Is this bad practice? Multiple location landing pages but 1 office location

[ladykal]

Hi all,

My client has customers from various surrounding cities - can I create local landing pages to target these cities although he only has 1 office? I haven't done local SEO in a long while and can't remember if this is considered bad practice or not.

 

[Contractor]

This is common with service area businesses. I don't have a single city where I live, it's just lots of small towns, hundreds of them. My services area is about 15 towns so I made a landing page for each of them.

Google doesn't like Doorway Pages, but these are different. Instead of putting up the same page 15 times with only the town name replaced, you have to make each page unique. There are many ways to do that. Talk about the town itself and include pictures (which show up next to the result in mobile search, a big plus). Talk about work you have done there or for customers from there. Post reviews or testimonials from customers who live there, etc. etc.

If you make each landing page unique Google won't have a problem with it. And if you make them all good quality and get some links, google might rank them higher in the organic results than the businesses who are located in that town.

 

[ladykal]

This is common with service area businesses. I don't have a single city where I live, it's just lots of small towns, hundreds of them. My services area is about 15 towns so I made a landing page for each of them.

Google doesn't like Doorway Pages, but these are different. Instead of putting up the same page 15 times with only the town name replaced, you have to make each page unique. There are many ways to do that. Talk about the town itself and include pictures (which show up next to the result in mobile search, a big plus). Talk about work you have done there or for customers from there. Post reviews or testimonials from customers who live there, etc. etc.

If you make each landing page unique Google won't have a problem with it. And if you make them all good quality and get some links, google might rank them higher in the organic results than the businesses who are located in that town.

This is exactly what I was hoping to hear. Although he has only 1 physical office, I will create no more than 15 local landing pages and each of those will be unique to the area it is serving. No duplicative content.

If the home page is ranking on or near page 1 for the its main city (the city the business resides in), then there is no reason to create a local landing page for that main city, right? what are your thoughts? And thank you!

 

[Contractor]

Yes, no need for a landing page for the town that the business is located in. That is what I read here and elsewhere AFTER I made my website and made a landing page for the town I am based out of, Oops lol.

So here I am, not sure if that landing page is stealing some of the juice from my homepage. And I wonder if it's best for me to remove it or leave it, I am open for any of the pro's opinions on this.

 

[ladykal]

Yes, no need for a landing page for the town that the business is located in. That is what I read here and elsewhere AFTER I made my website and made a landing page for the town I am based out of, Oops lol.

So here I am, not sure if that landing page is stealing some of the juice from my homepage. And I wonder if it's best for me to remove it or leave it, I am open for any of the pro's opinions on this.

I would think it over by looking at the following items to inform your decision:

• Which of the two pages ranks higher for your target keywords (GSC)?
• Which of the two pages gets more impressions for your target keywords (GSC)?
• Which of the two pages have more backlinks from external websites?
• Are any important keywords being cannibalized?
• use the search site operator to see which URL displas first, this is usually what Google deems as most revelant for that query. So you would write the following:
  • site:abc.com "city + main keyword"​

To be uber clear - my client has a walk-in location, he doesn't go to his customers. So the local landing pages are still ok to do, right?

 

[skyalphabet]

Things you might want to consider:
1. Update your Google My Business to ensure each location page is included in the service areas.
2. Create a post in Google My Business for each landing page. 15 posts if you have 15 pages. Repost them every 14 days.
3. The URL structure for each landing page should reflect the location you are targeting i.e. nail-salon-detroit-michigan/
nail-salon-flint-michigan/

Use these URLs as your GMB destinations

4. Use alt-text on the images on the landing page and include the location (flint, michigan) along with the image description and a lat/long coordinate. For example:

Nail salon in Flint, Michigan where a Flint resident receives pedicure 43.0125°, 83.6875°

5. The social schema also helps a lot if your landing pages are services or products