Question about optimizing every service page to include the city the company is located in

[LisaB]

For local SEO, is it necessary to optimize every service page to include the city in the Title, H1, content and meta description? For example, Furnace repair boston ma, furnace installation boston ma, etc.

Client only has one location and we include the city state in the schema, mention it on the home page and include the address in the footer. To me it seems spammy to include the city on every service page. Is there a better way to do this and what is best practice?

(We also create service location pages that are optimized for nearby towns and cities the client wants to rank for.)

 

[ElizabethRule]

Are you already ranking in Boston for your target keywords? If not, I would start adding "Boston" in the title, H1, content, and meta description for the pages you want to rank IN Boston.

Alternatively, you can create a Boston service area page and see if you can get that to rank for all your target services in Boston. It will likely be tough to do as Boston is a huge city and I bet there is a ton of competition. I find it is easier to rank service area pages for a bunch of services in smaller/less competitive cities compared to larger cities. So I would likely optimize all my service pages for Boston first and see if that works.

Just FYI location schema doesn't have an impact on rankings in my experience, onsite content is really the way to go to improve rankings for location specific keywords.

 

[LisaB]

Are you already ranking in Boston for your target keywords? If not, I would start adding "Boston" in the title, H1, content, and meta description for the pages you want to rank IN Boston.

Alternatively, you can create a Boston service area page and see if you can get that to rank for all your target services in Boston. It will likely be tough to do as Boston is a huge city and I bet there is a ton of competition. I find it is easier to rank service area pages for a bunch of services in smaller/less competitive cities compared to larger cities. So I would likely optimize all my service pages for Boston first and see if that works.

Just FYI location schema doesn't have an impact on rankings in my experience, onsite content is really the way to go to improve rankings for location specific keywords.

Thank you. So if the company is located in a small town, do you still think it's necessary to optimize every service page in this manner? Or is creating a service area page for the town sufficient?

 

[ElizabethRule]

If it's a small town probably not necessary, but you need to check rankings and see. If the page is not optimized for the town and you're ranking, you're good. If you're not ranking, optimizing the service page for the town should help.

The other thing to check is ranking for explicit terms (service + location) vs. ranking IN the town for implicit terms (service) and near me searches. Use a grid rank tracking tool to check this because you'll find rankings for implicit vs explicit searches are different across a city/town/service area.

i wrote about this for SEL Understanding explicit vs. implicit searches: The key to dominating local SEO

 

[dannanelli]

For local SEO, is it necessary to optimize every service page to include the city in the Title, H1, content and meta description? For example, Furnace repair boston ma, furnace installation boston ma, etc.

Client only has one location and we include the city state in the schema, mention it on the home page and include the address in the footer. To me it seems spammy to include the city on every service page. Is there a better way to do this and what is best practice?

(We also create service location pages that are optimized for nearby towns and cities the client wants to rank for.)

This is a really good question and I can see you’re concerned with it looking spammy. It is a best practice to include the location name in the page title, meta description, headings, and body content for all service pages that you’d like to rank in that location. If you don’t add the location name you will be relying on Google to guess the location you’re targeting. Google may get it right, but you can remove all doubt by adding the location name. In addition, think of it this way: are you targeting “furnace installation” across the country or “furnace installation in Boston”. Boston is actually part of the keyword phase and should be included. Just my two cents!