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
-
Major Landing page removed from Google SERP and replace homepage URL.How do I fix it?
Hi Major Landing page removed from Google SERP and replace homepage URL.How do I fix it? In an SPA website (angularJS), Why it happens?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
SEO Adjustments Where Content Isn't Front And Centre...
So I am wondering what people think for a SEO strategy for sites where (1) the interaction is a one-off event and (2) content is not often shared or something that people want. Specificially regarding two sites this applies to: Site 1 is basically a mortgage site. So customers interact with the site once and then most likely never again once their mortgage is sorted. Mortgages aren't great content pieces and customers don't really read a lot of the content - it's part of the reason loan officers/mortgage professionals exist... Site 2 is also for a one off purchase but it's an embarrassing problem that nobody would share content for because they don't want people to know that they sought help for this. This also makes getting backlinks hard. Also it is a one off purchase, never to be made again... Am interested in how people would adapt their SEO strategies to these circumstances - where content development and promotion is limited...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GTAMP0 -
What is the proper way to execute 'page to page redirection'
I need to redirection every page of my website to a new url of another site I've made. I intend to add:"Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html"I will use the 301 per page to redirect every page of my site, but I'm confused that if I add:"Redirect 301 / http://mt-example.com/" it will redirect all of my pages to the homepage and ignore the URLs i have separately mentioned for redirection.Please guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NABSID0 -
Will Creating a Keyword specific Page to replace the Category Section page cause any harm to my website?
I am running a word press install for my blog and recently had 3 of my main keywords set as categories. I recently decided to create a static page for the keywords instead of having the category page showing all the posts within the category, and took it off the navigation bar. I read about setting the categories to use NO index so the search engines can shine more importance on the new pages i created to really replace where the category was showing. Can this have a negative effect on my rankings? http://junkcarsforcashnjcompany.com junk car removal nj is showing the category section, So i placed the no index on it. Will the search engines refresh the data and replace it with the new page I created?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars0 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0 -
To land page or not to land page
Hey all, I wish to increase my sites rankings on a variety of keywords within sub categories but I'm unsure where to be spending the time in SEO. Here's an example of the website page structure: General Home Page > Sub Category 1 Home Page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPSSeomonkey
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 > Sub Category 2 Home Page
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 We've newly introduced the Sub Category Home Pages and I was wondering if SEO is best performed on these pages or should landing pages be built, one for each of the 4 sub categories in each section. Those landing pages would have links to the "Searching / Results pages" for that sub category. Thanks!0 -
Most Painless way of getting Duff Pages out of SE's Index
Hi, I've had a few issues that have been caused by our developers on our website. Basically we have a pretty complex method of automatically generating URL's and web pages on our website, and they have stuffed up the URL's at some point and managed to get 10's of thousands of duff URL's and pages indexed by the search engines. I've now got to get these pages out of the SE's indexes as painlessly as possible as I think they are causing a Panda penalty. All these URL's have an addition directory level in them called "home" which should not be there, so I have: www.mysite.com/home/page123 instead of the correct URL www.mysite.com/page123 All these are totally duff URL's with no links going to them, so I'm gaining nothing by 301 redirects, so I was wondering if there was a more painless less risky way of getting them all out the indexes (IE after the stuff up by our developers in the first place I'm wary of letting them loose on 301 redirects incase they cause another issue!) Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Moving poor content to its own domain may risk being seen as a doorway page?
We have decided to move some thin content from our primary domain to an independent domain in order to lift the panda penalty. Does anyone have suggestions for how to avoid being seen as a doorway page? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0