Long list of towns served on homepage?

[theoseo]

Hi all, I am taking over a 200 page site from a third-party SEO that created it and am going to have several questions for this forum about certain SEO choices they made and whether I should change them.

The first is that they made lists of cities/towns served on many of the pages including the homepage. Is there any SEO value to this or is it useless or even negative?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@theoseo, I'd suggest keepting that list (maybe tweaking it as needed). Particularly on the homepage, I've found a super-explicit service area very beneficial for rankings. It's good SOP.

Will your client rank in all of those places? Probably not.

Can you overdo the list, like by cramming 170 cities onto the page? Of course.

But as long as it's not an eyesore or a barrier to visitors' reading important info on the page, there is zero downside. Also, I've found that sometimes - usually for more-specialized search terms in less-competitive cities - all it takes to pop into the Maps and/or organic results is to mention the city once on the homepage. So I don't know anything about your client, but the "service area" blob on the homepage could realistically pop them into some SERPs they're not in yet.

Another benefit: if and when you do "city pages" (the right way, I hope), it helps to be generous with the internal linking to those pages. Typically that should include a trail of breadcrumbs from the homepage, which will be easy to add if you already mention those cities on the homepage.