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.

 

[fisicx]

Blog posts over city pages?

Yes!

I've been testing this for years and it works. You can create a city page - but it would really only be the posts categorized for that city.

Creating a city page without evidence of work done locally is pointless.

The problem is most local businesses create a page for each location and just repeat the same tired old tropes that everyone else uses (quality, reliability, professional etc). It's pointless and has said so in the past.

Read the quality raters guidelines to understand how Google indexes and ranks pages like this.

 

[TJRobertson]

I have to agree with @keyserholiday .

I've created thousands of service area pages in the last year alone. They definitely work. I also don't provide any "evidence" or case studies on these pages (though I do think that's a nice touch!)

This is how I think about it: Your homepage is already targeting your "main" city, right? Does your homepage need evidence that you've done work in that city? Do you need case studies on your homepage about the city you're trying to rank in? It might help a little, but it definitely isn't necessary for ranking.

These service area pages are just homepages for that specific city. I create them the same way I would create a homepage. I typically only mention the city a few times on the page (like I would on a homepage) - in the H1 and a few other places, where it makes sense naturally. The rest of the content is original, but structured exactly like the homepage (I usually just copy/paste the template and then write the copy from scratch).

If I'm doing service-specific city pages, I do them the same way, just using the main service page instead of the homepage.

It works incredibly well. It's hands down the most efficient use of my clients' SEO hours at the moment. Maybe it will stop working eventually, but I don't think Google cares much about these 0 competition search terms to do anything about it.

 

[RMortis]

Why are they "zero competition search terms"?

 

[TJRobertson]

I should say "very low competition", though often it is 0 competition.

For example, if you have a window tinting shop in Dallas, you might create a page targeting "Sunnyvale texas window tinting". I just Googled that term - there is exactly ONE business targeting it, and it's with a service area page. That means that business has 0 competition, so even though the page is fairly terrible, it ranks by default.

Would it be better if the best window tinting shop near Sunnyvale ranked instead? Yes, but I think it's unlikely Google is putting much effort into these super tiny niche searches.

 

[RMortis]

Do you also typically check search volume versus that term?

I always tell my clients I have ranked #1q for many things, just nothing anyone searches for. LOL.

 

[TJRobertson]

Do you also typically check search volume versus that term?

I always tell my clients I have ranked #1q for many things, just nothing anyone searches for. LOL.

Haha, ya.

Many of these terms will show 0 search volume in the keyword tools, but they still get searches. I rely on Google Search Console data above anything else.

When picking service areas, I'll look at city names for which they're getting impressions, even before they have a page targeting that city. If they're running Google Ads, I'll also look there.

The service area pages don't just rank well for terms containing the city name either; they often rank well for your main search term when the searcher is simply from or in that city.