Site Structure Question

[1stpageconsulting]

I'm building a site for a fishing charter and duck hunting guide I'm not sure of the most effective site structure. They have 3 physical offices with verified gmb pages. Normally i have 1 page for each city and service and interlink them. On each city page I would use the schema for that office nap but I'm not sure I can effectively put both keywords on 1 page since they are so different. I'm worried about making sperate pages e.g. city + service 1, city + service 2. Because then I would have good page to link to from their gmb and citations. They also want to rank for state terms like state + duck hunting.

Would domain > state > city > service be to much I'm now sure how being that many tiers into the site would effect ranking. I'm also worried if I point all the citations to the city page it would rank above the targeted service pages.

As you can see I'm all over the place on this one. Help me before I go crazy thinking of all the possibilities.

 

[1stpageconsulting]

To try and make this more simple I kind of rambled on there.

The client has 3 Physical Locations all in different cities in the same state.
They have 3 verified GMB pages
They offers 2 distinctly different services
They would like to rank locally in each of the 3 cities for both of their services
They would also like to rank for the state + services

Questions
1. How would you layout the site pages to accomplish these goals?
2. What webpage would you link to from each of the Google My Business pages?
3. How would you setup the internal linking to ensure the correct pages rank?

I've attached an image of how I normally layout local sites but this doesn't involves state rankings or 2 distantly different services. I just want to demonstrate I have put some time and thought into this before coming here in search of a handout. Thanks for any help.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Welcome 1stPage!

Things are quiet here on Sunday, especially Father's day evening when you posted.
So I'm bumping this today to see if we can get you some feedback.

 

[1stpageconsulting]

Thanks Linda I appreciate it.

 

[1stpageconsulting]

I guess everyone here is just as stumped as I was. Was worth a shot.

 

[mborgelt]

To keep things as simple as possible I would start in this manner:

City Page 1
-Service 1
-Service 2
City Page 2
-Service 1
-Service 2
City Page 3
-Service 1
-Service 2

I would then link each GMB to the city page. So I can help you more, does the duck hunting side use a different business name than the fishing charter? If so, you may be better off using this structure:

Fishing
-Fishing City Page 1
-Fishing City Page 2
-Fishing City Page 3
Duck Hunting
-Duck Hunting City Page 1
-Duck Hunting City Page 2
-Duck Hunting City Page 3

In this case you want to link the GMB to the city service page. As far as linking goes you would want to create a hierarchy for which locations you want to rank more and distribute links accordingly.

 

[1stpageconsulting]

The duck hunting operates under the same business name. So you would do

Domain > city 1 > service 1 ect making the city page the parent of the service page.

Would you use any keywords in the city page title or leave it just the city name. Also would it be considered over optimized if I used
domain > city > city + service? Since the city would appear in the URL twice?

Thanks for the response btw I appreciate it.

 

[mborgelt]

No problem I love to help. If they use the same business name I would go with the first option and build out pages underneath the services if you find ranking difficult. I would use main keyword + City in the title but try to make it human and click-worthy. I would stay away from keyword stuffing URLs in that manner.

 

[ColoradoChris]

Just to add a little, I like using the SILO structure too.

If you are using Wordpress I would go this route:

hunting and fishing as categories

Then city or location as sub category

Then blog posts for each one talking about unique stuff.

But interlink them only within the selected silo.

Just my 3 cents, I talk too much lol

Colorado Chris

 

[1stpageconsulting]

Can you be more clear. You mean to set them up as post instead of pages?

 

[ColoradoChris]

Again this is just my ideal SILO setup:

So if you have your main category Duck Hunting

So if your using wordpress, I would create a category and a page that matches the same.

So for an example:

www.yoursite.com/duck-hunting/

www.yoursite.com/category/duck-hunting/

So the category slug is also "duck-hunting"

Then use the simple 301 redirect plugin and redirect the category to the page.

So when someone goes to www.yoursite.com/duck-hunting its a category, that's pointing to a page instead of the archives.

Then you can either create pages as sub categories following the same concept, and then create pages as posts.

So this is what I would do for my client:

www.yoursite.com/duck-hunting/city-name/10-ways-to-train-your-dog-to-retrieve


So I have my website url / Category that points to a page instead of a category / my geo targeted city name / unique blog posts that talk about maybe training in the specific city, or a fun article etc

Why I like the silo method is that you keep all of the link juice within the silo. Now some seo pros say to link only to the parent categories, but I typically stay within my silo. But I create menus on each page to only link to other pages within the silo.

I was told its like this:

If you have 50 links coming in and they are spread everywhere, it dilutes the link juice.

But by having each silo, like one for fishing, one for hunting etc separate from each other, they all stay on topic and relate to each element of the silo.

Again just my thoughts.

Colorado Chris

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Just to simplify things here, I think this is what the first poster mentioned and I also agree:

company.com/dallas/duck-hunting/
company.com/dallas/fishing-charter/
company.com/houston/duck-hunting/
company.com/houston/fishing-charter/

I'm sure you're not in Dallas or Houston but you get the idea.