I've seen and heard alot about city-specific landing pages for businesses with multiple locations, but what about city-specific landing pages for cities nearby that you aren't actually located in? Is it ok to create landing pages for nearby cities?
-
I asked here https://www.google.com/moderator/#7/e=adbf4 but figured out ask the Moz Community also! Is it actually best practice to create landing pages for nearby cities if you don't have an actual address there? Even if your target customers are there? For example, If I am in Miami, but have a lot of customers who come from nearby cities like Fort Lauderdale is it okay to create those LP's?
I've heard this described as best practice, but I'm beginning to question whether Google sees it that way.
-
Yes you can, but how well multiple locations works, I don't know.
Its hard to get your homepage to rank in one location, let alone landing pages ranking in every location. Worth the try, but hard to do.
-
Hi Ricky,
Google's rule of thumb has always been 'what's good for the user is what's good for Google'. They try to abide by this, and while they don't always get it right, this has been their modus operandi for many years.
I can see why the advice you've read about city landing page development is giving you pause. I think your confusion may be founded on the fact that this is typically considered a best practice for SABs (service area business like plumbers, chimney sweeps, etc.). In these cases, building a unique page for each city the business travels to for service is, indeed, a best practice. Google has no problem with it.
By contrast, what you are describing is a brick-and-mortar business that stays put while customers travel to it from various locations. This is a completely different situation. The questions I'd be asking myself is,
"Does it serve a genuine purpose (other than meeting SEO goals) to write about customers coming from different locations to mine?"
Chances are, it doesn't. Stating that "Bob comes from Fort Lauderdale to shop here' doesn't really help anybody, right?
So, ruling this out, what can you do in this scenario to help users and to meet SEO goals at the same time? For B&M businesses, this is a really tough question. One thing to consider is whether the business has any legitimate involvement in surrounding cities. For example, a doctor might have hospital affiliations within another city, or a sporting goods store might sponsor little league events in another town. These are things the business can write/brag about to show their connection to neighboring cities.
Will taking this approach enable the business to rank well locally in these other cities? Almost certainly not. Can it gain you some organic visibility in these other cities? Possibly. Whether the investment of time and effort in such content development is going to yield worthwhile returns is a question only the individual business can answer.
I think you've asked a very smart question here and I hope my thoughts on the subject are helpful!
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
-
Strange: page no longer present in SERPS and I'm not sure why
I indexed a new page last week and it ranked 1st The page is still live, still registering sessions in analytics, registering activity in search console Why is it no longer present for the keyword in ranked first for on Friday?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacksons_Fencing0 -
All urls seem to exist (no 404 errors) but they don't.
Hello I am doing a SEO auditing for a website which only has a few pages. I have no cPanel credentials, no FTP no Wordpress admin account, just watching it from the outside. The site works, the Moz crawler didn't report any problem, I can reach every page from the menu. The problem is that - except for the few actual pages - no matter what you type after the domain name, you always reach the home page and don't get any 404 error. I.E. Http://domain.com/oiuxyxyzbpoyob/ (there is no such a page, but i don't get 404 error, the home is displayed and the url in the browser remains Http://domain.com/oiubpoyob/, so it's not a 301 redirect). Http://domain.com/WhatEverYouType/ (same) Could this be an important SEO issue (i.e. resulting in infinite amount of duplicate content pages )? Do you think I should require the owner to prevent this from happening? Should I look into the .htaccess file to fix it ? Thank you Mozers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
A/B Testing - Should I add product descriptions on my category landing pages as well as on product pages and if so . how to do this to avoid duplicate content
