Multi-Location Content Strategy

[Hunter23]

I work for a chimney service company and lead the SEO team. We're currently serving 500 cities with 20 of those being major cities where we focus on getting traffic. We are ranking fairly well (usually mid-first page or early second page) but we obviously want to do better. We have been slowly dropping in some of our key cities and the only thing that I can think that could be hurting us is that each of those 500 cities have their own landing page where the content is the exact same besides changing the city name and phone number throughout the text. Could this be hurting my site? What would be the best solution to fix this? (Obviously having original content on each page is not feasible). Thank you for your help.

 

[pestmarketer]

We manage a multi location pest control business in 20 major cities. We're currently building out a new national website that wants to address that concern you raised of duplicate content. The way we are getting around that is by:
a) city specific reviews - We have thousands of reviews we've gathered through GatherUp and GMB. These are unique to each major city, are relevant for the user, and provide unique relevant content
b) city specific connection - There are certain things unique to each major city, such as the local branch manager, the service team, and connections to the city like local sponsorships, chambers, etc. We've written up content to talk about these our city specific info. It's relevant to the local user, shows our team and our connection, and its unique.

Hope these ideas are helpful.

 

[StephanieNewton]

Hey there,

I definitely agree with @pestmarketer's comments about building location-specific reviews, as well as creating more local content. I'd really recommend watching this webinar — it covers multi-location SEO and features answers to a bunch of commonly asked questions, which you may find useful.

 

[Rich Owings]

@pestmarketer It's always nice to see someone doing it right!

 

[Hunter23]

That seems like a great resource. Thank you for your response!
Do you think mentioning things not related to our business but related to the city would be helpful or harmful?

 

[StephanieNewton]

Glad to be of help! I'd imagine you'd want to continue targeting your keywords, but overlapping those with location-specific content, too. I always recommend people to read Greg Gifford's blog on content silos when this question comes up, I think it paints a really clear picture of how to structure things.

 

[JoyHawkins]

Hey @Hunter23

Here is an article I wrote a few years ago that is still applicable that has a bunch of strategies for multi-location businesses: How to solve duplicate content local SEO issues for multi-location businesses