Multiple courses and multiple cities

[Digitaldar]

Hi there!
I have a chance to weigh in on a site overhaul and I am trying to determine the best approach to take for search engine visibility and user experience.

The site offers tons of courses in many cities in many states. The courses are local in nature meaning that a person searches for knitting class Seattle or crochet class Denver.

I figure the user their journey has to start on one of two pages, the Seattle page or the crochet page for example (either city or course). If a city offers a course, the course description is the same everywhere. So knitting is knitting whether you are in Seattle or Denver therefore I would like to avoid having a knitting Seattle page and a knitting Denver page because there are so many cities it would be impossible to have unique, meaningful content.

I am hoping that on the Seattle page for example we can list upcoming courses which might include knitting. On the knitting page I am also hoping that we can list upcoming knitting courses in various locations which might include Seattle. In the end we will end up with a page that contains knitting courses in Seattle but ideally that page is not indexed? I perceive it as being part of the checkout process.

suggestions on how best to approach this? I am actually most interested in the user experience as I feel that this is a large enough company that they will be easily recognized by Google for their courses. E.g. Their site is currently not awesome but they are visible for their core competencies. The user journey is awful!

thank you in advance!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Digitaldar,

Welcome to the forum and thanks for posting. I don't have an answer for ya and just got back online, too tired to type much. Just wanted to say hi.

Hopefully some of our pros will have some suggestions for you tomorrow.

 

[Digitaldar]

Thanks Linda!
I have been an avid reader for quite some time and have worked with tons of clients in the local space - but this scenario is a bit new for me in that I have carte blanche... I can propose whatever I like to the site!
Looking forward to people's opinions - to sum up the above: you have multiple locations and you offer multiple courses at each location.
What is the desired landing page for a specific course in a specific city? Keep your mind on the user experience as well as SEO From an SEO perspective the course is the same in all cities so we need to be wary of duplicate content.

DigitalDar