Canonical Tag - City and Location Pages

[TGlasow]

I'm currently working on a local business website with a number of locations within the same city. This has caused keyword cannibalization to occur - all 5 locations are competing for the same keyword, i.e. "example service in city".

To combat this, I have created a Hub City page that houses all locations of that business within the area. Ideally a user can visit this city page, then choose their nearest location, thus ensuring traffic is spread out evenly amongst all locations.

Here is the problem: the city page does not rank, and meanwhile, rank is diluted across all 5 location pages.

Would it make sense to set up canonical tags on the location pages that point to the city page? Ideally this would ensure the city page is the one Google indexes/ranks.

 

[ElizabethRule]

Can you consolidate all the location pages into 1 page? And just list all your locations within the city on 1 page, and optimize that page for all city specific keywords? This way, you only have 1 URL Google can choose for the target keywords.

If not, I would test canonicalizing all the location page URLs to the Hub City page - and optimize the crap out of that page for your target keywords. If that does not work, you can test adding a "noindex" tag to the location pages so Google hopefully figures out you only want the hub city page to show in SERPs.

I think the 1-page solution is best, but depending on your situation, you can test the other options to find what works best!