Hi All, I recently relaunched a new design on my tool hire eCommerce website and now display my products in grid form on my category landing pages as opposed to just a list view which we previously had on the old design. My bounce rates are alot higher than they use to be and my gut instinct is telling me maybe this is wrong . I want to do some a/b testing using a list view. My question is , previously in our list views we just showed the images and pricing and had on page content on the bottom of the page. The user would click on the product image and they would then we taken to the product page which has the product description , t&c, etc etc.. If I was to do this in my a/b testing but change it so we also displayed the product descriptions as well on the category landing pages . Is there a special way to do this as in effect, we would have duplicate content as the product descriptions are also on the product page?. Does anyone have any thoughts on this as to whether its a No No from an SEO point of view ?... Heres a short url link to one of my category pages - http://goo.gl/QJv5gw Historically we use to rank well for the category landing pages and not for the product pages.Our Rankings are down , bounce rates are higher so I am trying to sort both. We have good content on pages etc. Any advice greatly appreciated as always thanks Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Multi-Location SEO: Sites vs Pages
I just started with a new company that requires multi-location SEO for its niche product/service. Currently, we have a main corporate website, as well as, 40+ individual dealer websites (we host all). Keep in mind each of these dealers consist of only 1-2 people, so corporate I will be managing the site or sites and content strategy. Many of the individual dealer sites actually rank very well (#1-#3) in their areas for our targeted keywords, but they all use the same duplicate content. Also, there are many dealer sites that have dropped off the radar in last year, which is probably because of the duplicate and static content. So I'm at a crossroads... Attempt to redo all of these location sites with unique and local content for each or Create optimized unique pages for each of them on our main site and redirect their current local domains to their page on our site Any advise regarding which direction to go in and why. Why is very important. It will be very difficult to convince a dealer that is #1 with his local site that we are redirecting to our main site, so I need some good ammo and reasoning. Also, any tips toward achieving local seo success will be greatly appreciated, too! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-coopersmith0 -
What are the SEO issues we should consider on a plug in that creates a custom home page based on zip code or GPS location.
We are developing a plug in the changes the home page relative to a users location or zip code. We believe this will provide users with a more personalized experience. We are concerned about how this might affect SEO. We are also wondering if we should partner with one of the SEO ply in developers. We were thinking about Yoast. Is there another partner that might be better? I would appreciate any feedback people can give.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ron_McCabe0 -
How does the crawl find duplicate pages that don't exist on the site?
It looks like I have a lot of duplicate pages which are essentially the same url with some extra ? parameters added eg: http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition?page=1 http://www.merlin.org.uk/10-facts-about-malnutrition?page=2 These extra 2 pages (and there's loads of pages this happens to) are a mystery to me. Not sure why they exist as there's only 1 page. Is this a massive issue? It's built on Drupal so I wonder if it auto generates these pages for some reason? Any help MUCH appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deniz0 -
Lots of city pages - How do I ensure we don't get penalized
We are planning on having a job posting page for each city that we are looking to hire new CFO partners in. But, the problem is, we have LOTS of locations. I was wondering what would be the best way to have similar content on each page (since the job description and requirements are the same for each job posting) without being hit by Google for having duplicate content? One of the main reasons we have decided to have location based pages is that we have noticed visitors to our site are searching for "cfo job in [location] but we notice that most of these visitors then leave. We believe it to be because the pages they land on make no mention of the location that they were looking for and is a little incongruent with what they were expecting. We are looking to use the following URLs and TItle/Description as an example: | http://careers.b2bcfo.com/cfo-jobs/Alabama/Birmingham | CFO Careers in Birmingham, AL | | Are you looking for a CFO Career in Birmingham, Alabama ? We're looking for partners there. Apply today! | | Any advice you have for this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | B2B.CFO0 -
Meeting Google's needs 100% with dynamic pages
We have bought into a really powerful search, very exciting We can define really detailed product based 'landing pages' by creating a search that pulles on required attributeseghttp://www.OURDOMAIN.com//search/index.php?sortprice=asc&followSearch=9673&q=red+coats+short-length Pop that in a link Short Red Coats on a previous page and wonderful, that gives a page of short red coats in price ascending order, one happy consumer, straight to a page that meets their needs Question 1 however unhappy Google right? Question 2 can we meet Google's needs 100% with a redirect permanent in an .htaccess file E.G redirect permanent /short-red-coats/ http://www.OURDOMAIN.com//search/index.php?sortprice=asc&followSearch=9673&q=red+coats+short-length
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeezerG
Many thanks
CB0