If You Were Building a Service Company Website

[Ryanl]

From scratch and wanted to rank organically in 20+ local cities surrounding your location how would you structure the website?

Currently have city pages setup with small amount of unique content on each with reviews from people in those cities listed using nearbynow service.

Also, I recently noticed another website is ranking really well with more content but the content is essentially the same on every page only changing the city name and one or two other things.

We’re about to start building but would love some input on any suggestions you’ve seen work really well. It’s super competitive here.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I'd suggest doing a few city pages at a time before spending too much time on them. They work really well in some industries and not-so-great in others.

I'd make the URLs short and would avoid excess folders. Also, make use of schema on them (especially review schema).

 

[Ampere]

My electrical company uses city (small town) based landing pages which bring in all of our work from those nearby towns. To be honest, I did not see any real bump when I had each page re-written from the original "same thing on every page with only the town name changed out" thing.

The competitor who is beating you might have a few decent links pointed to his pages. That is something that most small SAB's don't have. I'm still trying to find a way to get some, but can't other than paying for links from PBN's.

I am just curious, what does nearbynow do for you? I just have reviews from people in each town placed at the bottom of each city based landing page.

 

[Ryanl]

My electrical company uses city (small town) based landing pages which bring in all of our work from those nearby towns. To be honest, I did not see any real bump when I had each page re-written from the original "same thing on every page with only the town name changed out" thing.

The competitor who is beating you might have a few decent links pointed to his pages. That is something that most small SAB's don't have. I'm still trying to find a way to get some, but can't other than paying for links from PBN's.

I am just curious, what does nearbynow do for you? I just have reviews from people in each town placed at the bottom of each city based landing page.

Thanks for the response! I wonder if there is a rule of thumb when it comes to % of content that has to be different. Maybe someone can address that in the forum.

Nearby now has been good to us. So, we used to have our guys in the field use the app and check in. Check in means you write a small description of the job and then request a review to the customer via text/email. The check-in details are geotagged then sent to the page of the city you're in. The review request is sent, if the phone is logged into gmail it will open gmail reviews. If not, they have a choice. We offer google, nextdoor, and our website. If they choose to leave feedback on our website, it gets posted to the respective city page.

I hope that makes sense. The reason I chose them is they didn't review gate and schema is honest because it's only showing the reviews from that page.

 

[JoyHawkins]

To be honest, I did not see any real bump when I had each page re-written from the original "same thing on every page with only the town name changed out" thing.

This doesn't surprise me. I've seen similar things. Since the pages aren't competing with each other, having "unique" content doesn't really make a difference. I also haven't seen that Google can detect this much for many SMBs because they don't have a high volume of them.

 

[MonicaH]

Just curious - for a client who wants to be found for each of their 3 services in each of 4 nearby cities, would you create 4 city pages (listing each of the 3 services) or a page for each combination of city/service (12 pages - which seems excessive but is what he's asking for)?

 

[Ampere]

Just curious - for a client who wants to be found for each of their 3 services in each of 4 nearby cities, would you create 4 city pages (listing each of the 3 services) or a page for each combination of city/service (12 pages - which seems excessive but is what he's asking for)?

That's a good question. I would like to see what the pro's say.

I have known other electrician who have gone crazy making up massive amounts of pages. One had 40 different towns that he serviced and 20 different services that he wanted to promote, so he made 800 different pages. The content was the same for each service. The town name and image was changed out for each town. But since these weren't pro's doing it, they weren't split testing it correctly and I never got any better information than "Oh yeah, I get lots of calls".