This is great stuff. Thank you! Would you happen to have an example of a site that does this well? I think you're spot on in your suggestions and would love to see it in practice.

Excellent advice Ria. I'll likely give that advice to the client.

Another question that brewed from this: how then should main navigation be handled as we expand? obviously we can't have D.C. centric keywords in the main navigation as the business expands. I think we could create unique content and landing pages for each individual service and location, but how would that be incorporate into the overall user flow and URL structure?

Would it be more of a sitemap play? If someone goes to www.example.com, should they be given an option to choose their location then be routed to that specific city's subdomain and yhenbrowse from there?

I guess my main question is, how exactly should we structure the site navigation for users from multiple cities to both please UX and the big G?

Thank you!

Thank you, Ria. That's very helpful.

Im curious, when the business expands to different cities in the coming months (for example, Miami and Chicago are being considered, not yet finalized), then in that case I would assume we need to have location in the URL path for the sake of designation and differentiation. This may be a sub folder in and of itself though. Thoughts?

Hi Mozzers,

My first Moz post! Yay! I'm excited to join the squad

My client is a full service entertainment company serving the Washington DC Metro area (DC, MD & VA) and offers a host of services for those wishing to throw events/parties. Think DJs for weddings, cool photo booths, ballroom lighting etc.

I'm wondering what the right URL structure should be. I've noticed that some of our competitors do put DC area keywords in their URLs, but with the moves of SERPs to focus a lot more on quality over keyword density, I'm wondering if we should focus on location based keywords in traditional areas on page (e.g. title tags, headers, metas, content etc) instead of having keywords in the URLs alongside the traditional areas I just mentioned. So, on every product related page should we do something like:

example.com/weddings/planners-washington-dc-md-va
example.com/weddings/djs-washington-dc-md-va
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting-washington-dc-md-va

OR

example.com/weddings/planners
example.com/weddings/djs
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting

In both cases, we'd put the necessary location based keywords in the proper places on-page. If we follow the location-in-URL tactic, we'd use DC area terms in all subsequent product page URLs as well. Essentially, every page outside of the home page would have a location in it.

Thoughts?

Thank you!!