How to structure site content for a business with one physical address but other area

[SDBradfo]

So say this business operates out of one physical location in city A and it wants to target City B and C too, would you focus all the site content on City A and have individual sub-folders for the locations they service with unique content for each page?


Or alternatively, would you keep all the content on the main site generic and add a separate folder for city A also?
Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks.

 

[James Watt]

Are we talking about SABs or a brick and mortar looking to reach out to a wider audience?

Even with SABs, the physical location is such an important part of ranking (especially on mobile devices) that you're unlikely to get in the 3-pack or high in the map results outside your actual area, unless you're way out in the boonies and don'd have much competition.

With that being the case, you've got two different kinds of search results you'll want to influence. The first is map/3-pack results where you can get them (your actual location in other words) and organic listings. For those organic listings, local landing pages can potentially get you ranking in places outside where you can reach with your local listing.

My two cents, if you're talking about a single location business, target all the locally relevant aspects of the site (NAP on every page, schema, H2 and title on home page, map, etc) around where you're most likely and most interested in ranking for, and then build your local landing pages to expand on that foundation. Joy started a great thread back in March if you're looking for some real-world examples of making some of those extra city/suburb landing pages and getting them to work. There's a ton more threads on the topic too if you dig around a bit.

 

[SDBradfo]

Are we talking about SABs or a brick and mortar looking to reach out to a wider audience?

Even with SABs, the physical location is such an important part of ranking (especially on mobile devices) that you're unlikely to get in the 3-pack or high in the map results outside your actual area, unless you're way out in the boonies and don'd have much competition.

With that being the case, you've got two different kinds of search results you'll want to influence. The first is map/3-pack results where you can get them (your actual location in other words) and organic listings. For those organic listings, local landing pages can potentially get you ranking in places outside where you can reach with your local listing.

My two cents, if you're talking about a single location business, target all the locally relevant aspects of the site (NAP on every page, schema, H2 and title on home page, map, etc) around where you're most likely and most interested in ranking for, and then build your local landing pages to expand on that foundation. Joy started a great thread back in March if you're looking for some real-world examples of making some of those extra city/suburb landing pages and getting them to work. There's a ton more threads on the topic too if you dig around a bit.

Thanks for this, very informative.

Yes I was talking about SABs sorry!

Would you able to help with the following scenario:
A plumber has a small office in a major city (city A) and 60% of his business comes from that one city but the other 40% comes from city B and city C. How would you structure the content in this case? Lets say that the cities are 20/30 miles away from each other - I'm assuming any local relevance to city A has disappeared at this point?
Here would you still focus all the main content on city A and have landing pages and service pages (i.e. domain.com/cityB/toilet-repairs). Would those landing pages have to have a different footer (as to not confuse Google with the plumber's SCHEMA'd address?).

Thanks for your help.

 

[James Watt]

I've seen local landing pages without the regular footer, NAP, and schema, and I've seen some with. I haven't done any testing on it, but I don't think that's what's going to matter much personally. The important pieces is your traditional SEO factors... title, heading tags, domain authority, quality and quantity of onsite and offsite links to the page in question, and so on. Your question's valid and I'd be interested to hear how others weigh in on it, but I think the real important things are going to be what content you fill these pages with, how you choose your keywords to target, and what your backlink building plan is going to look like.

I already linked you to a thread with some great stuff, but two more articles also mentioned a little deeper in that thread can help you with those bigger questions. Here and here.