Settle A Debate (Please)

[RMortis]

I am having a debate with a friend/potential client over some SEO tactics on their current site.

They are a home improvement contractor with a pretty wide service area. They have 1 page on their site that says
City A Contractor
City B Contractor
City C Contractor
and so on and so forth for like 45 cities.

I said this is like 1992 SEO, and does not work (if it ever did) anymore. They say it helps with Local SEO.

Then for their H1s, they have picked the biggest city in the area (in this case Philadelphia) and use that in all H1s and content. (Note Philadelphia is NOT an area they think is where their customers are.) So like ... Philadelphia's Greatest Contractor since 1975 in the H1s and things like "Why should I pick Philadelphia's Best Contractor over competitors?"

For this, I also said those are tactics that no longer work, and Google is smart enough to figure out where your local area is. Plus it turns off your customer base who is NOT in Philadelphia.

Thoughts?

 

[keyserholiday]

You are correct, this doesn't work at all. They need a page for each city.

 

[RMortis]

What is best practice for that now? Do you create individual pages for each area you want to serve (they do not have physical locations in those spots) and then list them on the website?

 

[RMortis]

Actually this is what they said:
"About the Service Areas page — that’s actually there for local SEO, so removing it could hurt visibility in surrounding towns. If anything, we’d recommend adding more areas instead of cutting it. What are the towns that are missing? We can pull together a few suggestions too if that’s helpful."

Again that is totally 100% wrong, right? This is one page.

 

[johnlavapie_SEO]

I would be interested to see the clicks and impressions in those pages. What are the chances they are right? Maybe 5% if competition is low.

But @keyserholiday is right on this. Here is a thread from 3 years ago: https://localsearchforum.com/threads/create-multiple-pages-for-each-town-i-service.58855/

Elizabeth Rules had some articles there you can use.

 

[fisicx]

What is best practice for that now? Do you create individual pages for each area you want to serve (they do not have physical locations in those spots) and then list them on the website?

Nope. Google doesn't like these either.

What you need to do is show Google and potential clients the work you have done in those locations.

This means writing blog posts with lots of pictures of the projects. You categorize the post by location and service and link the posts together using your internal navigation (which is a very powerful SEO technique).

This means someone looking for X in Y city will find the blog posts. And if it's not quite what they want you would have related posts on the same page.

It's a lot of work and does need to be kept up to date but if your friend puts in the effort they could easily dominate the ranking for a whole load of keywords.

 

[keyserholiday]

Nope. Google doesn't like these either.

What you need to do is show Google and potential clients the work you have done in those locations.

This means writing blog posts with lots of pictures of the projects. You categorize the post by location and service and link the posts together using your internal navigation (which is a very powerful SEO technique).

This means someone looking for X in Y city will find the blog posts. And if it's not quite what they want you would have related posts on the same page.

It's a lot of work and does need to be kept up to date but if your friend puts in the effort they could easily dominate the ranking for a whole load of keywords.

Blog posts over city pages? Some cities have low to no competition. You can create city pages and interlink them.