Local Content Silos: Rank Sites with Multiple Locations in Local Search

[Eric Rohrback]

Barry,

Multi-location doesn't necessarily mean multi-national corporation. It could be a more regional business. Wal-Mart could get away with a variety of strategies because they're a giant. They have links from every major site you can think of, and their a major brand in the world. Unless your client is Target (or another similarly sized business), I wouldn't necessarily copy their strategy. There are hundreds of ranking factors in Google, so I'm sure there's a ton behind the scenes that we're not seeing to why they rank well with the strategy they have.

On the silo subdirectory, I think that's the best route. Keep it organized by city, since the content will need to be unique for each separate target market (and optimized as such). I would think you'd want to keep it as:

site.com/city/service

 

[Jeremy Booze]

Any imput on what type of url structure would be best for organizing multiple local silo's or if they have any use cases? This may be a long post but there is so many variations.

1. abc.com/garage-door-repair/city/

Note on 1: The "city" page would still be garage-door-repair centric.


2. abc.com/garage-door-repair/city-garage-door-repair/

Not on 2: This seems to keyword stuffed.


3. abc.com/garage-door-repair/locations/city/

*Note on 3: the above "locations" would be a directory style page.

3.1 abc.com/garage-door-repair/location/city-garage-door-repair/

4. abc.com/locations/city-garage-door-repair/

Note on 4: If i'm trying to rank for search phrase "city-garage-door-repair" (Here the city and service are broken up with a (/) and when using yoast. Yoast would not recognize this as a key term due to the (/) separating topics. Will google?
Will search engines correlate the two?

5. abc.com/garage-door-repair/city-garage door repair/

Note on 5: this feels to keyword stuffed


Any input would be appreciated... The problem is that I need us cases but it is difficult and very time consuming to test every variation .