Do Specific Location landing Pages make the difference?

[kevinjwiles]

Hey

I am just curious if people think having say

www.website.com/location1
www.website.com/location2

How important do people think having specific location pages are?

 

[Scott Rawlins]

They are important if you want to try and rank outside the city that your business is actually located. If you have well written and uniquely written landings pages, they can certainly help outside your city. Optimizing those pages correctly will help as well.

That's my 2 cents.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Scott is right.

But it also helps if you DO have offices in those cities. Think national chains and franchises Roter-Rooter. They have indiv location landing pages.

 

[Keenan Glass]

In the days of yesteryear, it worked fine to duplicate the page and change the location. These days, I suggest the content should be really be unique for each page.

I never have quite reconciled how to manage the content for 12 different services over 12 suburban locations. Are you guys really creating 144 pages?

 

[Louis Nava]

Thankfully, I missed out on this era of web design and SEO when I decided to work on my other skill sets.

Now, I'm working on helping to cleaning up the mess.
8 domains, 8 services over 60 communities, all duplicate content. I'm consolidating all of it to the top 5 major communities, all domains/services into 1 domain. All fresh new unique content and being forced to do a ton of 301's

I'm curious to know what you come up with as best methods of handling such a thing.

 

[Adam Steele]

Yah, location pages are great, especially if you aren't/can't ranking locally. Heck, even if you do rank locally, moving up a location page onto page 1 alongside it is a great move to get more exposure.

I have had tremendous success setting up neighbourhood location pages for my client for their surrounding areas - sometimes as many as 40 pages. I may only get a handful of visitors per page per mo, but often it only takes 1 conversion per mo to make it WAY worth the effort.

Recommended.

 

[chadkimball]

- sometimes as many as 40 pages. I may only get a handful of visitors per page per mo, but often it only takes 1 conversion per mo to make it WAY worth the effort.

totally

40 pages X 5 visitors (a handful) = 200 extra visitors per month.

can be significant especially in businesses where one conversion is $1000+ profit

 

[Laustin1878]

Yah, location pages are great, especially if you aren't/can't ranking locally. Heck, even if you do rank locally, moving up a location page onto page 1 alongside it is a great move to get more exposure.

I have had tremendous success setting up neighbourhood location pages for my client for their surrounding areas - sometimes as many as 40 pages. I may only get a handful of visitors per page per mo, but often it only takes 1 conversion per mo to make it WAY worth the effort.

Recommended.

Firmly agree that capturing as much real estate in the SERP's is very helpful. Adding a Sponsored Listing captures basically all of the real estate available.

Just curious, are your "neighborhood pages" incorporating several smaller cities to make up a "neighborhood" or are they targeting individual cities? Are you delivering this content via a blog (posts or pages) or adding these pages as part of the main navigation and as part of a service area page on the site?

I am considering a project like this and there are at least 50 towns, cities, municipalities, etc. It would be quite cumbersome, not to mention, the information across these pages could get a little redundant. I'm a little concerned that it may start looking sloppy. Grouping a number of cities under one "area" would certainly cut down on the overall number of pages to be created but wouldn't allow me to get as granular and targeted as I'd like.

 

[Travis Van Slooten]

50 towns...yikes. As a general rule, I try to keep my city landing pages to the core cities - the bigger cities that I know get searches. How do I know? I always run a test PPC campaign for 2-3 weeks to see which, if any, of the cities get searches. Then I plan accordingly.

If this were my project I would do the same - start with the cities that get searches. Then for the rest of them I would group them by general areas or neighborhoods IF applicable. Otherwise I wouldn't worry about them and just concentrate on the bigger cities.

And as other have mentioned, you'll get the most traction if these pages are totally unique and city specific. What I'll typically do is have the business owner write something about their connection with that given city and/or describe some projects they have worked on in that city. Then we'll have pictures of projects completed in that city. Finally, we'll have testimonials from customers in that city.

Travis

Firmly agree that capturing as much real estate in the SERP's is very helpful. Adding a Sponsored Listing captures basically all of the real estate available.

Just curious, are your "neighborhood pages" incorporating several smaller cities to make up a "neighborhood" or are they targeting individual cities? Are you delivering this content via a blog (posts or pages) or adding these pages as part of the main navigation and as part of a service area page on the site?

I am considering a project like this and there are at least 50 towns, cities, municipalities, etc. It would be quite cumbersome, not to mention, the information across these pages could get a little redundant. I'm a little concerned that it may start looking sloppy. Grouping a number of cities under one "area" would certainly cut down on the overall number of pages to be created but wouldn't allow me to get as granular and targeted as I'd like.

 

[Carleton Wilkins]

Great information and thank you all for the tips. One question... With these multiple location pages, is it important that other places on the website link to this page? What I mean is, can this page (www.example.com/city_four) have NO incoming links to it (So in theory it would only be found via google) and only have the usual website links out. OR does every location page need a link to it from the rest of the site, via a location drop down menu or whatever?

Thanks for any information or help!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Relevant to the discussion I think - the new info Google just published yesterday.

Google Publishes Guidelines for Local Sites & Location Landing Pages