Yeah we've done that for clients due to limited budget but we're working on the idea that I mentioned earlier on our site, which is currently undergoing a redesign, to see how Google reacts. The tricky part is content and avoiding duplicate information but we're setting it up so that the services page contains average but informative content. However each local services page is where we are putting the exceptional content and information with local testimonials and case studies which should make them unique. I haven't seen anyone take this approach so we're hopeful that it will yield positive results. I was curious if you had any experience with it and I really appreciate your feedback on this topic. Thank you!!

Hi Miriam,

Great information that we follow as well. The big question I have, related to this topic, is whether or not it's wise to create an optimized service page for each service in each city. Here is what I mean by that:

Let's say we have a customer that has a physical location in two cities and they provide the same services to each city. Does it make sense to have a "generic" page for each service AND have a more optimized service page for each city with unique content? In this case the structure would like something like this:

/services/generic-service1
/services/generic-service2
/city-a/optimized-local-service1
/city-a/optimized-local-service2
/city-b/optimized-local-service1
/city-b/optimized-local-service2

In your experience is that the best approach or do you recommend a different method? Thanks!

Yeah Microsoft, for some reason, likes to make things a little more complex than it needs to be. Here are a couple of links I found that might help:

http://www.iis.net/configreference/system.webserver/httpredirect

http://forums.iis.net/t/1190228.aspx?Specific+url+301+redirection

Pay particular attention to load speed. HTTPS encrypts everything and sends it to the client browser where it is then decrypted. If certain pages are loading much slower or if you are using the same images/resources on multiple pages you will want to look at caching various resources.

As Highland mentioned, you'll want to make sure the code is using relative URLs and not hard coded "http" URLs because that will not only impact load time but it may give the visitor an undesirable experience if the site is all messed up. If you are on linux make sure that your .htaccess file does a 301 from http requests to https for obvious reasons.

I hope that helps!