas, would you target the main location i.e. "London" on the home page and the main product/service pages directly. Or would you leave this all to deeper pages where you can more easily add value? I can imagine that the inclusion of the location i.e. "London" might compromise the quality of the writing. And put off the users from other locations. For example on the Home Page if your targeting:
Local Website Optimization | | GrouchyKids
Keyword: Widgets
Location: London Widgets in London and Beyond For the best Widgets in London come to... And for a key product or service page if your targeting:
Keyword: Car Widgets
Location: London Car Widgets London and Beyond For the best Car Widgets in London come to... On deeper pages its going to be easier to make this work, but how would you approach it on the main pages and homepage? Hope that all makes sense?0 -
Duplicate Content - Local SEO - 250 Locations
Hey everyone, I'm currently working with a client that has 250 locations across the United States. Each location has its own website and each website has the same 10 service pages. All with identical content (the same 500-750 words) with the exception of unique meta-data and NAP which has each respective location's name, city, state, etc. I'm unsure how duplicate content works at the local level. I understand that there is no penalty for duplicate content, rather, any negative side-effects are because search engines don't know which page to serve, if there are duplicates. So here's my question: If someone searches for my client's services in Miami, and my client only as one location in that city, does duplicate content matter? Because that location isn't competing against any of my client's other locations locally, so search engines shouldn't be confused by which page to serve, correct? Of course, in other cities, like Phoenix, where they have 5 locations, then I'm sure the duplicate content is negatively affecting all 5 locations. I really appreciate any insight! Thank you,
Local Website Optimization | | SEOJedi510 -
Improve my on-page SEO
Hello, I am a photographer based in the UK, I have recently increased my prices, so SEO has become more important then ever as I need to target additional cities and wedding venues. I am looking for suggestions on ways I can ethically improve my websites on-page SEO and regional landing pages. I am running out of ideas, so any suggestions would be welcome. Do you think search engines will see these regional pages as low quality spammy pages are they not advised! If so how can I target other cities with out paying for PPC. Home page Additional Issues Is the 404 server script any good? I also have an issue, with old deleted wordpress pages, redirecting them even though there are no redirects set up in SEO yoast. I am not sure the server script on the shared hosting for 404 errors is any good, does anyone have any experience with this. For example this page returns the 404 page, however the header status is 200. http://www.robertsail.co.uk/derby-wedding-photographers-2/ If I moved to a dedicated server would this help me out.
Local Website Optimization | | Roboto19701 -
How Google's Doorway Pages Update Affects Local SEO
Hey Awesome Local Folks! I thought I'd take a proactive stance and start a thread on the new doorway pages update from Google, as I feel there will be questions coming up about this here in the forum: Here's the update announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/03/an-update-on-doorway-pages.html And here's the part that will make local business owners and Local SEOs take a second glance at this: Here are questions to ask of pages that could be seen as doorway pages: Do the pages duplicate useful aggregations of items (locations, products, etc.) that already exist on the site for the purpose of capturing more search traffic? I think this will naturally lead to questions about the practice of creating local/city landing pages. At this point, my prediction is that this will come down to high quality vs. crummy quality pages of this type. In fact, after chatting briefly with Andrew Shotland, I'm leaning a bit toward seeing the above language as being strongly geared toward directory type sites and large franchises. I recommend reading Andrew's post about his take on this, as I think he's on the right track: http://www.localseoguide.com/googles-about-to-close-your-local-doorway-pages/ So, I'm feeling at this point that if you've made the right efforts to develop unique, high quality local landing pages, you should be good unless you are an accidental casualty of an over-zealous update. We'll see! If anyone has thoughts to contribute on this thread, I hope they will, and if lots of questions start coming up about this here in the community, feel free to link back to this thread in helping your fellow community members 🙂 Thanks, all!
Local Website Optimization | | MiriamEllis9 -
Multiple Locations with Branded Name/Keyword in URL
I have a client, let's call him "Bob". Bob has 2 stores where he sells "Widgets", Bob's Widgets and Bob's Widgets South. These locations are roughly 40 miles from each other and serve two different marketplaces. Each location has their own website "www.bobswidgets.com & www.bobswidgetssouth.com". Each location is run by different individuals. The Store Manager at Bob's Widgets is complaining that when you type "Bob's Widgets" into the search engines "Bob's Widgets South" website is indexing in the 2nd and/or 3rd position. The Store Manager at Bob's Widgets feels that Bob's Widgets South could be stealing business from him because of the way Google is indexing the sites. I have explained to him that the keyword the user is typing in is in both names of the locations and in each URL and this is prompting the search engine to index both sites. Am I missing something else???
Local Website Optimization | | mittcom0 -
Local SEO: City & County Pages
I'm working on developing some local pages for an HVAC company. They cover two counties, so I was planning on having two county pages, then linking them to individual city pages to keep the menu simpler and not cluttering it up with a couple dozen city pages for people to slog through. Has anybody ever done county pages before for local SEO? Or at least seen them? Just curious to see if there's any real benefit overall for have separate county pages, or if I should just stick to city pages.
Local Website Optimization | | ChaseMG0 -
Keywords with locations
I've seen quite a few threads that orbit around my questions, but none in the last year, so I'll ask it 🙂 I'm seeing some strange results when testing various keywords with and without locations included. For a foundation repair company in Indiana, we've optimized for all the big cities, since the company services the whole state. Here's a sample of weird stuff: Test 1: If I set my location (all other Google 'helps' turned off) to Indianapolis and search 'foundation repair' result is #3 'foundation repair indianapolis' result is #20 'indiana foundation repair' result is #18 Test 2: Location set to the small town the company is based in (Rossville, IN) 'foundation repair' result is #1 'foundation repair rossville' result is #3 behind other companies located in Rossville, GA, and Rossville, PA!! I suppose I was under the impression that the ip location data Google gathers would weigh more heavily than how place names are optimized as part of keywords (or just that the physical location would supplant the place name typed into the search if it happened to be the same). But according to these tests, it seems that inferred location is by far a secondary factor. I can deduce that we're more optimized than our competitors for 'foundation repair', but less optimized for keywords with place names in them (we feel like we'd be verging on stuffing if we did more). Am I missing something here? Has anyone else seen this sort of thing?
Local Website Optimization | | clearlyseo0 -
Bing ranking a weak local branch office site of our 200-unit franchise higher than the brand page - throughout the USA!?
We have a brand with a major website at ourbrand.com. I'm using stand-ins for the actual brandname. The brand is a unique term, has 200 local offices with sites at ourbrand.com/locations/locationname, and is structured with best practices, and has a well built sitemap.xml. The link profile is diverse and solid. There are very few crawl errors and no warnings in Google Webmaster central. Each location has schema.org markup that has been checked with markup validation tools. No matter what tool you use, and how you look at it t's obvious this is the brand site. DA 51/100, PA 59/100. A rouge franchisee has broken their agreement and made their own site in a city on a different domain name, ourbrandseattle.com. The site is clearly optimized for that city, and has a weak inbound link profile. DA 18/100, PA 21/100. The link profile has low diversity and generally weak. They have no social media activity. They have not linked to ourbrand.com <- my leading theory. **The problem is that this rogue site is OUT RANKING the brand site all over the USA on Bing. **Even where it makes no sense at all. We are using whitespark.ca to check our ranking remotely in other cities and try to remove the effects of local personalization. What should we do? What have I missed?
Local Website Optimization | | scottclark0