What is the best URL Structure for Local Business?

[CaribouFondue]

Hello,

I am doing a website rebuild for my local business and I am looking at what the competition (that ranks well) is doing. One thing I noticed that they are doing seems very counter intuitive to me and I wanted to get some other peoples thoughts on it. This company ranks incredibly well, and their website was built by a local SEO company.

They have a main GMB landing page for each of their locations. but then below that landing page they have separate pages for more content, it's clearly done as an SEO tactic because the content on these pages is just fluff. The industry is self storage.

This is their structure (they repeat all of these pages for each GMB landing page):

[domainame]/locations/[cityname]-midtown/ <- main GMB landing page for this location
[domainame]/locations/[cityname]-midtown/book-a-unit/
[domainame]/locations/[cityname]-midtown/self-storage/
[domainame]/locations/[cityname]-midtown/truck-rental/
[domainame]/locations/[cityname]-midtown/moving-supplies/
[domainame]/locations/[cityname]-midtown/shredding/
[domainame]/locations/[cityname]-midtown/#reviews
[domainame]/locations/[cityname]-midtown/#units

So my question is, should I follow this same url structure? It seems very strange to me to split up my content like this. Why would they put a deeper page below the main GMB landing page with the target keyword "self storage" if they are trying to rank their main GMB landing page for this keyword. Is this not keyword cannibalization? Or does the deeper page being about "self storage" somehow give some boost to the parent for this topic?

My thoughts right now is to have all of this content on one very big landing page for each of my GMB locations. But I can't help but feel like i'm overlooking some trick that they are doing here.

 

[Tony Wang]

@CaribouFondue it depends on what you're trying to accomplish and how easy it will be. Getting one page to rank for several different kw's can be pretty difficult in many cases. For example, storage and truck rental are two very different services, even though they often go hand in hand in this industry. So having separate pages that focus on each one will make that page stronger for that kw.

Of course, if the page is just fluff, then it doesn't make much difference, fluff is not highly valued by Google. But I think you can create useful content for each service. It doesn't need to be 5k words, just helpful. For each location, the basic service might be almost identical, but you can add specific info about each locality/neighborhood.

It will build relevance for your main page, but you can also get individual pages ranked organically. The Local 3 pack doesn't get all the clicks, and having good organic rankings for several different kw's can add more visibility.

 

[Tim Evans]

I think that SEO tactic of building city landing pages used to be more prevalent. Try this content to help you determine your GMB landing page strategy. What Page Should You Link Your GMB Listing To? - Whitespark Weekly

You should also read How to Rank in Cities Where you Don't Have an Address for ideas too.

Best,

Tim Evans

 

[CaribouFondue]

I think that SEO tatic of building city landing pages used to be more prevalent. Try this content to help you determine your GMB landing page strategy. What Page Should You Link Your GMB Listing To? - Whitespark Weekly

You should also read How to Rank in Cities Where you Don't Have an Address for ideas too.

Best,

Tim Evans

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the advice and links. My business has already set up the individual location based landing pages, and I have already built citation backlinks, and other backlinks to these landing pages. At this point switching that back to just the homepage feels like a mistake. Additionally our business is growing and I anticipate opening more locations in the future.

My question wasn't so much about doing the individual location landing pages, but the fact that they do an additional 5 pages of content for each landing page. To me this feels like a mistake, like it would be better to try to get the landing page itself to rank for all those different keywords, at the end of the day, google will only rank your GMB landing page url in the local pack, so why are they trying to rank other pages around it?

My only thought is it somehow builds keyword relevance for the landing page itself by the interlinking back to the landing page.

To simplify I want to give an example. Let's say you have a business with many locations and it sells Oranges and Bananas in Chicago, Detroit, LA, NY, etc. Which of these two strategies is better:

1) Make a GMB landing page for Chicago and you make the url mybusiness.com/bananas-chicago and you give it the title "Bananas Chicago" and you make a second page that is mybusiness.com/bananas-chicago/oranges and you establish some interlinking between these two pages. And you only talk about bananas on the former, and only talk about oranges on the latter.

2) Make GMB landing page for Chicago and you make url mybusiness.com/chicago and you give it the title "Bananas & Oranges in Chicago" and somewhere on this page you also have content about bananas and oranges.

All other variables set aside, which of these two ranks better for these two keywords:
Bananas Chicago
Oranges Chicago
?